The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
June 2002
Lynn Thorndike
Mediaeval Magic and Science in
the
Seventeenth
Century*
Speculum
Volume 28, Issue 4
Oct. 1953, 692-704.
ARISTOTLE
had accepted
four inferior elements below the sphere of the moon: namely, earth, water, air,
and fire, but had distinguished the heavenly spheres from these as a fifth
essence which was incorruptible. This view prevailed generally through the
mediaeval period. In the middle of
the fourteenth century, however, John of Rupescissa composed a work called ‘The
Consideration of the Fifth Essence.’ In it he suggested that, as the heavens
were an incorruptible fifth essence, so the corruption of the human body might
be staved off by a quintessence extracted from each of the elements or from the
mixed bodies of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. He waxed especially enthusiastic over the
fifth essence from antimony.
In the seventeenth century many
still accepted the doctrine of four elements, while others reduced them to three
or two, and Van Helmont went back to the hypothesis of Thales that everything
was composed of water. Descartes,
of course did not recognize any of the old four elements, his three being
differentiated only in figure and motion. The doctrine that the heavens were
incorruptible was more generally abandoned, and some identified them with fire,
while others held that air also filled the heavens and was continuous with the
sky. On the other hand, Caspar
Bartholinus as late as 1697 estimated the height of the earth’s atmosphere as
hardly one mile, although he knew that its weight raises water thirty-two feet,
and held that the precipitation from it was sufficient to supply all springs and
rivers. He also still spoke of
three regions of air, as had been customary through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, although in the thirteenth Michael Scot and Thomas of
Cantimpré had listed seven. Five
years before Bartholinus’s book, Etienne Chauvin in his Rational Lexicon
of 1692, had reduced the three regions of air to two, variously estimated as
extending eight, forty or fifty miles above sea level. But he was sure that the loftiest
mountains surpassed this height by many parasangs and reached the purest ether -
a vague appellation which many applied to the substance of the heavens. For Chauvin, too, it was still an open
question whether springs of water originated from precipitation or from the sea
- a question much debated throughout the seventeenth
century.
While the substance which fills the
heavens came to be called ether rather than fifth essence, the conception of
quintessences extractable from things about us, which John of Rupescissa had
developed in the fourteenth century, was widespread among the alchemists and
chemists of the seventeenth century, although they usually incorrectly ascribed
it to Paracelsus or to Raymond Lull, under whose name one version of
Rupescissa’s treatise was current. His stress on antimony also marked the
chemical manuals of the seventeenth century, and was
* Read at the annual dinner of the
Mediaeval Academy of America
held at the Vanderbilt Hotel in
692
long a bone of contention between
the dogmatic school of medicine and the spagyrics, or advocates of the
employment of chemical remedies. At
Incidentally, Patin was an ardent
advocate of the practice of blood-letting which had continued through the
mediaeval period, although he felt that it had been somewhat neglected in favor
of polypharmacy and Arabic medicine. In 1633 a royal physician who had
rheumatism was bled sixty-four times in eight months, and Patin had another
patient bled thirty-two times for a continuous fever, and he was ‘entirely
cured, for which I praise God.’ When Patin was summoned to attend Hobbes,
the English philosopher was in such pain that he wanted to kill himself but
refused to be bled on the ground that he was sixty-four and too old. But next morning he assented and was,
according to Patin, much better in consequence, and after that Patin said - they
became great pals. But Patin was
accused of responsibility for the death of Gassendi, who died at the age of
sixty-three, by excessive phlebotomy in his last illness. On the other hand, Patin recounted with
great satisfaction the death of La Brosse, head of the Jardin du Roy, who had
contracted dysentery from eating too many melons and drinking too much wine -
‘as usual,’ adds Patin. He had his
entire body rubbed with oil of yellow amber for four days, and then swallowed on
an empty stomach a large glass of brandy with a little astringent oil. When this did no good, he took an emetic,
but died as it was working. ‘So
vomited forth his impure soul that impure wretch, most expert in killing men!’
He had refused to be bled, calling
it the remedy of sanguinary pedants, and said that be would rather die. Patin added: ‘The devil will bleed him in
the other world, as one deserves who was a knave, an atheist, an impostor, a
homicide, and a public executioner.’
Belief in marvelous virtues of gems,
herbs, and animals had ever been a doughty ally, indeed one might well say, an
integral part, of magic. Since no
rational explanation of them could be offered in terms of the accepted science
of the time, with its four elements and four primary qualities of hot and cold,
moist and dry, they were accounted for in the Middle Ages either by the
influence of the celestial bodies and their mysterious and incorruptible fifth
essence upon terrestrial substances, or simply attributed to occult qualities
and virtues, specific form, and the action of the whole substance. This conception of action by some occult
quality was by no means universally abandoned in the seventeenth century. But revivers of the atomistic theory of
Epicurus and Lucretius like Gassendi, advocates of a new method like Descartes,
and adherents of the corpuscular philosophy of Boyle felt that it was a
confession of weakness to resort to occult qualities in the explanation of
natural phenomena, and that they could explain these marvelous virtues
mechanically by the action of particles which were so subtle and tiny as to be
intangible and invisible. Thrown
off as effluvia, these infinitesimal particles entered the pores of such
substances as exactly fitted them and thus effected by contact what had seemed
to be action at a distance, as in the case of the mag-
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net’s attracting iron, the torpedo
fish numbing one’s arm, although touched only with the tip of a spear or
ten-foot pole held in the hand, and the healing virtue of amulets worn about the
neck or otherwise attached externally.
Resort was also had to spirits, not,
however, in the sense of immaterial separate substances such as angels and
demons, but of very subtle material fluids in the human and other bodies. Besides the four humors - blood, phlegm,
choler, and bile - Galen had distinguished animal spirits connected with the
brain, vital with the heart, and natural with the liver. Mediaeval alchemists further applied the
term, spirits, to such substances as arsenic, quicksilver, sulphur and sal
ammoniac. In the sixteenth century
Telesio, in attacking the natural philosophy of Aristotle, not only relied on
such spirits to explain bodily functions, but even accounted for intellectual
and moral qualities by the difference between the spirits in heat, tenuousness
and purity. In the seventeenth
century Francis Bacon, although asserting that his method was ‘at least new,
even in its very nature,’ continued this emphasis upon spirits. His favorite explanation of natural
phenomena was that in all tangible bodies there are very fine, rarefied, subtle
and invisible spirits, which are neither heat nor vacuum, air or fire, but
differ from one another as much as tangible bodies do. They are almost never at rest and are
easily dissipated, evaporate, infuse and boil away. They govern nature principally. Gems have in them fine spirits, as their
splendor shows, and they may work upon the spirits of men to comfort and
exhilarate them. The leaf of the
herb burrage has ‘an excellent spirit to repress the fuliginous vapor of dusky
melancholy and so to cure madness.’ Cats and owls could not see by night,
were there not a little light, sufficient for their visual spirits. The reason why blows and bruises induce
swellings is that the spirits rush to relieve that part of the body and draw the
humors with them.
For William Harvey, the discoverer
of the circulation of the blood, the spirits were never separated from the
blood, but most authors of the century thought of the animal spirits as
circulating through the motor and sensory nerves. On the other hand, Steno, during his stay
in
It is true that there was an
increasing tendency on the part of sceptical Epicureans like Gassendi to reject
outright some of these reported marvelous virtues as false. Yet he did not question that shellfish
fatten and that the marrow in the bones of animals increases with the waxing of
the moon. He attributed it,
however, not to an occult influence of the moon but to particles of moisture on
the moon which are excited by sunlight and then borne by the sun’s reflected
rays to earth in greater number than at the time of the new moon. Similarly that sheep shun a wolf which
they have never seen before is because the wolf sheds corpuscles which are
offensive to the sheep. Or Gassendi
repeats the statement of Lucretius that the reason why a lion is scared by the
crowing of a cock is that the corpuscles emitted by the cock hurt the lion’s
eyes.
694
With all due respect to Lucretius
and Gassendi, it must be said that more than one objection may be raised against
this explanation. In the first
place, what proof is there that the cock emits corpuscles? And if so, why should they be any more
injurious than those emitted by the hen, especially when we think of fascination
by witches, of the presence of a menstruating woman clouding a mirror, and that
the female of the species is more deadly than the male? In the third place, why is it that these
injurious effluvia are emitted only when the cock crows? In the fourth place, how and why do they
injure the lion’s eyes rather than his nose or ears or paws or mane? In the fifth place, why do Lucretius and
Gassendi dodge the obvious explanation that the sound of the crowing startles
the king of beasts, and adopt the extremely far-fetched theory that the effect
of a noise is felt by an organ of vision? Anyone could readily think up a dozen
more plausible explanations. But
just so long as it is atomistic and corpuscular, it is good enough for
Gassendi.
Aristotle and Pliny had told of the
little fish called echeneis (HHC: Greek not displayed) of which a single
specimen could bring a ship in full sail to a sudden halt by attaching itself to
the keel. Pliny indeed had waxed
eloquent on the subject as follows:
We have now arrived at the
culminating point of the wonders manifested to us by the operations of
Nature. And even at the very
outset, we find spontaneously presented to us an incomparable illustration of
her mysterious powers....
What is there more unruly than the
sea, with its winds, its tornadoes, and its tempests? And yet in what department of her works
has Nature been more seconded by human ingenuity, than in this by the
invention of sails and oars? We are
further impressed by the ineffable power of ocean tides, as they constantly ebb
and flow, and regulate the currents of the sea as though these were the waters
of one vast river.
Yet a single fish, and that of very
diminutive size - the fish known as the echeneis - can counteract
all these forces, though acting in unison and impelling in the same
direction. Winds may blow and
storms may rage, yet the echeneis controls their fury, restrains their
mighty force, and bids ships halt in their course; a result which no cables, no
anchors… could ever have produced.
A fish bridles the impetuous violence of the deep and subdues the frantic
rage of the universe - and all this by no effort of its own, no act of
resistance on its part, no act at all, in fact, except attaching itself to the
keel.
Pliny goes on to tell how the
flagship of
With such specific confirmation of
the authority of Aristotle, few ventured to question the truth of the statement.
The church father Basil and Isidore
of Seville quoted Pliny; William of Auvergne accepted it in the thirteenth
century. Thomas of Cantimpré said
that it had seemed incredible to many, but since Ambrose, Jacques, Aristotle,
Isidore, and Basil all affirmed it, he did not see how there was any room left
for doubt. Giovanni da Fontana
continued credulous concerning it in the early fifteenth century. Giannini very much doubted it in the
sixteenth century, despite the authority of Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian, but
the sceptic Sanchez accepted it without question, as did Gesner, Freige, and
others. Pomponazzi suggested that
the echeneis operated by occult virtue like the magnet; Fracastoro thought that
it was merely a sign of the proximity of magnetic mountains which were the
immediate cause of the ship’s stopping; Cardan held that the echeneis attached
itself to the rudder rather than the keel and wobbled it
so
69
that the ship could not proceed.
If true, Giannini could attribute
the effect only to occult virtue. In the seventeenth century, of more than
twenty authors whom I have examined, only three or four denied it. For Valerio Martini, it was still an
example of occult virtue. For
Francisco Torrelbanca of Cordova, it and the torpedo fish were unmistakable
examples of magic, along with the magnet, asbestos, and ever-burning lamps found
in ancient sepulchers. Campenella
suggested that the echeneis stupefied the vessel and rendered it repugnant to
its natural motion, as the bite of a mad dog makes its victim inhuman and
canine. Gassendi discussed it for a
full folio column and attributed the ship’s stopping to an adverse current
rather than the remora. Horst in
1682 wrote that the faculty by which the echeneis stopped ships was the contrary
of that by which the magnet attracted iron. Henckel in 1690 could do no better than
repeat the reasoning of the great Spanish schoolman Suarez in the previous
century.
Some say that, as the hand of the
thrower gives an impetus to the missile which keeps it going after it has left
his hand, so the remora or echeneis imprints a non-impetus upon the ship which
keeps it standing still. Others say
that it detains the vessel by innate virtue, as a man holds a stone in his hand
so that it cannot fall. Yet others
say that it so attaches itself to the ship that it cannot be moved, nor can the
ship. Suarez’s own conclusion is
that, however, it happens, there is no doubt that it comes from some marvelous
and occult virtue, aided very likely by some special and connatural celestial
influence.
Besides such occult virtue and
celestial influence, sympathy and antipathy were an explanation of apparent
magic and action at a distance to which resort was made as often in the
seventeenth as in the mediaeval centuries, as the twenty-six treatises in the
Theatrum sympatheticum of 1662 bear witness and repeated reference to the
conception by many other writers. Weapon ointment now commanded more
attention and support than it had in the sixteenth century. Much discussed was the question whether
the corpse of the victim would bleed at the approach of the murderer and only at
his approach, a question ventilated by Nicole Oresme and Henny of Hesse in the
fourteenth century and by Galeotto Marzio in the fifteenth. Indeed, Peter of Abano, the famous
Conciliator, at the end of the thirteenth century in a passage of his Commentary
upon the Problems of Aristotle, had given an explanation of the phenomenon which
was repeated by Lazarus Gutierez of the University of Valladolid in 1653 and
which was perhaps both as ingenious and as probable as any that was offered.
The slayer, by virtue of his fury
and strong imagination, had impressed on his victim spirits of hostility aroused
at the time of the crime and emitted from his - the slayer’s - body. When the murderer reappears, these
material spirits tend to return to his body where they belong. In doing so, they stir the corpse and
draw blood from the wound with or after them. Others attempted to explain the bleeding
corpse in terms of sympathy and antipathy.
The force of sympathy was also
involved in the Biolychnium of Johann Ernst Burggrav. This Lamp of Life and Death was fed with
a liquid made from human blood which burned as long as the blood-giver lived,
went out when be died, and presumably flickered when he fell
ill.
696
For such diseases as dropsy,
jaundice, and leprosy, Burggrav gave the following prescription. Empty an egg and fill the shell with some
of the patient’s blood, then close the aperture with fish-glue. Place the egg under a setting hen for a
fortnight, then feed it to a pig or a dog, and the disease will be transferred
to the animal. Such transplantation
or magic transfer of disease to plants and animals was much practiced in the
seventeenth century, and many examples of it might be
given.
Another example of the belief in
sympathy then is had in the oft repeated tale of the grafted nose, which, when
the original owner of the skin employed in the grafting died, rotted and fell
off. Caspar Schott in 1665,
however, cast doubt upon this story. He furthermore declared impossible the
supposed sympathetic action of two compasses at a great distance from each
other, or that friends after having mingled a little of their blood, could
communicate from afar. If one of
them pricked his skin, similar punctures were said to appear upon the body of
the other.
In the fourteenth century William de
Marra of Padua, in a work on poisons addressed to Pope Urban V (1362-1370),
suggested as an explanation for hydrophobia that the patient shunned water
because vapors from his eyes, infected with rabies, were reflected in the water
and made him imagine that he saw there the dog which bad bit him. William further referred to the belief
that bits of flesh or fat resembling puppies appear in the patient’s urine, and
it was repeated by Christopher de Honestis and John Martin later in the same
century. This latter notion
persisted in the seventeenth century and is found as late as 1709 in Garmann’s
De miraculis mortuorum, although S. A. Fabricius had published a medical
disquisition against it at Padua in 1665 and Meibomius and Gaspar à Reies had
questioned it earlier. But Daniel
Sennert (1572-1637), who for many was a great medical authority, had rung
further changes and variations upon it, such as discussing whether and why
images of dogs sometimes appear in the urine of mad dogs - rather than in that
of the sufferer from hydrophobia, or repeating, as Frommann reminds us in 1675,
upon the solemn assurances of trustworthy persons, that animals similar to small
puppies are generated from the foam of mad dogs which has adhered to one’s
clothing.
William de Marra further remarked
that the bite of the spider called tarantula was relieved by music, because its
poison induced melancholy, for which the best antidote is rejoicing. The vulgar and ignorant say that the
insect itself sings when it bites, and that, when the patient hears similar
cadences, it is a great relief to him. William was unwilling to entertain this
explanation, but he thought that it might be possible that the pleasure derived
from the music attracted the spirits from within the body to its periphery and
so prevented the poison from penetrating to the vitals. From a score of seventeenth century
discussions of the bite of the tarantula, let us take for comparison that by
Walter Charleton, an Oxford M.D. and Fellow of the Royal Society, who in 1654
published a résumé in English of the Epicurean or atomic natural science of
Gassendi, whose discussion of the same matter it resembles but is longer and
more detailed.
The bite of the tarantula makes a
man ‘dance most violently at the same time every year’ as when he was bit, ‘till
he be perfectly cured thereby, being invincible
697
by any other antidote but Musick,’
which affects the animal spirits in the brain and so the whole body and
attenuates the poison ‘by a way very like that of fermentation,’ setting the
patient to dancing until the venom is expelled by a profuse sweat. Different victims require different tunes
and musical instruments to dance to, according to the type of tarantula that has
bitten them and also according to their own temperaments. The melancholy needs drums, trumpets and
sackbuts; the choleric and sanguine are cured by stringed instruments. The musicians of
The possibility of prolonging life
to 120 years, or of renewing one’s youth like the snake and the eagle, of
discovering an alchemical elixir of life, or a fountain of youth in the
Francis Bacon seems to have been
more interested in the prolongation of life and health than in the cure of
disease. He thought that purges
were more conducive to a long life than exercise and sweats were, arguing that
perspiration drove out not only noxious humors but also good juices and spirits.
On the other hand, frequent
blood-letting might be beneficial by renewing the fluids of the body. He held that persons with long legs were
likely to live longer than those with long trunks. He knew a great man who attained a long
life and whose custom it was to have a fresh sod of earth brought to him every
morning while he was still in bed, and he would hold his head over it for some
time. Unicorn horn was rather out
of favor when Bacon wrote, but the bezoar stone, gold and powdered pearls,
emeralds or jacinths, were still highly regarded as promoting longevity. Among his own favorites were ‘Grains of
Youth’ and ‘Methusalem water.’ The
former comprised four parts of nitre, three of ambergris, two of orris-powder,
one-quarter of white poppy seed, one-half of saffron, with water of orange
blossoms and a little tragacanth. These ingredients were to be made into
four small grains which were to be taken at
Francisco Torreblanca of Cordova
believed that old men might renew their youth, and that the phoenix lives to be
five hundred years old, because it never indulges in sexual intercourse. He further assures us that the devil can
enable a man to fast for a long time, for the chameleon, according to Pliny, has
such a large lung that it can live on air alone, while about the year 1288 a
girl had subsisted for thirty years on the eucharist alone. Similarly Athanasius Kircher in his
Mundus subterraneus tells of a diver who spent so much time under water
that a
698
web grew between his fingers like
that on the foot of a duck, while his lungs became so distended that they
contained a supply of air sufficient for an entire day.
Speaking of water of orange
blossoms, it may be noted that Sir Isaac Newton breakfasted regularly on ‘orange
peel boiled in water which he drank’ instead of tea, ‘sweetened with sugar and
with bread and butter. He thinks this dissolves phlegm,’ we are
told.
Such favorite phrases of late
mediaeval scholasticism and of the pseudo-Lullian alchemical corpus as
calidum innatum (innate heat) and humidum radicale (fundamental
moisture) were abandoned by Caspar Bartholinus in the last decade of the
seventeenth century. But the former
phrase had been employed by Caimus in 1616, by Marcus Marci in 1635, Zaccagnini
in 1644, Conring in 1647, and Hoffman in 1667; while humidum radicale was
used by Bartoletti in 1619, William Harvey in 1651, and J. J. Becher, who at
It may seem a long cry from the
seventeenth century back to the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville in the
early seventh century. Yet, when
Caspar Bauhin, noted primarily as a botanist, published two books on the nature
of hermaphrodites and monstrous births from the opinions of theologians,
jurisconsults, medical men, philosophers and rabbis, they were further described
in the long Latin title as plane philologici. In a work on the salamander by
Wurffbain in 1683, the opening chapter on whether such an animal existed was
followed by other chapters upon its etymology, homonyms, and synonyms, before a
word was said of its natural history and reputed living in fire, for which he
listed fifty favoring authors and ten against this based upon
experiment.
Wurffbain had first submitted his
work to the
699
Not ordinarily. From dog and toad Paullini proceeded to
volumes on the sacred herb, salvia, mole, eel, hare, wolf, and ass. Judging from the three of these that I
have examined, all follow a similar plan of presentation and profess to be
according to the norm of the Academy. In that on the wolf there is a chapter
upon its use in prodigies and portents. That on the ass includes chapters on
asinine prodigies and omens, asinine dreams, asinine miracles and forecasts,
pretended and superstitious ass-worship, superstitious use of the ass, and
magical use of it.
After long hesitation, Athanasius
Kircher felt obliged to admit the existence of flying dragons, as Roger Bacon
had done in his day. Kircher tells
of one with two feet and wings seen in
The statements of the Bible
concerning natural phenomena and occult arts carried as much weight and created
as great difficulties in the seventeenth century as they had through the
mediaeval period. The account of
creation in the Book of Genesis, the waters above the firmament, the sun
standing still, the asp closing its ear to the incantations of snake charmers,
how the carnivorous animals in Noah’s ark were fed, the witch of Endor and
apparition of Samuel, the feats of Pharaoh’s magicians, the star of the Magi,
the eclipse during the Passion, Behemoth and Leviathan, Jacob and the ewes, and
Rachel and the mandrakes, were but some of the passages of Scripture that raised
problems which were rehearsed once more in the seventeenth century. John Betts, royal physician in ordinary,
Fellow of the London Medical College, and associated with Harvey, in a book of
1669 on the origin and nature of the blood, explained the ‘cloven tongues like
as of fire,’ which appeared above the heads of the Apostles at Pentecost, as
animal spirits or the fiery part of the blood which sometimes burst forth into
flame. A book that was reviewed in
Philosophical Transactions in 1665 held that Solomon had already been
acquainted with the circulation of the blood. Becher, who was famous for his industrial
inventions as well as for his chemical laboratory, assigned a large share in the
process of creation to angels. He
affirmed that they had produced both macrocosm and microcosm by arranging
particles into ‘the ideas of various species and bodies,’ to which the remaining
particles of matter were then attracted.
700
Paracelsus was much cited by the
alchemists and chemists of the seventeenth century, but they also went back to
mediaeval authorities such as Arnald of Villanova and Raymond Lull. Indeed, Duchesne or Quercetanus early in
the century protested that he had never abandoned the dogmatic school of
Hippocrates, and that be condemned the Paracelsists but had imitated such good
old authors as Raymond Lull, Roger Bacon, Ripley, Rupescissa, and Christopher of
Paris - all dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
century.
A treatise on the elixir for white
and for red (silver and gold) and on the great philosophic stone is represented
in the edition of 1664 as having been composed in 1632. We read, ‘By my hope of heaven I have
declared to you what my eyes have seen, my hands have operated, my fingers have
extracted. And I have written this
booklet with my own hand, and signed it with my name, when I was in the last
agony, the year 1632, May seventh.’ Really the date should be
On the other hand, no manuscripts of
The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony by Basil Valentine, which was so much
cited in the course of the seventeenth century, are earlier than the middle of
that century, while the work was first printed in German in the early years of
the century, and did not appear in Latin translation until the decade of the
‘forties. Basil Valentine was
supposed to have been a monk in the fifteenth century and a precursor of
Paracelsus, but his name first appears in 1599.
For many men in the seventeenth
century Roger Bacon was a kindred spirit. Robert Fludd agreed with Gabriel Naudé
that Roger had been wrongly accused of evil magic and had cherished only the
good variety. Jacques Gaffarel
cited Bacon in his Unheard of Curiosities of 1629. Campanella during his
long imprisonment made extravagant promises of the marvels which he would work,
if released from captivity, which remind one of Roger’s program for education
and experimental science. He
assured Cardinal Odoardo Farnese that, if set free, he would teach natural and
moral philosophy, logic, rhetoric, poetic, politics, astrology, and medicine -
all within a year’s time and in admirable fashion, accomplishing more than ten
years of ordinary study in the schools would. He would reform astronomy and the
calendar. He would prove against
Aristotle, Ptolemy and Copernicus - in favor of the Evangel - that the end of
the world would be by fire. Under
pain of losing all credit as a scholar, if he failed, he would fabricate a
marvelous city and ships that move without oars or sails. He would open the whole world like a book
from his mouth in two months, and, ‘when you hear me, your books will seem to
you mere tricks of jugglers.’ If he
but open his mouth at
701
even of ludicrous experiments, and
think that the “plays of boys” may sometimes deserve to be the study of
philosophers,’ he reminds us of Roger’s ideal experimentalist who ‘blushed if
some layman or old-wife or soldier or rustic knew what he ignored’ and who
‘examined even the experiments of old-wives and considered their divinations and
incantations and those of all the magicians, and likewise the tricks and
illusions of all the jugglers, in order that nothing which he ought to know
might escape him.’ Sebastian
Wirdig, in his New Medicine (
Albertus Magnus, too, was not
forgotten in the seventeenth century. In the catalogue of the Museo Calceolario
at
Indeed, in general we find the books
of secrets and of so-called experiments of thirteenth-century manuscripts
closely paralleled, in seventeenth-century publications. Much was said of secrets and arcana of
nature, and in favor of a mystic and cryptic style of writing, particularly in
alchemy. Medical cases and
prescriptions were still spoken of as experiments. A single secret prescription, powder, or
pill might make a physician rich, and the secret was as carefully guarded as the
prize trick of a magician. George
Wilson whose Complete Course of Chymistry was first published in 1691,
tells us that ‘Mr. Lockyer got a good estate’ by the composition of his pill.
He adds the composition of a pill
which he had from ‘Dr. Starkey’s own mouth, in the year 1665, a little before
his death; who then told me,
702
he gave Matthews the former (pill)
for a little money; but this is that which he successfully made use of himself.’
A few pages later Wilson remarks
concerning Starkey’s and Matthews’ pill, ‘Those gentlemen who have not the
conveniency to prepare it may for twenty shillings the pound have it of me.’
Sometimes such remedies bore fancy
names, as ‘Mitigated Dragon’ or ‘Magnanimous Conception.’ Abbé Bourdelot wrote in 1675 that, since
he began to practice medicine, he had known forty or fifty physicians, each of
whom had his particular secret. He
called them kings for a few days, and deemed it more advisable to beware of a
man with a single secret than of a man of one book.
Walter Harris, royal physician,
issued his Anti-Empirical Pharmacology in 1683. Although in times past the world had been
involved in dark and dismal ignorance, he believed that it was now so
enlightened that all occult arts had vanished, ‘and nothing but superstition, a
deluge of gross superstition, can revive them again. For, although the world is as naturally
inclined to superstition as to any one vice that can be named, yet it is never
like to overwhelm
Also, Harris still favored the use
of compound medicines. ‘As diseases
are complicated, the medicines must be so likewise.’ Theriac Andromache or Venice Treacle,
which had sixty odd ingredients, ‘will claim a preference before most others.’
But both it and Mithridate were now
very little used in
As for characters, charms and seals,
their efficacy depended on deluding the patient’s imagination. ‘if the disease be merely imaginary and
false, the true cure must be likewise false and imaginary.’ Sometimes such cures acquire a widespread
reputation. But as ‘reasoners and
doubters try’ one, and it fails to work for them, other men gradually lose faith
in it.
In a closing chapter, ‘Of
Mountebanks and other sorts of Empirics,’ Harris complained that in other
countries they ‘are despised as the very dirt,’ but continue to flourish in
The validity of astrology and the
reality of witchcraft were repeatedly debated through the course of the
seventeenth century. Morin, whose
Astrologia Gallica was an elaborate attempt to rehabilitate that art, had
been present at the birth of the infant Louis XIV in order to time exactly the
horoscope of the future Grand Monarque, and owed his appointment to a
royal professorship in mathematics at the University of Paris to the
astrological service which he had rendered Catherine de’ Medici. Astrological images, however, he rejected
as inefficacious, although many lords and ladies offered to pay him handsomely
for them.
In 1625 appeared the book of Gabriel
Naudé on great personnages in the past who had been falsely accused of magic.
A century and a half later Abbé
Claude-
703
Marie Guyon, in the eighth volume of
his Bibliothèque ecclesiastique (
Some think that Pierre Duhem went
too far in support of his contention that the dynamics of seventeenth century
physics was launched back in the fourteenth century. At least his was a wholesome reaction
which has turned scholars to investigation of the neglected physical science of
the earlier century. I may note
another example of that neglect. There were many writers on the rainbow in
the seventeenth century, but few, if any, of them were aware that Dietrich of
Frieberg and a writer in Arabic contemporary with him had offered essentially
correct explanations of it in the first years of the fourteenth century . More
than this, the learned editors of the splendid modern edition of the works of
Huygens, who have done so much to correct other misapprehensions in the history
of science, were in the year 1932 in their seventeenth volume equally in
ignorance of Dietrich’s treatise, although in the interim it had been printed in
part in 1814, in whole in 1914, and discussed repeatedly.
Magic was still intermingled with
science in the seventeenth century. There is general agreement that the
Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was the outstanding and most epoch-making
book of the century. In his other
scientific published works, too, Newton was careful not to include anything that
was not firmly supported by experimental proofs and geometrical demonstration,
of which he did not feel certain, and which he felt should promptly convince
everyone else, although it did not always succeed immediately in doing so. But he left more than a million words in
manuscript which, we are assured, are ‘of no substantial value.’ Yet they ‘were nearly all composed during
the same twenty-five years of his mathematical studies,’ and ‘are just as sane
as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical.’
‘The scope and character of these
papers have been hushed up,’ continues Lord Keynes, whose brilliant contribution
to the Newton Tercentenary Celebrations of 1947 I have been quoting, ‘or
at least minimized, by nearly all those who have inspected them.’ Speaking especially of the alchemical
section, Lord Keynes said: ‘I have glanced through a great quantity of this - at
least 100,000 words, I should say. It is utterly impossible to deny that it
is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not
to admit that
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The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
June 2002