THE RENAISSANCE 143 



defined the limits of man's mastery over nature and 

 disclosed the methods by which this mastery is attained. 

 Then, too, the extreme prepossession with theological 

 matters, the natural result of the first popular contact 

 with the material for the construction of religious belief, 

 subsided as the years went on, and after a while the 

 Devil and all his works ceased to perplex the mind 

 of men. We now know more about these strange 

 waves of unreasoning belief and religious exaltation 

 which pass over nations, attracting especially within 

 their sphere of influence the more ignorant, more 

 neurotic, more highly strung of the population, and we 

 may believe that the prevalence of a belief in witch- 

 craft was, in certain aspects, an example, in an 

 extended form, of such an epidemic. 



But it is perhaps hardly wise to waive on one side, 

 as the fancies of excited and ill-regulated brains, 

 the whole of the phenomena which were classified 

 under the general term of witchcraft during the hey- 

 day of the intellectual life of the Renaissance. Joseph 

 Glanvill, a Restoration rector of Bath Abbey, who 

 preserved for us the tale of the Scholar Gipsy made 

 famous in Matthew Arnold's poem, found the evidence 

 for some sorts of unexplained manifestations suffi- 

 ciently strong to justify enquiry and examination. 

 With Henry More, one of the band of Christian 

 Platonist scholars at Cambridge who at that time 

 exercised considerable influence in stemming the tide 

 of naturalistic philosophy expounded by Hobbes and 

 his school, Glanvill established what was virtually 

 a small society for psychical research. He endeavoured 

 in a manner worthy of the recently founded Royal 

 Society, to which he belonged, either to confirm or 



