ther incidentally touched
upon witchcraft. He warned judges to be wary about believing the
confessions of witches and the evidence against them. "For the witches
themselves are imaginative and believe oft-times they do that which they
do not; and people are credulous in that point, and ready to impute
accidents and natural operations to witchcraft. It is worthy the
observing, that ... the great wonders which they tell, of carrying in
the air, transporting themselves into other bodies, &c., are still
reported to be wrought, not by incantations, or ceremonies, but by
ointments, and anointing themselves all over. This may justly move a man
to think that these fables are the effects of imagination."[61]

Surely all this has a skeptical sound. Yet largely on the strength of
another passage, which has been carelessly read, the great Bacon has
been tearfully numbered among the blindest leaders of the blind.[62] A
careful comparison of his various allusions to witchcraft will convince
one that, while he assumed a belief in the practice,[63] partly perhaps
in deference to James's views,[64] he inclined to explain many reported
phenomena from the effects of the imagination[65] and from the operation
of "natural causes" as yet unknown.[66]

Bacon, though a lawyer and man of affairs, had the point of view of a
philosopher. With John Selden we get more directly the standpoint of a
legal man. In his _Table Talk_[67] that eminent jurist wrote a paragraph
on witches. "The Law against Witches," he declared, "does not prove
there be any; but it punishes the Malice of those people that use such
means to take away mens Lives. If one should profess that by turning his
Hat thrice and crying Buz, he could take away a man's life (though in
truth he could do no such thing) yet this were a just Law made by the
State, that whosoever should turn his Hat thrice and cry Buz, with an
intention to take away a man's life, shall be put to death."[68] As to
the merits of this legal quip the less said the better; but it is
exceedingly hard to see in the passage anything but downright skepticism
as to the witch's power.[69]

It is not without interest that Selden's point of view was exactly that
of the philosopher Hobbes. There is no man of the seventeenth century,
unless it be Oliver Cromwell or John Milton, whose opinion on this
subject we would rather know than that of Hobbes. In 1651 Hobbes had
issued his great _Leviathan_. It is unnecessary here to