COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



the complete establishment of that philosophy ; 

 but if otherwise, it will perish, as other doctrines 

 have perished, through lack of the mental pre- 

 disposition to accept it. It is, indeed, generally- 

 true that theories concerning the supernatural 

 perish, not from extraneous violence, but from 

 inanition/ The belief in witchcraft, or the phy- 

 sical intervention of the Devil in human affairs, 

 is now laughed at ; yet two centuries have hardly 

 elapsed since it was held by learned and sensible 

 men as an essential part of Christianity. It was 

 supported by an immense amount of testimony, 

 which no one has ever refuted in detail. No one, 

 for example, has ever disproved witchcraft, as 

 Young disproved the corpuscular theory of light. 

 But the belief has died out because scientific cul- 

 tivation has rendered the mental soil unfit for 

 it. The contemporaries of Bodin were so thor- 

 oughly predisposed by their general theory of 

 things to believe in the continual intervention 

 of the Devil, that it needed but the slightest 

 evidence to make them credit any particular act 

 of intervention. But to the educated man of to- 

 day such intervention seems too improbable to 

 be admitted on any amount of testimony. The 

 hypothesis of diabolic interference is simply 



^ '* Ce n'est pas d'un raisonnement, mais de tout rensem- 

 ble des sciences modernes que sort cet immense resultat — 

 il n'y a pas de surnaturel.'* Renan, Etudes (P Histoire Re- 

 ligteusey p. 206. 



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