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To attempt to define magic further than has been done in our description of the notions of primitive man is like trying to embrace a phantom. Magic rested upon man's conjecture of the characteristics and processes of nature, not on a knowledge of nature correctly deduced from observation and experiment. As one would expect, there went with these mistaken notions a fantasticalness both in reasoning and in practical procedure. The follower of magic is apt to be on the watch not for facts or laws, but for hidden mysteries; he is fond of ceremonial and symbols; he enjoins upon himself and his fellows the necessity of secrecy in their operations and mysticism in their writings. Again, magic is, as has been said, praeternatural; its outcome is to be marvelous. It assumes the existence of wonderful properties in various objects and of wonderful bonds of sympathy between different things. Finally, we should remember that man always is a factor in magic. His knowledge, skill or power is always essential to the performance of a feat of magic. Even when demons do the deed, they must be invoked. A miracle may be contrary to natural law but it is not magic, for man is not the cause of it. Even if wrought in answer to his prayer, the miracle is not magic, for the gods answer only if they choose. But the magic formula compels the desired marvel; by it man coerces nature or even deity.

Such are some of the chief characteristics of magic. Yet with these granted, it remains, like superstition or religion, a vague term at best. The reader may disagree with me as to exactly what beliefs and practices should be included under it, and it is indeed a nice question just where magic begins and ends. Much of alchemy, for example, was nothing but chemistry of a rude sort, and perhaps even its theories that metals may be transmuted and life greatly prolonged will some day prove to have had much truth in them. On the other hand, alchemy was based to a considerable extent on a belief that plants, animals and minerals have properties and powers which they cannot have: and if we ever do succeed in making gold or putting off old age, it is quite certain that such a consummation will never be accomplished by the fantastic methods which alchemists usually employed. Similarly we shall see that the practice of allegorical interpretation of past writings and the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, which perhaps at first thought one would not regard as magic at all, nevertheless bear at least some resemblance to it. But after all our thesis is not to establish a certain definition for the word "magic," or to prove that such and such ideas and acts are magical. A name signifies little, and the word magic has had too many different meanings in different periods and for different men to allow any one to assert with confidence that he has found an absolutely correct definition. I employ the word simply because it seems the most convenient, most intelligible and most justifiable term for denoting a number of beliefs which I believe are all intimately related and which are the marks of a certain attitude towards the world.

So much for the definition of magic and for the nature of its origin. But the discussion of these two points does not fully explain the meaning of the beliefs which were illustrated in our first chapter. We have yet to bring out the full significance of the presence of such notions in the minds of mediaeval thinkers and scientists.

It was stated above that the outcome of magic is praeternatural, marvelous; but this statement, while in one sense perfectly true, requires some qualification. Perhaps to inexperienced primitive man the results which he wished to accomplish or the crude theories on which he based his operations seemed nothing remarkable. Perhaps incantation seemed to him the natural way to bring rain, and sorcery the sole cause of disease. But as time went on and observation taught men, it must have been impressed upon their minds that either the events they sought to produce, or the methods by which they sought to produce them, were a little out of the ordinary, although of the possibility of the events and of the validity of the methods they still remained convinced. If we wish to sum up the whole history of magic in a sentence, we may say that men first regarded magic as natural, then as marvelous, then as impossible and absurd. Evidently then magic is subjective, as anything false must be. To-day in the thought of educated and sensible people it is limited in actual significance to stage illusions; once it was a universal attitude towards the universe. As one false hypothesis after another was superseded by true notions, the content of magic narrowed in men's minds until at last it became an acknowledged deception. Meanwhile its mistaken premises and strange proceedings first mingled with and then vanished into science and scientific methods.

This, then, is the significance of the beliefs of which we were speaking in the first chapter. They are phenomena in that union--or struggle--of magic and science which marked the decay of the former and the development of the latter. As such, they warn us not to picture a magician to ourselves as armed with a wand, clad in solemn robes, and attended by a black cat. They warn us, on the other hand, not to regard the learned students of nature, mathematics and medicine in ages past as modern scientists in mind and spirit, who were merely handicapped by such obstacles as crude instruments and want of data. We perceive the anachronism involved in explaining away as mere passing fancies, personal eccentricities or anomalous beliefs the superstitious or bizarre notions of those to whom tradition has accorded great fame. We are warned to consider carefully whether such notions were not ingrained in the very being of those men and characteristic of their whole mental attitude.

Science and magic are very unlike, but even the distinction between East and West varies according to where the speaker takes his stand. We have come to regard science as abstract truth, scientific investigation as necessarily correct and sensible; we forget that science has a past. In their actual history science and magic were not unassociated. Scientists might accept magical doctrines and magic might endeavor to classify its fancies and to account for them by natural causes. Roger Bacon could regard the attainment of magical results as the great end of experimental science. Francis Bacon could place magic in the same category with metaphysics and physics.

It is with this mingling of magic and science--or more broadly of magic with learning in general--in the history of our Western world that this essay has to do. It is a theme of no narrow interest. Such ideas as have been cited, not only held by the most learned men of the times but incorporated in their scientific and philosophical systems--in so far as they had any--deserve consideration in the history of science and philosophy as well as in that of magic, or in an investigation of the mental make-up of the men of the past.

While, however, the place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe is our general subject, the present essay is far from being an attempt at a complete treatment of it. The aim is rather to illustrate that theme by a survey of learning during the period of the Roman Empire, when the divers threads of the thought and knowledge of the ancient world were to some extent united. The prominence of magic in mediaeval science is perhaps better known and more generally admitted. Accordingly this essay will take for granted, except in so far as it has been illustrated in our first chapter, the presence of magic in mediaeval learning, and will try to show that magical doctrines, credulity, mysticism, and love of the marvelous were not traits peculiar to mediaeval thought, but that in this respect there was close resemblance, probably strict continuity between the Roman world and later times. It was largely in order to bring out this resemblance, continuity and influence that the beliefs of various writers in the Middle Ages and early modern times were given in the first chapter. Let the reader compare them with those notions of men in the Roman Empire which will presently be set forth. If we are justified in thus regarding the Roman world as summarizing ancient science and helping to explain mediaeval thought, we evidently, in taking our stand in that period secure a broad prospect and ought to obtain a fair idea of the place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe. In defining the field which we are to cover, it should be further said that Christian thought will not come into our discussion, since it did not greatly influence science and other secular learning until the close of the Roman Empire. Lastly, it should be clearly understood that we are here concerned with magic only as connected with science and with learning--only as accepted by educated men.

It is true, however, that Pliny does not seem to have been a man of much scientific training and experience. He said himself that his days were taken up with the performance of public duties, and that consequently his scientific labors were largely carried on in the evening hours. Probably we should regard his book as little more than a compilation, and perhaps no very judicious compilation at that, in view of his maxim that there is no book so bad but that some good may be got from it. Perhaps we may not unjustly picture him to ourselves as collecting his material in a rather haphazard fashion; as not always aware of the latest theories or discoveries; as occasionally citing a fantastic writer instead of a more sober one; or as quoting incorrectly statements which his limited scientific knowledge prevented him from comprehending. Perhaps, too, he derived some of his data directly from popular report and superstition. Certainly to us to-day his work seems a disorderly and indiscriminate conglomeration of fact and legend on all sorts of subjects--disorderly, in that its author does not seem to have made any effort to sift his material, to compare and arrange his facts, even in his own mind; indiscriminate, in that Pliny seems to lack any standard of judgment between the true and the false, and to deem almost nothing too improbable, silly or indelicate to be mentioned. Ought we to consider such a work as truly representative of the beliefs of preceding centuries, or as an example of the best educated thought and science of its author's own age? This is a question which we must consider.

Pliny did have, however, a fairly clear idea of the extensive scope of magic as well as of its great age and currency. Not only did he declare that of all known arts it had exerted the greatest influence in every land and in almost every age, but "no one," he said, "should wonder that its authority has been very great, since it alone has embraced and combined into one the three other subjects which appeal most powerfully to man's mind." For magic had invaded the domain of religion and had also made astrology a part of itself, while "no one doubts that it originally sprang from medicine and crept in under the show of promoting health as a loftier and more holy medicine." Indeed, he thinks that the development of magic and of medicine have been parallel and that the latter is now in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the follies of magic which have made men doubt whether plants possess any medicinal properties at all. Pliny, moreover, sees the connection of magic with the lore of the magi of Persia. Indeed, "magus" is his only word for a magician. But this does not lead him to admit what some persons--the philosopher Eudoxus, for instance--have asserted, that magic is the most splendid and useful branch of philosophy. For Pliny, magic is always something reprehensible.

Moreover, magi or magicians deal with the inhuman, the obscene and the abominable. Osthanes, and even the philosopher Democritus, are led by their devotion to magic into propounding such remedies as drinking human blood or utilizing in magic compounds or ceremonies portions of the corpses of men violently slain. Magic is a malicious and criminal art. Its devotees attempt the transfer of disease from one person to another or the exercise of baleful sorcery. "It cannot be sufficiently estimated how great a debt is due the Romans who did away with those monstrous rites in which to slay a man was most pious; nay more, to eat men most wholesome." In fine, we may rest persuaded that magic is "execrable, ineffectual and inane." Yet it possesses some shadow of truth, but is of avail through "veneficas artes ... non magicas," whatever that distinction may be.

To plants, for example, Pliny assigns powers no less marvelous than those which he has attributed to animals. There is one plant which, held in the hand, has a beneficial effect upon the groin; another overcomes the asp with torpor, and hence, beaten up with oil, is a remedy for the sting of that snake. Fern, he says, if mowed down with the edge of a reed or uprooted by a ploughshare on which a reed has been placed, will not spring up again. Moreover, in his twenty-fourth book, immediately after having announced that he has sufficiently discussed for the present the marvelous properties attributed to herbs by the magi, he proceeds to mention the following remedies. One is a quick cure for headache, and consists in gathering a plant growing on the head of a statue and attaching it to your neck with a red string. Another is a cure for tertian fever, and consists in plucking a certain herb before sunrise on the banks of a stream and in fastening it to the patient's left arm without his knowledge. A third recipe instructs us that plants which have taken root in a sieve that has been thrown into a hedge-row "decerptae adalligataeque gravidis partus adcelerant." A fourth would have herbs growing on dunghills a cure for quinzy, and a fifth assures us that sprains may be speedily cured by the application of a plant "iuxta quam canes urinam fundunt," torn up by the roots and not allowed to touch iron.

Coming to minerals we find Pliny rather more reticent in regard to strange qualities. His account of gems is written mainly from the jeweler's point of view. When marvelous powers are mentioned, the magi are usually made responsible, and such powers are frequently rejected as absurd. Pliny, however, grants some magic properties in certain stones. Molochitis, by some medicinal power which it possesses, guards infants against dangers; and eumecas, placed beneath the head at night, causes oracular visions. To water Pliny allows powers which we must regard as magical, for according to him certain rivers pass under the sea because of their hatred of it.

In man, moreover, as well as in other creatures upon earth, there is magic power. Pliny mentions men whose eyes are able to exert strong fascination, others who fill serpents with terror and can cure snake-bite by merely touching the wound, and others who by their presence addle eggs in the vicinity. Pliny takes up the power of words and incantations in connection with man. Whether they have potency beyond what we expect ordinary speech to possess is a great and unanswered question. Our ancestors, Pliny says, always believed so, and in every-day life we often unconsciously accept such a view ourselves. If, for instance, we believe that the Vestal virgins can, by an imprecation, stop runaway slaves who are still within the city limits, we must accept the whole theory of the power of words. But, taken as individuals, the wisest men lack faith in the doctrine.

Pliny, then, believed in the possession of magic properties by well-nigh all varieties of terrestrial substances, nay even by colors and numbers, and in strange relations of occult sympathy, love and hatred between different things in the realm of nature. His acceptance of ceremony as efficacious has also been brought out to some extent. We have seen him attributing importance to death from a single wound, to suspension by a single hair, to fastening an amulet without the patient's knowledge, or to the absence for a time from the patient's sight of the person who attached it. We will consider one or two more such instances among the many which exist in his pages.

He who gathers the iris should be in a state of chastity. Three months beforehand let him soak the ground around the plant with hydromel--as a sort of atonement to appease the earth. When he comes to pluck it, he should first trace three circles about it with the point of a sword, and, the moment he plucks it, raise it aloft towards the heavens. In another passage, in connection with the application of a mixture to an inflammatory tumor, Pliny says that persons of experience regard it as very important that the poultice be applied by a naked virgin and that both she and the patient be fasting. Touching the sufferer with the back of her hand, she is to say, "Apollo forbids a disease to increase which a naked virgin restrains." Then, withdrawing her hand, she is to repeat the same words thrice and to join with the patient in spitting on the ground each time.

Pliny occasionally prefaces his marvelous remedies by some such expression as "it is said." This circumstance is scarcely to be taken as a sign of mental reservation, however, as the following absurd statement, which he makes upon his own authority and declares is easily tested by experiment, will indicate. "If a person repents of a blow given to another, either by hand or with a missile, let him spit at once into the palm of the hand which inflicted the blow, and all resentment in the person struck will instantly vanish." This is often proved, according to Pliny, in the case of beasts of burden, which can be induced to increase their speed by this method after the use of the whip has failed.

One can, perhaps, make some distinction between the strange influences which Pliny credited and the statements of the magi which he rejected. I believe that he did not go to the length of affirming that plants or parts of animals could cause panics, procure provisions, win you royal favor, gain for you vengeance on your enemies, or make you invisible. But he was inconsistent enough. After asserting that a single fish but a few inches long could immediately arrest the progress of the largest vessel by attaching itself to the keel of the ship, was it for him to declare false the notion that a stone can calm winds or ward off hail and swarms of locusts? He characterized as "idle talk" the assertion of the magi that the stone "gorgonia" counteracted fascination, but he had already written: "Id quoque convenit, quo nihil equidem libentius crediderim, tactis omnino menstruo postibus inritas fieri magorum artes, generis vanissimi, ut aestimare licet." Apparently, then, the only charge which he could bring against magicians without reflecting upon himself was that of malicious and criminal practices. His beliefs were much like theirs.

Pliny himself holds that the universe is a divinity, "holy eternal, vast, all in all--nay, in truth is itself all," a proposition rather favorable to astrological theory. The sun is the mind and soul of the whole world and the chief governor of nature. The planets affect each other. A cold star renders another approaching it pale; a hot star causes its neighbor to redden; a windy planet gives those near it a lowering aspect. Saturn is cold and rigid; Mars a flaming fire; Jupiter, located between them, is temperate and salubrious. When the planets reach a certain point in their orbits, they are deflected from their regular course by the rays of the sun.

To what extent the planets rule man's life Pliny does not specify--an instance of prudent reticence on his part, if he really consciously avoided the question. He disclaims any belief in the vulgar notion that a star, varying in brightness according to our wealth, is assigned to each of us, and that the eternal stars rise and fade at the birth or death of insignificant mortals. "Non tanta caelo societas nobiscum est ut nostro fato mortalis sit ibi quoque siderum fulgor." But thus to deny that the stars are ruled by man's destiny or doings is far from refusing to believe that men's lives are ordered by the stars. Pliny, as we have seen, holds that Venus has a considerable influence over the process of birth in all animals. Also he certainly accepts the portentous character of various particular celestial phenomena. "From the stars celestial fire is vomited forth bearing omens of the future." He gives instances from Roman history of comets which signalled disaster, expounds the theory that their significance is to be determined from the direction in which they move and the heavenly body whose powers they receive, and states that the particular phase of life to which they apply may be deduced from the shape which they assume or from their position in relation to the signs of the zodiac.

Pliny's belief in portents seems to have been general and not limited to celestial phenomena. In a passage on earthquakes he declares, "Never has the city of Rome shaken but that this was a forewarning of some future event."

Pliny is less certain in regard to the superstitious observances so common then, to secure good luck or ward off evil fortune. In chapter five of his twenty-eighth book he gives quite a list of practices, such as selecting persons with lucky names to lead the victims at public lustrations, saluting those who sneeze, placing saliva behind the ear to escape mental anxiety, removing rings while eating, averting the ill-omen of mentioning fire at meal-time by pouring water beneath the table, and other superstitious table etiquette. He cites beliefs of the same nature, as that odd numbers are for every purpose the more efficacious, that medicines do no good if placed on a table before being administered, that baldness and headaches may be prevented by cutting the hair on the seventeenth and twenty-ninth days of the moon, and that women who walk along country roads twirling distaffs, or even having these uncovered, bring very bad luck, especially to the crops. He seems to have inclined to the belief that there was a modicum of truth, at any rate, in these notions and customs--and certainly we have already seen him affirming the validity of analogous practices--but he finally decides that amid the great variety of opinion existing in the matter he will not be dogmatic and that each person may think as he deems best. His attitude is much the same in regard to divination from thunder and lightning.

With all the foolish notions which he imbibed from antiquity or into which his mind, over-hospitable to the fantastic and marvelous, led him, Pliny had one good scientific trait. He might believe in magic but he had no liking for the esoteric. His mind might be confused but it was not mystical. He had no desire to hide the "secrets" of science and philosophy from the public gaze, to wrap them up in obscure and allegorical verbiage lest the unworthy comprehend them. On the contrary, he sharply remarked apropos the lack of information about the medicinal properties of plants, that there was a most shameful reason for this scarcity, namely, that even those who knew were unwilling to give forth their knowledge, "as if that would be lost to themselves which they passed on to others."

Writers who have discussed the intellectual life under the Roman Empire generally agree that it was not marked by originality and creative power, and owed a perhaps unusually large debt to the past. The cosmopolitan character of the Empire, the mingling at that time of the science, theology, philosophy and superstition of different nations, religions and races, deserve equal emphasis. The lore of the magi of Persia, the occult science of Egypt, perhaps even the doctrines of the gymnosophists of India, may be regarded, together with that belief in divination which played such a r?le in classical religion and government and with other superstitious notions of Greeks and Italians, as contributory to the prominence of magic in the Empire.

To discuss with any attempt at completeness the influence of the past upon the belief in magic in the Empire lies, however, outside the province of this essay. Pliny has shown us something of the union of magic with science in the literature before his day. Philo of Alexandria, Apuleius and the fame of Hermes Trismegistus may give us some notion of the influence of the East. In other writers of the period of which we treat one may discern further traces of the thought and learning of the past. In general such evidence must suffice. We shall, however, presently take occasion to support our contention that Pliny gives one a fairly good idea of science before his day, by a few citations from two writers of repute, one a Greek and one a Roman, of the period before the Empire. Moreover, the great historical importance of Greek philosophy and the fact that, besides playing a prominent part in Roman culture, it exercised a powerful direct influence on Christian Europe long after the fall of Rome, seem to justify some treatment of its doctrines. Especially may we mention Plato and Aristotle, who exerted great influence not only during classical times, but also the one in the Middle Ages, the other in the period following the decline of Scholasticism.

We naturally incline to regard this earlier period of more or less distinctively Greek thought and learning as a golden age, comparatively speaking, characterized by sane thinking if not also by careful investigation of nature, and free from superstition, credulity and mysticism. The general opinion seems to be that magic entered science and learning and was accepted by men of intellectual prominence only when mental decay had set in and when Oriental influence had become a powerful force.

Fortunately we are not here concerned to measure either relatively or absolutely with any attempt at exactness the amount of magic in the learning of the closing centuries of Greek national life, but only to investigate whether in the philosophy of the Greeks there were not theories at least liable to encourage a later age to belief in magic. There was, for instance, the view of the Stoics that the universe is a single living whole--a theory well fitted to form the starting-point for a belief in sympathetic magic. Also their doctrine that events are all arranged in a fatal causal series was favorable to divination. Quintus Cicero, represented as upholding the truth of that art, cites the Stoics as authority, and we may safely assume that Seneca drew his view of divination largely from the same source.

The doctrine of Pythagoras also deserves mention, for it has played a great r?le in history. He is said to have held that the whole world is, and that the life of man ought to be, harmoniously ordered in accordance with mathematical principles; nay more, that such principles are living things and that numbers are the essence of the universe. The logical conclusion is that by skilful use of mere numbers man can move heaven and earth. As the poet, eulogizing Michael Scot, put it; the "mathematici" by their art affect numbers, by numbers affect the procession of the stars, and by the stars move the universe. The employment of characters constructed of numbers or of geometrical figures, the use of numerical formulae as remedies or of compounds of three portions of three kinds of drugs applied during three successive days, is raised from the plane of superstition to the level of science. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the heavenly bodies with their apparently unchanging regularity of movement are the governors of our existence. Plato, who adopted the Pythagorean doctrines at least to a considerable extent, declared that the loftiest function of the sense of sight was to survey the heavens, an occupation by which we gain philosophy. Like the Pythagoreans also, he associated the four elements with regular solids. The cube represented earth; the octohedron was water; the tetrahedron, fire; and the icosahedron, air. The remaining regular solid, the dodecahedron, was held to represent the universe as a whole.

Towards magic, as he understood it, Plato's attitude seems to have been sceptical, though perhaps not confidently so. He maintained that persons acquainted with medicine and prophets or diviners were the only ones who could know the nature of poisons which worked naturally, and of such things as incantations, magic knots and waxen images; and that since other men had no certain knowledge of such things, they ought not to fear but to despise them. He admitted, however, that there was no use in trying to convince most men of this and that legislation against sorcery was necessary. He himself occasionally mentioned charms or soothsaying in a matter-of-fact way.

Whatever Plato's opinion of vulgar magic, his view of nature was much like that of primitive man. He humanized material objects and materialized spiritual characteristics. For instance, he asserted that the gods placed the lungs about the heart "as a soft spring that, when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against a yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus become more ready to join with passion in the service of reason." He affirmed that the liver was designed for divination, and was a sort of mirror on which the thoughts of the intellect fell and in which the images of the soul were reflected, but that its predictions ceased to be clear after death. Plato spoke of the existence of harmonious love between the elements as the source of health and plenty for vegetation, beasts and men. Their "wanton love" he made the cause of pestilence and disease. To understand both varieties of love "in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is," he tells us, "termed astronomy." This suggests that he believed in astrology--in the potent influence of the stars over all changes in earthly matter. He called the stars "divine and eternal animals, ever abiding." The "lower gods," of whom many at least are identical with the heavenly bodies, form men who, if they live well, return after death each to a happy existence in his proper star. The implication is, though Plato does not say so distinctly, that the stars influence human life.

Aristotle's doctrine was similar. Windelband has well expressed his view:

The stars themselves were ... for Aristotle beings of superhuman intelligence, incorporate deities. They appeared to him as the purer forms, those more like the deity, and from them a purposive rational influence upon the lower life of the earth seemed to proceed--a thought which became the root of mediaeval astrology.

Moreover, "his theory of the subordinate gods of the spheres of the planets ... provided for a later demonology." And a belief in demons fosters a belief in magic. For such subordinate gods--on the one hand movers of nature's forces, and on the other hand subject to passions like man and open to influence through symbols and conjurations--are evidently most suitable agents for the worker of magic to employ. We must also mention Aristotle's attribution of "souls" to plants and animals, a theory which would readily lend itself to an assumption of magic properties in herbs and beasts.

The book by a Roman which we are to consider as illustrative of the condition of science before the age of the Empire is Cato's treatise on agriculture. Several passages emphasize the importance of such conditions as that the moon should be new or waning or not shining during the performance of such acts as the transplanting of trees or the manuring of meadows. It is also directed that in administering medicine to oxen the man giving the dose shall have fasted previously and that both he and the ox stand upright during the operation. One medicine prescribed for cattle is a mixture of 3 grains of salt, 3 leaves of laurel, 3 fibres of leek, 3 tufts of ulpican leek, 3 sprigs of the savin, 3 leaves of rue, 3 stalks of the white vine, 3 white beans, 3 live coals, 3 sextarii of wine. Each ox is to be given a portion for three days and the whole is to be divided so that it will suffice for exactly three doses. To heal a sprain or fracture the singing of the following nonsensical incantation or formula is recommended: "In alios S. F. motas vaeta daries dardaries astataries dissunapiter." This was written by a man generally supposed to have had much common sense and who was enlightened enough to wonder how two augurs could let their eyes meet without laughing.

Do you hear, you who rashly charge me with magic, that this art is acceptable to the immortal gods, consists of celebrating and reverencing them, is pious and prophetic, and long since was held by Zoroaster and Oromagus, its authors, to be noble and divine? Nay, it is included among the chief studies of royalty, and the Persians no more think of rashly allowing any one to become a magician than to become a king.

But if his accusers mean magic in the popular sense, that is, Apuleius grants, a different matter.

Even educated men, however, probably more often, like Pliny, regarded the magi as all one with other magicians. Philostratus, in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, seems to approximate much closer to this position than to that taken by Apuleius, although one would expect a biographer of that mystic personage to view the magi with favor. Philostratus declares that Apollonius was no magician, although he did associate with the magi of Babylonia, the Brahmins of India, and the gymnosophists of Egypt. For he was like Empedocles, Pythagoras, Democritus and Plato who frequented those sects and yet did not embrace the art.

The best science of the Empire reflected to a considerable extent these superstitions sanctioned by public opinion, as our discussion of Seneca and Ptolemy will indicate in some detail. For the present we may observe how the great Galen--whose authority reduced to a single school the many quarreling medical sects of his day, was later implicitly accepted by the Arabs, and then dominated European medicine to the time of Paracelsus--was not above astrological medicine or the use of fantastical remedies. He displayed trust in amulets and believed that such things as the ashes of frogs or "hippocampi" have remedial power. He held that the critical days of disease are largely influenced by the moon, and affirmed that we receive "the force of all the stars above." It should be noted moreover that in one passage, in giving expression to his zeal for astronomy as the handmaid of the healing art, Galen accused many physicians of paying no attention to the stars. But he asserted that in this neglect they were no true followers of the great Hippocrates, whom they extolled but never imitated, for Hippocrates had maintained that astronomy had no small bearing on the art of the physician and that geometry was its indispensable precursor.

Philosophy as well as science was not unfavorable to some varieties of magic. Neo-Platonism, the most prominent school of philosophy in the Empire, probably led men on to belief in magic more than any previous classical system. Nature was looked upon as real only in so far as it was soul, and its processes were regarded as the expression of the world-soul's mysterious working. The investigation of nature thus tended to become an inquiry concerning spirits and demons, a study into the strange and subtle relations existing between things united, as all things are, by bonds of spiritual sympathy. True, the earlier Alexandrines are said to have condemned magic arts, but we have seen that such condemnation need not amount to much. Plotinus attacked only the most extreme pretensions of astrology, and was ready to grant that the stars were celestial characters and signs of the future. He even conceded that prediction might be made from birds. But to him astrology and augury seemed of comparatively small importance, for he believed everything to be joined to and dependent upon every other thing and that in any object the wise man might see signs of everything else. Succeeding Neo-Platonists, at any rate, were often devoted to magic. The name of Iamblichus, for instance, is one of the most prominent in the field of the occult.

This allegorical interpretation of literature has played a great part in human history. It was rife in the age of the Roman Empire, when Philo Judaeus of Alexandria was perhaps its greatest exponent, as he was also the chief member of the Jewish-Alexandrian school of philosophy.

One must admit, however, that along with Seneca's consciousness of the very imperfect knowledge of his own age there goes a tendency to esotericism. The following language would come fittingly from the mouth of a magician:

There are sacred things which are not revealed all at once. Eleusis reserves sights for those who revisit her. Nature does not disclose her mysteries in a moment. We think ourselves initiated; we stand but at her portal. Those secrets open not promiscuously nor to every comer. They are remote of access, enshrined in the inner sanctuary.

Seneca seems to regard scientific research as a sort of religious exercise. His enthusiasm in the study of natural forces appears largely due to the fact that he believes them to be of a sublime and divine character, and above the petty affairs of men.

Indeed, the phenomena which he discusses are mainly meteorological manifestations, such as winds, rain, hail, snow, comets, rainbows, and--what he regards as allied subjects--earthquakes, springs and rivers. Probably he would not have regarded the study of zo?logy or of physiology as so sublime. At any rate he considers only a comparatively few "natural questions," and hence the amount and variety of belief in magic which he has occasion to display is correspondingly limited.

It is evident enough, however, that Seneca by no means accepted magic as a whole. He tells us that uncivilized antiquity believed that rain could be brought on or driven away by incantations, but that to-day no one needs a philosopher to teach him that this is impossible. And, although he affirms that living beings are generated in fire, believes in some rather peculiar effects of lightning, such as removing the venom from snakes which it strikes, and recounts the old stories of floating islands and of waters with power to turn white sheep black, he is sceptical about bathing in the waters of the Nile as a means of increasing the female's capacity for child-bearing. He qualifies by the phrases, "it is believed" and "they say," the assertions that certain waters produce foul skin-diseases and that dew in particular, if collected in any quantity, has this evil property. I imagine he did not believe the story he repeats that the river Alphaeus of Greece reappears in Sicily as the Arethusa, and there every four years, on the very days when the victims are slaughtered at the Olympian games, casts up filth from its depths. The themes Seneca discusses of course afford him less opportunity for the taking up of the magic properties of plants, animals and other objects, but he was probably less credulous in this respect than Pliny, unless his pretensions are even more deceptive.

Seneca did believe, however, that whatever is caused is a sign of some future event. He accepts divination in all its ramifications. Only he holds that each flight of a bird is not caused by direct act of God nor the vitals of the victim altered under the axe by divine interference, but that all has been arranged beforehand in a fatal and causal series. He believes that all unusual celestial phenomena are to be looked upon as prodigies and portents. But no less truly do the planets in their unvarying courses signify the future. The stars are of divine nature and we ought to approach the discussion of them with as reverent an air as when with lowered countenance we enter the temples for worship. Not only do the stars influence our upper atmosphere as earth's exhalations affect the lower, but they announce what is to occur. Seneca employs the statement of Aristotle that comets signify the coming of storms and winds and foul weather, to prove that comets are stars; and declares that a comet is a portent of a storm in the same way as the Chaldeans say that a star brings good or ill fate to men at birth. In fact, his chief, if not sole, objection to the Chaldeans would seem to be that in their predictions they take into account only five stars.

What? Think you so many thousand stars shine on in vain? What else, indeed, is it which causes those skilled in nativities to err than that they assign us to a few stars, although all those that are above us have a share in the control of our fate? Perhaps those nearer direct their influence upon us more closely; perhaps those of more rapid motion look down on us and other animals from more varied aspects. But even those stars that are motionless, or because of their speed keep equal pace with the rest of the universe and seem not to move, are not without rule and dominion over us.

Seneca accepts a theory of Berosus, whose acquaintance we have already made, that whenever all the stars are in conjunction in the sign of Cancer there will be a universal conflagration, and a second deluge when they all unite in Capricorn.

The first of the four books opens with the trite contention that the art itself is not to be rejected because frequently abused by imposters, and with the admission that even the skilful investigator often makes mistakes owing to the incompleteness of human knowledge. In the first place, our doctrine of the nature of matter rests, Ptolemy says, more on conjecture than on certain knowledge. Secondly, old configurations of the stars cannot be safely used as the basis of present-day predictions. Indeed, so many are the different possible positions of the stars and the different possible arrangements of terrestrial matter in relation to the stars that it is difficult to collect enough instances on which to base judgment. Moreover, such things as diversity of place, of education and of custom must be reckoned with in foretelling the future of persons born under the same stars. But although predictions frequently fail, yet the art is not to be condemned any more than one rejects the art of navigation because of frequent shipwrecks.

In each planet one of the four elemental qualities predominates and endows the star with a peculiar nature and power. The sun warms and, to some extent, makes dry, for the nearer it comes to our pole the more heat and drought it produces. The moon, on the contrary, causes humidity, since it is close to the earth and gets the effect of vapors from the latter. Evidently the moon influences other bodies in this way, rendering them soft and producing putrefaction. It also warms a little owing to the light it receives from the sun. Saturn, however, chills and, to some extent, dries, for it is very far from the heat of the sun and the damp mists of the earth. Mars emits a parching heat, as its color and proximity to the sun lead one to infer. Jupiter, situated between cold Saturn and burning Mars, is of a sort of lukewarm nature, but tends more to warmth and moisture than to the other two qualities. So does Venus, but conversely, for it warms less than Jupiter but makes moist more, since its large area catches many damp vapors from the neighboring earth. In Mercury, situated near the sun, moon and earth, neither drought nor dampness predominates; but that planet, incited by its own velocity, is a potent cause of sudden changes. In general, the planets are of good or evil influence according as they abound in the two rich and vivifying qualities, heat and moisture, or in the detrimental and destructive ones, cold and drought.

In short, then, the mythical figure of Hermes Trismegistus became an actuating ideal to the Middle Ages, and the works appearing under his name had a considerable influence in extending belief in magic. Secondly, the hermetic books serve to typify that mass of Eastern occult philosophy and occult science which was so strong a force in the mental life of the Roman Empire.

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