Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/118

110 was no thoroughgoing scepticism. We sought in vain for an instance of consistent disbelief. If, too, there was an effort to make the magic, which was accepted, scientific by basing it upon natural laws, as Quintus Cicero, Seneca and Ptolemy tried to do, there was also, besides the definite approval of magical doctrines, often a mystical tone in the science and philosophy of the time. The question of the relative strength of magic and of science in those days must, then, be left unsettled. It is difficult enough to judge even a single individual; to tell, for instance, just how superstitious Cato was.

In closing we may, however, sum up very briefly those elements which we selected as combining to give a fairly faithful picture of the belief in magic which then prevailed among educated people. Native superstitions from which science had not yet wholly freed itself; much fantastical and mystical lore from Oriental nations; allegorizing and mysticizing in the interpretation of books—which in Philo went to the length of a belief that all knowledge could be secured by this means; a portrayal of nature which attributed to her many magic properties and caused medicine to be infected with magic ceremony and to be based to some extent on the principle of sympathetic magic; a widespread and often extreme belief in astrology; a speculative philosophy which was often favorable to the doctrines of magic or even advanced some itself; and the system of Neo-Platonism in especial, with which we may associate the view—prevalent long before Plotinus, however—that everything in the universe is in close sympathy with everything else and is a sign of coming events—these were the forces ready at the opening of the Middle Ages to influence the future.