Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/85

77] Indeed, the phenomena which he discusses are mainly meteorological manifestations, such as winds, rain, hail, snow, comets, rainbows—and what he regards as allied subjects—earthquakes, springs and rivers. Probably he would not have regarded the study of zoölogy or of physiology as so sublime. At any rate he considers only a comparatively few "natural questions," and hence the amount and variety of belief in magic which he has occasion to display is correspondingly limited.

It is evident enough, however, that Seneca by no means accepted magic as a whole. He tells us that uncivilized antiquity believed that rain could be brought on or driven away by incantations, but that to-day no one needs a philosopher to teach him that this is impossible. And, although he affirms that living beings are generated in fire, believes in some rather peculiar effects of lightning, such as removing the venom from snakes which it strikes, and recounts the old stories of floating islands and of waters with power to turn white sheep black, he is sceptical about bathing in the waters of the Nile as a means of increasing the female's capacity for child-bearing. He qualifies by the phrases, "it is believed" and "they say," the assertions that certain waters produce foul skin-diseases and that dew in particular, if collected in any quantity, has this evil property. I imagine he did not believe the story he repeats that the river Alphæus of Greece reappears in Sicily