Faustus is introduced to us by the Chorus at the commencement of the play as a scholar of repute, 'glutted now with learning's golden gifts,' and about to turn aside to the study of necromancy. Accordingly he appears in his study rejecting logic as no end in itself, law as servile, medicine because he has exhausted its possible limits, divinity because it tells him that the reward of sin is death. Upon sin his mind is set all the time, so that the reminder from Jerome's Bible annoys him. He flings the book aside because it warns him of what he affects to disbelieve and would be glad to forget. Magic wins him by its unknown possibilities 'of profit and delight, of power, of honour, and omnipotence'. Lest we should suppose that his choice has anything heroic in it, that he is deliberately accepting a terrible debt of eternal torment in exchange for what necromancy can give, we are informed that he has no belief in hell or future pain, that to him men's souls are trifles. Deep down in his conscience he has a fear of 'damnation', which only makes itself felt, however, in unexalted moments. Such thoughts are set aside as 'mere old wives' tales' in the triumphant hour of his signing the contract. With curiosity and longing, then, he enters unshudderingly into a bargain that will give him what he seeks. We can readily discover, from his own lips, what that is. He exults over the prospect of having spirits to do his bidding: I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates; I'll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings. Many other things his fancy pictures. But we observe that philosophy stands below wealth and feasting in his wishes. He dismisses Mephistophilis back to Lucifer with this report of himself: Say, he surrenders up to him his soul, So he will spare him four and twenty years, Letting him live in all voluptuousness. For a moment his enthusiastic outlook upon limitless capacity wakens in him a desire for military glory: he would be 'great emperor of the world', he would 'pass the ocean with a band of men'. But from what we know of his subsequent career he never attempted to win such renown. No; in his heart he confesses, The god thou servest is thine own appetite. Mephistophilis, with a profound and melancholy insight into the reality of things, sees hell in every place where heaven is not. Faustus, on the other hand, with flippant superficiality laughs at the idea. An intellectual, a moral hell is to him incomprehensible. Nay, an this be hell, I'll willingly be damned: What! sleeping, eating, walking, and disputing! But, leaving this, let me have a wife, The fairest maid in Germany; For I am wanton and lascivious, And cannot live without a wife.