“Agrippa gives a huge list of things which belong to the Sun, the Moon, the Planets and the fixed stars, and receive influences from them; for instance: to the Sun are related Fire, Blood, Laurel, Gold, Chrysolite; they confer the gifts of the Sun: Courage, Cheerfulness, and Light.... Animals have a natural sense, which, higher than human understanding, approaches the spirit of prophecy.... Men can be bewitched to love and hate, to sickness and health. Thieves can be bewitched so that they cannot steal at some particular place, merchants, that they cannot do business, mills, that they cannot work, lightning flashes, that they cannot strike. This is brought about through drinks, salves, images, rings, incantations; the blood of hyenas or basilisks is adapted to such a purpose--it reminds one of Shakespeare’s witches’ cauldron.” No; it does not remind one of that, if one understands Agrippa aright. He believed--it goes without saying--in many facts which in his time everybody regarded as unquestionable. But we still do the same to-day. Or do we imagine that future centuries will not relegate much of what we now regard as “undoubted fact” to the lumber-room of “blind” superstition? I am convinced that in our knowledge of facts there has been a real progress. When once the “fact” that the earth is round had been discovered, all previous conjectures were banished into the domain of “superstition”; and the same holds good of certain truths of astronomy, biology, etc. The doctrine of natural evolution constitutes an advance, as compared with all previous “theories of creation,” similar to that marked by the recognition of the roundness of the earth as contrasted with all previous speculations as to its form. Nevertheless, I am vividly conscious that in our learned scientific works and treatises there is to be found many a “fact” which will seem to future centuries to be just as little of a fact as much that Paracelsus and Agrippa maintain; but the really important point is not _what_ they regarded as “fact,” but _how_, in what spirit, they interpreted their “facts.” In Agrippa’s time, there was little understanding or sympathy for the “natural magic” he represented, which sought in Nature the natural--the spiritual only in the spirit; men clung to the “supernatural magic,” which sought the spiritual in the realm of the sensible, and which Agrippa combated. Therefore the Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim was right in giving him the advice to communicate his views only as a secret teaching to a few chosen pupils who could rise to a similar idea of Nature and spirit, because one “gives only hay to oxen and not sugar as to singing birds.” It may be that Agrippa himself owed to this same Abbot his own correct point of view. In his _Steganography_, Trithemius has produced a book in which he handled with the most subtle irony that mode of conceiving things which confuses nature with spirit.