142 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



Harvey assisted at the examination of reputed witches. 

 Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus were burnt 

 respectively by Catholic Rome and Calvinist Geneva 

 for their religious opinions and their intellectual pre- 

 eminence. The same penalty of death in the flames 

 was reserved for both sets of victims. In each case, 

 the civil authorities were only executing the decrees 

 of the representative citizens of the day. The voice 

 of the people was on the side of the powers whose 

 actions condoned the popular alarms ; and Kepler's 

 mother, after her acquittal, was preserved with 

 difficulty from an indignant crowd. 



It may be thought fanciful to connect witchcraft and 

 witch-hunting with the advance of natural science or 

 to associate them in any way with the prevalence 

 of a mystical attitude of mind. Yet the evidence of 

 racial susceptibility would accord with such a connec- 

 tion. Broadly speaking, the Northern races supplied 

 the men of science, the witches and the mystics ; the 

 East Anglian area, for instance, is remarkable for its 

 contributions to all three categories. 



The belief in witchcraft decayed with as little ap- 

 parent reason as it rose. The civilized world, class 

 by class, nation by nation, gradually discovered that 

 it had ceased to believe in the existence of witches 

 even before it had given up the practice of burning 

 them. It was not that the world grew more tolerant 

 or more humane, but that it had become more sceptical, 

 and was preparing itself for the rationalistic philo- 

 sophy and the intellectual tyranny of the eighteenth 

 century. 



To what was this change of attitude due ? Probably, 

 to some extent, to the advance of science, which slowly 



