Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/111

103] acquainted with the first book only of De Divinatione, this remark—which ought to have proved more potent than any necromantic spell in invoking Cicero's slandered Manes—must be taken as a startling revelation of the mental calibre of both its maker and his age.

Synesius (370-430 ), Bishop of Ptolemais, furnishes a good example of what was probably the position of the average Neo-Platonist who did not go to extremes in the last period of the Roman Empire. In the present survey we are not concerned with Christian belief in the Empire, and so it is only as a Neo-Platonist that Synesius will at present interest us. He is the more interesting for us in that he was a man with some taste for science. He knew some medicine and was well acquainted with geometry and astronomy, subjects which he probably studied under his friend Hypatia. He believed himself to be the inventor of an astrolable and of a hydroscope. He played his part in secular politics and as bishop defended his people from oppression. He was fond of the chase and of his dogs and horses, and said so. He was a great lover of books also, but thought that their true use was to call one's own mental powers into action. Philosophy, mathematics and literature all claimed his attention. Yet broad and independent-minded as he was for his age, and interested as he was in science, he believed in magic. Indeed, there was apparently no form of magic in which he would not have believed.

Synesius regarded the universe as a unit and all its parts as closely correlated. This belief not only led him to maintain, like Seneca, that whatever had a cause was a sign of some future event, or to hold with Plotinus that in any and every object the sage might discern the future of every other thing, and that the birds themselves, if endowed with sufficient intelligence, would be able to predict the future by