as the Protestant physician John Weyer.
[Sidenote: Weyer] In his book _De praestigiis daemonum_ [Sidenote: 1563]
he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded,
{659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the
victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce
with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations.
Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really
used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not
admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and
cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and
elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant
of Satan.

[Sidenote: Scott]

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superstition was Reginald
Scott's _Discovery of Witchcraft_, wherein the lewd dealings of _Witches
and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise
upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils_. [Sidenote: 1584]
Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he
was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he
endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and
traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter
flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done
to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as
ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and
religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily
be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental
disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the
cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame
for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not
be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on _a priori_
grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable
to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the
work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by
order of James I.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art
of rebutting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless
Bodin's abominable _Demonology_ that called forth his celebrated es