ated declaimed against "magic."[1] But sometimes fear of being accused of magic was their very reason for so doing. Bede had such a fear when he treated of divination by thunder. Roger Bacon took suspicious care to insist that his theories had nothing to do with magic, which he declared was for the most part a mere pretense and could bring marvels to pass only by diabolical assistance.[2] The writer of the Speculum Astronomiae—probably Albertus Magnus—found it necessary to write a treatise to distinguish books of necromancy from works on "astronomy," i. e., astrology.[3] Coming to a later age, we find Agrippa frankly owning his trust in magic, and including under it, in his three books of Occult Philosophy, practically all the beliefs that we have mentioned. For him magic embraced the fields of nature, mathematics and theology. Indeed, men of his day and of the century following displayed a tendency to stretch the term to include true science. He himself called magic "the acme of all philosophy." Giovanni Battista della Porta (1540-1615), not it is true without considerable justification, called his encyclopedic work on
- ↑ Bodin for instance condemned "magic" in his De Magorum Daemonomania (Paris, 1581).
- ↑ Bridges, Opus Maius, vol. i, p. 241. See too the De Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae et de Nullitate Magiae. Rolls Series, vol. xv, appendix.
- ↑ Spec. Astron., ch. 17. Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. Borgnet (1890), vol. x, pp. 629 et seq. And he finally came to the conclusion that "concerning books of necromancy the better judgment—prejudice aside—seems to be that they ought rather to be preserved than destroyed. For the time is perchance near at hand in which, for reasons which I now suppress, it will be advantageous to consult them occasionally. Nevertheless, let their inspectors abstain from abuse of them." Ch. 17.
Similarly Roger Bacon, in his De Secretis, ch. 3, after mentioning books of magic to be eschewed, remarked that many books classed as magic were not such but contained worthy wisdom.
