THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE 281 



progress by men of superior intelligence to the 

 obstacles opposed to it by popular ignorance and 

 superstition, we are brought face to face with the 

 long-lived crew of witches, wizards and alchemists. 

 It is often said that the more rationalistic outlook 

 of the seventeenth century, due to Hobbes and 

 others, did much to discredit these practitioners. 

 But the observant dwellers in our British cities 

 or remote country villages, pestered as they are 

 with advertisements of those who practise palm- 

 istry, and of those who predict the future by 

 crystal-gazing or by the fall of sand, of followers 

 of the sporting prophet, and of far more pre- 

 sumptuous and more dangerous impostors, or 

 confronted by the silent, indomitable belief of 

 the rustic in the witchery of his ancestors, may well 

 hold the opinion that the stock of superstition 

 is a constant stock and permeates now, as it did 

 in Elizabeth's time, every class of society. What 

 improvement there was in the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, and it is extremely doubtful if there was 

 much, was largely due to the advent of James I. 

 and the later rise of puritanism, associated as 

 they were with the most cruel and most inhuman 

 torture of sorcerers. When the alchemist and the 

 astrologer ran the risk of suffering as a sorcerer or 



