ABSTRACT
An active member of the Neoplatonic School of Chartres and a follower of sensible Salernitan dietetic principles, William of Conches, a Norman scholar born toward the end of the eleventh century, gives us a fantastic description of the metabolic nature and origin of the light of imagination. 1 Conches drew from Galen the conception of food being changed from matter into light by a sequence of conversions. The first conversion occurs in the liver where the digested matter becomes natural virtue, which then trickles through the heart where it is changed into spiritual virtue. Finally it exudes within the brain where it transmutes in a luminous wind. 2
