Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/368

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

undoubtedly be ascribed to maleficium; in Kieser 1 also we find instances of diseases which had been transmitted, especially to dogs, who died of them. In Plutarch 2 we find that fascinatio was already known to Democritus, who tried to explain it as a fact. Now admitting these stories to be true, they give us the key to the crime of witchcraft, the zealous persecution of which would therefore not have been quite without reason. For even if in most cases it may have been founded upon error and abuse, we are still not authorized to look upon our forefathers as having been so utterly benighted, as to persecute with the utmost vigour and cruelty for so many ages an absolutely impossible crime. From this point of view moreover, we can also understand that the common people should still even to the present day persist in attributing certain cases of illness to a maleficium, and are not to be dissuaded from this conviction. Now if we are thus induced by the progress of the age to modify the extreme view adopted by the last century concerning the absolute nullity of this ill-famed art, at any rate with respect to some part of it, still nowhere is caution more necessary than here, in order to fish out from the chaos of fraud, falsehood and absurdity contained in the writings of Agrippa von Nettesheim, Wierus, Bodinus, Delrio, Bindsfeldt, &c. &c., the few isolated truths that may lie in them. For, frequent though they may be throughout the world, nowhere have lies and deceit freer play than where Nature's laws are avowedly set aside, nay declared invalid. Here there are, we find, the wildest fictions, the strangest freaks of the imagination worked up into an edifice, lofty as the sky, on the narrow foundation of the slight particle of truth there may have been in Magic, and in consequence of this, the

1 Kieser, Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus. See the account of Bende Bendsen's illness, vol. ix. to vol. xii.

2 Plutarch, Symposiacae quaestiones, qu. v. 7. 6.

ANIMAL