Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/20

12 speech to-day numerous vestiges of the astrological art survive.

Moreover, a grander and more imposing witchcraft displayed itself in the stories of the wizard Merlin and in the persons of the wicked magicians with whom knights contended in the pages of mediæval romance. So strong was the tendency to believe in the marvelous, that men of learning were often pictured by subsequent tradition, if not by contemporary gossip, as mighty necromancers. Even Gerbert, who seems to have done nothing more shocking than to write a treatise on the abacus and build a pipe-organ, was pictured as running off with a magician's book and daughter, hanging under bridges between earth and water to escape noxious spells, and making compacts with Satan.

The attitude of the average mind as it has just been illustrated was to a large extent characteristic of the best instructed and most widely read men. The erudite poet Dante accepted the influence of the constellations upon human destiny. Bodin maintained in his Republic—perhaps the greatest book on political science written during the sixteenth