CHAPTER III 



MYSTICAL SPECULATION UPON NATURAL SCIENCE 



Magic during the Renaissance 



IN THE FIRST SECTION of this work wc havc pointed out how important was 

 the role played by mystical speculation in science during the Renais- 

 sance, even in the theories of its principal representatives, such as a Cusa- 

 nus or a Bruno. As a matter of fact, through the break-down of scholasticism 

 in science, the field was left open for all those wild fantasies that seem to be 

 common to all times and generations, although they are at times thrust out 

 of sight and dare not show themselves for fear of learned authority and the 

 derision of critics. Seldom indeed is it that mystical speculation and magical 

 experiments have gone so far and had such scientific pretensions as during 

 the Renaissance. 



All this Renaissance magic was based on a great many preconceptions: 

 primitive superstition, cabbalistic interpretation (originating from the East) 

 of the books of the Bible and a number of apocryphal appendices, Arabian 

 experimental science and its Western development. Finally, the neo-Platonic 

 philosophy, striving to gain by means of direct introspection a mystical, uni- 

 form conception of the whole of existence — spirit and matter, animate and 

 inanimate things — provided a common speculative framework in which to 

 fit all these various elements. Ideas taking this as their point of departure and 

 objective, foreign though they really are to both the aims and the methods of 

 natural science, have nevertheless had a deep influence on its development; 

 they have induced a striving after a uniform view of life at periods when 

 science threatened to disintegrate into aimless detailed research, and they 

 have produced a love of nature during epochs when humanity had otherwise 

 turned to abstract philosophic speculation. 



The Renaissance produced a number of personalities of this mystical, 

 half-experimenting, half-brooding type: the Italian Pico de Mirandola, 

 the Germans Heinrich von Nettesheim — called Cornelius Agrippa — and 

 Trithemius, and many others. They are, however, of but little interest to 

 biological history, although their speculations may have in certain cases 

 indirectly influenced the development of biology during the succeeding era. 

 One of their contemporaries, however, far more radically than they, furthered 

 the progress of biology; a man, moreover, who, owing to the life he lived, 

 is of more than common human interest; namely, Paracelsus. 



I3X 



