cend) to be a quack and a conjuror--and die under the
imputation that

Bombastes kept a devil's bird
Hid in the pommel of his sword,

and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym
of loud, violent, and empty talk. To understand it at all, we must go
back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were
believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which sprang up
at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating as
it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. They put
the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or
Proclus, on the same level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato
himself. And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, believers in
magic--Theurgy, as it was called--in the power of charms and spells, in
the occult virtues of herbs and gems, in the power of adepts to evoke and
command spirits, in the significance of dreams, in the influence of the
stars upon men's characters and destinies. If the great and wise
philosopher Iamblicus believed such things, why might not the men of the
sixteenth century?

And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the Occult
sciences. It had always been haunting the European imagination. Mediaeval
monks had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a great necromancer.
And there were immense excuses for such a belief. There was a mass of
collateral evidence that the occult sciences were true, which it was
impossible then to resist. Races far more ancient, learned, civilised,
than any Frenchman, German, Englishman, or even Italian, in the fifteenth
century had believed in these things. The Moors, the best physicians of
the Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the "Arabian Nights" prove, of
enchanters, genii, peris, and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their
Cabala, which sprang up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on
the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of the text of
Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel to Adam in
Paradise, by which Adam talked with angels, the sun and moon, summoned
spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed; and by that book of
Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon became the great magician and master of
all the spirits and their hoarded treasures.

So strong, indeed, was the belief i