THE RENAISSANCE 141 



We cannot close an account of the progress of 

 scientific thought during the Renaissance and the 



succeeding years without some reference 

 Witchcraft. and to the belief in the 



active interference of unseen and generally speaking 

 evil forces in the affairs of mankind. At the time 

 when Bacon was directing the advance of know- 

 ledge in England, when Luther, Calvin and Knox 

 were reforming the churches of Germany, France 

 and Scotland, a belief in witchcraft dominated practi- 

 cally the whole civilised world. It is easy now to 

 laugh at such fears, to ridicule the stories which 

 were then implicitly believed, and to explain away 

 the long series of occurrences on which the epidemic 

 of prosecutions throughout Western Europe was 

 based. But we must face the fact that the move- 

 ment went on side by side with the Renaissance, and 

 to some extent seems to have been the popular 

 representation of a belief in that possibility of man's 

 control over the unknown forces of nature which, 

 on the scientific side, Bacon foresaw and desired. 

 The particular form which the accusation usually 

 took, that of commerce with the powers of darkness 

 for evil purposes, was probably due to the prominence 

 given to the personality of the Devil in the Protestant 

 theology of the day. Many of the great men of science 

 of this period were either accused of heresy or involved 

 in dealings of some sort with witchcraft. The one 

 charge predominated in the south, the other in the 

 north of Europe, as we should have anticipated. 

 John Kepler, himself suspected of heresy, spent five 

 years of his life, from 1615 to 1621, defending his 

 mother from a capital charge of witchcraft. William 



