APPENDIX. 



ASTROLOGY. 



Besides those greater preventions which lay in the 

 very structure and organised conceptions of society in 

 the Middle Ages, the student of natural science was 

 thwarted also by many lesser, which could not find 

 place in this oration. Among the chief of these was 

 judicial astrology, which supplanted and degraded the 

 art of medicine. 



It is difficult to carry the imagination into a time 

 when the heavens were conceived as an animate and 

 divine being 1 , the heavenly bodies as active and intelli- 

 gent parts of it, and the whole set not in illimitable 

 space but around man and his home, and waiting upon 

 him (vid. p. 47) ; yet without such an effort we cannot 

 realise the ancient place and dominion of astrology. Such 

 a possession when in its strength must have enthralled 

 the human mind ; and it abode tenaciously with the first 

 scientific conceptions of celestial phenomena, even in the 

 thoughts of the enlightened. Tycho Brahe, for many 

 years of his life, was an adept ; and even Kepler saw 



1 Quse, simul sethereos animo conceperat ignes, 

 Ore dabat vero carmina plena dei. 



Ovid, Fasti i. 473. 



A. 8 



