zation, we are astonished to find all the productions of the Babylonian mind tainted by one radical vice. Judicial astrology, sorcery, a branch of gnosticism, and the first germs of the Cabbala—such are the wretched gifts which Babylon has presented to the world. There is no doubt that Babylon is gravely responsible for the enfeeblement of the mind in the first centuries of our era, and that the epidemic of superstition and chimerical science, which prevailed at that epoch, must, in a great measure, be set down to Chaldæan influence. It is certainly possible that Babylon may have possessed real science, before the time at which she devoted herself to this unhappy propagation of error. Judicial astrology leads to the belief of an earlier regular astronomy; magic, which pretends to direct the secret forces of Nature, presupposes a certain development of the physical sciences.[1] But we
- ↑ Similar results have happened to alchemy. The alchemy of the middle ages, judged according to the extravagance of the sixteenth century, was universally in the West, since the thirteenth century, a chemical labour firmly established, but which at present is allowed to lie all but forgotten in manuscripts.
