A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 2 (of 2) / During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era

by Lynn Thorndike

In the case of rain-making there is evidently much truth in Sir James Frazer’s statement that “the fallacy of magic is not easy to detect, because nature herself generally produces sooner or later the effects which the magician fancies he produces by his art.”[3013] But the dictum cannot be stretched to cover magic in general. In some cases the fallacy of magic is all too evident, but men love it, or there is as yet no truth discovered to take its place. Rational scepticism is needed to dispel the former; repeated experiment, to arrive at the latter. Believers in and practitioners of magic probably at no time in its history either even flattered themselves on so sound a basis of theory, or were so severely practical in their aims and methods, as not to delight in the marvelous and incredible and impossible for their own sake. Rather in providing or attempting to provide for practical wants and emergencies, considerations of credibility and possibility often were apt to be cast to the winds. Thus the spirit of magic is different from the scientific spirit.

Magic and experimental science.

Yet our material has conclusively shown that the history of magic is bound up with the history of science as well as with folk-lore, primitive culture, and the history of religion. Sometimes our authors have spoken of natural magic, but I rather wonder whether there could well be any other kind, since man must always reckon with his natural environment. It is not without reason that the Magi stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters but as those who have gone farthest and in most detail—too curiously, in his opinion—into the study of nature. It is not without reason that we have found experimentation and magic so constantly associated throughout our period. After all it is not surprising that magic, which was both curious and tried to accomplish things, should investigate nature and should experiment. It is even possible that magicians were the first to experiment, or shared that province with the first inventors and the useful arts, and that natural science, originally philosophical and speculative, took over experimental method in a crude form, as well as the conception of occult virtue, from magic. As Sir James Frazer has said, “Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature.”[3014] It is therefore perhaps not surprising that men like Galen, Apuleius, Apollonius, and Dunstan were accused of magic by their contemporaries; that men like Gerbert, Michael Scot, and Albertus Magnus were represented as magicians in later, if not contemporary legend; that Lithica and Roger Bacon tell us of the danger of sages being accused of magic; that the Book of Enoch, Cyprian, Firmicus, and Picatrix confuse magic with other arts and sciences; and that no one of our authors, try as he may, succeeds in keeping magic entirely out of science or science entirely out of magic.

Science is a gradual evolution, not a modern creation.

Be that as it may, if the anthropologists are correct in asserting that magic forms a great part of the life and thought of early man and of all primitive peoples, it is evident that only gradually would the science and thought of civilized peoples free themselves from the old habits and instincts. Modern science cannot exempt itself from its own theory of evolution as Julius Firmicus exempted the Roman emperor from the rule of the stars. Science did not come down from above nor invade from without. It grew up in the very midst of superstition and mental anarchy, just as the states of modern Europe had their beginnings in feudal society. As the kings in the middle ages had to govern under feudal limitations and even by feudal means, so science for a long time not merely was opposed by the unscientific attitude, but was itself tinged by fantastic theories and false data. It is scarcely a paradox to say that during our Roman and medieval period the laws of magic were better defined and understood than those of science. Yet the scientific attitude, like the spirit of nationality, was at work in the seeming chaos; gradually it shook itself free from error, and, by the increasing application of truly scientific methods, won a similar triumph to that which the sovereign political power gained by its gradual development of governmental institutions.

Its medieval stage of development.

This was the process going on in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When men still believed in demons and witches and divination from dreams, it is not surprising that they believed also in natural magic. Only a small part of nature’s secrets were revealed to them; of the rest they felt that almost anything might turn out to be true. It was a time when “one vast realm of wonder spreads around.” They had to struggle against a huge burden of error and superstition which Greece and Rome and the Arabs handed down to them; yet they must try to assimilate what was of value in Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Ptolemy, and the rest. Crude naïve beginners they were in many respects. Yet they show an interest in nature and its problems; they are drawing the line between science and religion; they make some progress in mathematics, geography, physics and chemistry; they not only talk about experimental method, they actually make some inventions and discoveries of use in the future advance of science. Moreover, they themselves feel that they are making progress. They do not hesitate to disagree with their ancient authorities, when they know something better. Roger Bacon affirms that many scientific facts and truths are known in his time of which Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, were ignorant. The ancients, says Peter of Spain in effect, were philosophers, but we are experimenters. Magic still lingers but the march of modern science has begun.

Does magic survive in modern learning?

Are there other sides of our life and thought to-day where magic still lingers and no such march as that of modern natural and experimental science has been begun or progressed so far? We fear that there are. One can well imagine that a future age may regard much of the learning even of our time as almost as futile, superstitious, fantastic in method, and irrelevant to the ends sought, as were primitive man’s methods of producing rain, Egyptian amulets to cure disease, or medieval blood-letting according to the phases of the moon. Ptolemy believed in astrology, but how many archaeologists and philologists and students of early religion and mythology and folk-lore there are who fail to observe his great law that one should always adopt the simplest possible hypothesis consistent with the observed facts! How some ransack the latest and remotest sources for some one brief annotation by a scholiast that may support some ingenious theory concerning the earliest origins of a language, a cult, or a deity,—which theory too often has only this to recommend it, that no one has ever thought of it before! How to prove a point concerning some single country and restricted period they bring together word-forms, coins, fragments of vases, customs, and folk-tales from the most outlandish regions and widely separated eras, and pile up a huge collection of most erudite looking footnotes, full of abbreviated formulae denoting German periodicals which have all the appearance of the unintelligible jargon of some ancient incantation! As one reflects upon the respect and admiration with which such “scholarship” and “research” is regarded by many in our own time, can one wonder that in the middle ages and antiquity the pharmacist who added to his compound herb after herb from India and other romantic lands, or part after part from the carcasses of fabulous animals, in a frantic effort to improve upon a remedy that was wrong to start with,—can one wonder if he was hailed in his day as a discoverer and public benefactor, if his compound was copied in book after book and century after century, and, while he perhaps had devised it against some one ailment, if it came in time to be regarded as a panacea for all ills? How many historical generalizations, which originated in superficial association of ideas on no sounder a basis than that supposed by some to lie behind magic, are not only still current, but are glibly and unquestioningly assumed as themselves a basis for what might otherwise be considered truly scientific investigation of more detailed and less important points!

Or in other sides of present life?