Cornelius Agrippa (born in 1486) was an early promoter of occult science. He came of a noble family of Cologne, received the best éducation of his time, was a man of varied attainments, great inconsistency in conduct, and a caustic humor which everywhere made him enemies and prevented him from having any settled abode. He wandered from place to place, sometimes honored with the favor of the nobility and sometimes plunged into extreme misery. He early became a secretary in the court of Emperor Maximilian I, and under that monarch distinguished himself in the army by such bravery as to win him spurs as a knight. Soon disgusted with the profession of arms, he devoted himself to law and medicine, but his intemperate pen soon drew him into quarrels and persecution. At Dole he fell out with the monks; at Paris{140} and Turin he compromised himself with the theologians; at Metz he incurred the animosity of the Jacobins for attacking the prevailing opinion that St. Ann had three husbands. He became a vagabond and almost a beggar in Germany, England, and Switzerland, and then went to Lyons, where the mother of Francis I, who was then Queen Regent, made him her physician. He soon lost favor here, and was disgraced and banished; then he went to the Low Countries, where he was imprisoned on account of his treatise on _The Vanity of the Sciences._ Afterward he returned to Lyons, was imprisoned anew, for an old libel against his former patron, and finally died in the hospital of Grenoble, in 1535, at the age of about fifty. His treatise on _The Vanity of the Sciences_ made him most trouble, and showed best both his bitterness of spirit and the extent of his learning. Herein he laid down the paradox, which was later renewed and sustained by Rousseau, that there is nothing more pernicious and injurious to common life, or more pestilential to the salvation of souls, than the arts and sciences. He founded this thesis on Scriptural authority, and supported it by profane testimony.