Lynn Thorndike

“ Science is a gradual evolution, not a modern creation.
Be that as it may, if the anthropologists are correct in asserting that magic forms a great part of the life and thought of early man and of all primitive peoples, it is evident that only gradually would the science and thought of civilized peoples free themselves from the old habits and instincts. Modern science cannot exempt itself from its own theory of evolution as Julius Firmicus exempted the Roman emperor from the rule of the stars. Science did not come down from above nor invade from without. ”

“ It is therefore perhaps not surprising that men like Galen, Apuleius, Apollonius, and Dunstan were accused of magic by their contemporaries; that men like Gerbert, Michael Scot, and Albertus Magnus were represented as magicians in later, if not contemporary legend; that Lithica and Roger Bacon tell us of the danger of sages being accused of magic; that the Book of Enoch, Cyprian, Firmicus, and Picatrix confuse magic with other arts and sciences; and that no one of our authors, try as he may, succeeds in keeping magic entirely out of science or science entirely out of magic. ”

“ He who yields to the charms of love and family affection or seeks political power or aught else than Truth and true beauty, or even he who searches for beauty in inferior things; he who is deceived by appearances, he who follows irrational inclinations, is as truly bewitched as if he were the victim of magic and goetia so-called. The life of reason is alone free from magic. Measuring our age by such a standard, we shall be tempted to cry out, Magic of magics, all is magic! What else is there to write about?
Importance of the history of experimental science. ”

“ Yet our material has conclusively shown that the history of magic is bound up with the history of science as well as with folk-lore, primitive culture, and the history of religion. Sometimes our authors have spoken of natural magic, but I rather wonder whether there could well be any other kind, since man must always reckon with his natural environment. It is not without reason that the Magi stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters but as those who have gone farthest and in most detail—too curiously, in his opinion—into the study of nature. ”

“ Peter says, “Moreover, this should be understood, that after Aristotle faith is to be put in Albert above all who have written in philosophy, because he has himself illuminated the writings of almost all philosophers and has seen wherein they spoke truly or falsely, nay more, since he himself was experienced above all others in natural phenomena. It may be that some, relying on their metaphysics or logic, can impugn him by certain arguments, but I think that no matter of great concern, since Albert himself says that faith is to be put in anyone who is expert in his art.” ”

“ If a man is always sad and in the dumps, after purifying the mandragora root in a fountain, let him take it to bed with him, hold it so that it will be warmed by the heat of his body, and say, “God, who madest man from the dust of the earth without grief, I now place next me that earth which has never transgressed”—Hildegard has already stated that the mandragora is composed “of that earth of which Adam was created”—“in order that my clay may feel that peace just as Thou didst create it.” ”

“ Indeed, Bacon seems to think that magic has taken such a hold upon men that it can be uprooted only by scientific exposition of its tricks and by scientific achievement of even greater marvels than it professes to perform. Perhaps he realizes that religious censure or rationalistic argument is not enough to turn men from these alluring arts, but that science must show unto them yet a more excellent way, and afford scope for that laudable curiosity, that inventive and exploring instinct which magic pretends to gratify. ”

“ This is well illustrated by the fact that in our authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries astrology is the most widespread, as it is the most pseudo-scientific of any variety of the magic arts. Indeed, it has ceased to be merely one method of divination and claims to study and disclose the universal law of nature in the rule of the stars, by which every fact in nature and every occult influence in magic may be explained. If this doctrine were true, all other sciences and magic arts would be reduced to branches of the supreme science and art of astronomy or astrology. ”

“ When men still believed in demons and witches and divination from dreams, it is not surprising that they believed also in natural magic. Only a small part of nature’s secrets were revealed to them; of the rest they felt that almost anything might turn out to be true. It was a time when “one vast realm of wonder spreads around.” They had to struggle against a huge burden of error and superstition which Greece and Rome and the Arabs handed down to them; yet they must try to assimilate what was of value in Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Ptolemy, and the rest. ”

“ In the reality of such feats of magic, then, Thomas firmly believes.
Magic not a science but due to demons.
But Aquinas will not admit that the magician and his materials are a sufficient cause of the magic. He also denies that certain men are especially endowed with magic power by the stars at their birth or that the influence of the constellations can be controlled to perform particular feats of magic. Demons in his opinion really perform the magic. Words, figures, spells are mere signs to them; the poor magician is their dupe. ”

“ So fat is the whale that he must be wounded deeply to feel it at all, but once his inner flesh is reached by the weapon, he cannot endure the bitterness of the salt water, seeks the shore, and is easily captured. The whale cherishes its young with wondrous love, and when they are stranded on shoals it frees them by spouting water over them. When a severe storm is raging, it swallows them and they abide safely in its belly until the storm is past, when it vomits them forth again. ”

“ However, I suspect that it is not so much that magic has been shown to be false, as it is that men have come to set a greater value upon truth, that accounts for magic’s decline. As I survey the practice and “beliefs” of primitive and savage tribes or the columns of modern newspapers and much of modern literature, I become convinced that men have a natural tendency to assert, and craving to hear the sensational, exaggerated, and impossible, and to fly in the face both of reason and experience. ”

“ At any rate, magic is treated by itself apart from his previous description and classification of the arts and sciences and listing of their founders. The definition of magic makes it clear why it is thus segregated: “Magic is not included in philosophy, but is a distinct subject, false in its professions, mistress of all iniquity and malice, deceiving concerning [Pg 14] the truth and truly doing harm; it seduces souls from divine religion, promotes the worship of demons, engenders corruption of morals, and impels the minds of its followers to every crime and abomination.” ”

“ Now too he shines with rays eternal, investigator of all natural forces. He gave the secrets of the Greek tongue to the Latin idiom by his power of assiduous practice and constant reading. Employing the virtues of herbs and stones, the sure aspects of the sky, stated hours and moments, by the crowd he was reputed to fascinate men. He opened the arcana of the art medical; he reconciled conflicts, a wonderful warrior! The name of Conciliator he won by uniting medicine and philosophy, astrology and natural magic, in the closest bond. Born for study, he died studying. ”

“ It is not without reason that we have found experimentation and magic so constantly associated throughout our period. After all it is not surprising that magic, which was both curious and tried to accomplish things, should investigate nature and should experiment. It is even possible that magicians were the first to experiment, or shared that province with the first inventors and the useful arts, and that natural science, originally philosophical and speculative, took over experimental method in a crude form, as well as the conception of occult virtue, from magic. ”

“ His own science still clings to many occult and magical theories and practices, while he admits that the magicians often try or pretend to use scientific books and methods, and that it is no easy matter to tell which books and characters and images are which. The experimental scientist not only exposes the frauds of magic but discovers secrets of nature hidden beneath the husk of magical ceremony and pretense. Also some men employ the marvels of philosophy for wicked ends and so pervert it into a sort of magic. ”

“ Is such charm any less fleeting and fallacious than the magic charm from which it takes its name? Does it advance truth or retard civilization? Is not the man without it, who has to be twice as efficient in order to secure the same position as the man with it, the true builder? ”

“ In his books on animals he seems of the uncritical school of the marvelous of Solinus, Basil, Ambrose, the Physiologus, and Jacques de Vitry. Seldom does he question any statement that he finds in his authorities; indeed, he does not appear to possess the independent knowledge of animal life to enable him to do so. He does state that the power of the little echinus to stop ships has seemed incredible to many, but inasmuch as Ambrose, Jacques, Aristotle, Isidore, and Basil all assert it confidently, he does not see how there is any room left for doubt. ”

“ William at any rate has respect for natural philosophy and favors scientific investigation of nature. Like his namesake of Conches in the preceding century he has no sympathy with those who, when they are ignorant of the causes of natural phenomena and have no idea how to investigate them, have recourse to the Creator’s omnipotent virtue and call everything of this sort a miracle, or evade the necessity of any natural explanation by affirming that God’s will is the sole cause of it. ”

“ Bacon says far more of the marvelous results which he expects experimental science to achieve than he does of the methods by which such results are to be attained. In the main marvelousness rather than practicability characterizes the aims which he proposes for scientia experimentalis. Indeed, of the three ways in which he represents it as superior to all other sciences, while one is that it employs sure proofs rather than mere arguments, two are that by it life may be greatly lengthened, and that from it a better knowledge of the future may be gained than even from astrology. ”

“ From divination by dreams and demons John passes to astrology. To start with he admits the attraction which the art has for men of intellect in his own time. “Would,” he exclaims, “that the error of the mathematici could be as readily removed from enlightened minds as the works of the demons fade before true faith and a sane consciousness of their illusions. But in it men go astray with the greater peril in that they seem to base their error upon nature’s firm foundation and reason’s strength.” ”

“ There will come, nor do I begrudge my labor, the devotion of a pious reader, who will now let you repose in his lap, now move you to his breast, sometimes place you as a sweet pillow beneath his head, sometimes gently closing you with glad hands, he will fervently pray for me to Lord Jesus Christ, who with Father and Holy Spirit lives and reigns God through infinite cycles of ages. ”

“ While the scheme of the universe put forward by ancient and medieval science is, as we have seen, on the whole adopted even in Hildegard’s most visionary writings, it is equally true that the religious interest is by no means absent from her two works of medicine and natural history. In the first place, the devil is a force in nature which she often mentions. Her opening the Causae et curae with a discussion of creation—of course a usual starting-point with the medieval scientist—soon leads her to speak of the fall of Lucifer. ”

“ Certain useful natural phenomena which are not found in the bosom of the art of medicine I have discovered by labor, vision, chance, experience, and genius to be both useful against diseases and the causes of diseases; and I have demonstrated certain instructive experiments for conserving the safety of the human mechanism, and I have experienced that all things from the eighth sphere to the earth’s center are governed by the law of reason (veridica ratione habentur) . ”

“ Life comes to the world of nature from the sky as if from God, and the creatures of the earth, air, and water could not move from their tracks, did they not absorb vivifying motions from the sky. [287] Nous or Intelligence says to Nature, “I would have you behold the sky, inscribed with a multiform variety of images, which, like a book with open pages, containing the future in cryptic letters, I have revealed to the eyes of the more learned.” ”

“ Daniel interprets the scope of astrology very broadly, asserting that it has eight parts: the science of judgments, or what we should call judicial astrology; medicine; nigromancy according to physics; agriculture; illusions or magic (de praestigiis) ; alchemy, “which is the science of the transmutation of metals into other species; the science of images, which Thoz Grecus set forth in the great and universal book of Venus; and the science of mirrors, which is of broader scope and aim than the rest, as Aristotle shows in the treatise on the burning glass.” ”

“ But while Peter joins in condemnation of such superstitious medicine, he yet believes in the efficacy of incantations and represents their opponents as incredulous and materialistic persons who will accept only action by gross material contact. He admits that there is no property in the incantation itself nor in its sound when uttered to explain its marvelous effects. We must look rather to the virtue of the mind of the person repeating the charm, to faith on the part of the person to be benefited, and to divine, angelic, demonic, or sidereal assistance. ”

“ Magic appears, in our period at least, as a way of looking at the world which is reflected in a human art or group of arts employing varied materials in varied rites, often fantastic, to work a great variety of marvelous results, which offer man a release from his physical, social, and intellectual limitations, not by the imaginative and sentimental methods of music, melodrama, fiction, and romance, or by religious experience or asceticism, but by operations supposed to be efficacious here in the world of external reality. ”

“ I have exposed the Physiologus myth, the Florilegia myth, the legend of Roger Bacon as a lone herald of modern experimental science, the notion that Vincent of Beauvais adequately sums up all medieval science, and a number of other modern “vulgar errors” concerning medieval learning. I have shown that medieval men were wider readers than has often been thought, that the scholastics presented their material in a more systematic way than classical writers, that the Latin of the thirteenth century has a clearer style and shows more direct thinking than the vernaculars of the fifteenth century. ”

“ The ancient classical feeling that magic was evil and the Christian prejudice against it as the work of demons still play a large part in his summary of the subject, but to these two points that magic is hostile to Christianity or irreligious, and that it is improper, immoral, and criminal, he adds the other two points that it is not a part of philosophy—in other words, it is unscientific, and that it is more or less untrue and unreal. Or these four points may be reduced to two: since law, religion, and learning unite in condemning magic, it is unsocial in every respect ”

“ Though himself a friar and master of theology, he had been trained and had then himself specialized in the three learned languages, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, in optic and geometry, in astronomy and astrology, in alchemy and “experimental science,” and in the writings of the classical moralists. Consequently he thought that no one could be a thorough theologian who did not go through the same course of training; nay, it was enough to ruin the reputation of any supposed scholar in Bacon’s sight, if he were unacquainted with these indispensable subjects. ”