Black Magic, which ever apes the Magic of Light, but takes it, as it were, backwards, was also concerned with the android, that it might be used as an instrument of passion and an oracle of hell. For this object it was requisite to outrage Nature and obtain a species of venomous fungus, full of concentrated human malice—the living realisation of all crime. For this reason magicians sought the mandragore beneath a gibbet from which some corpse was suspended; they caused it to be torn up by a dog tied to the plant, a mortal blow being inflicted on the animal. The eradication was effected by the convulsions of the agonised beast; the dog’s soul passed into the plant and also attracted thereto that of the hanged man. Enough of these horrors and absurdities; those who are curious in such knowledge may consult the common grimoire known along the countryside under the name of _Little Albert_. They will find further the method of making a mandragore in the form of a cock with a human face. Stupidity and impiety vie one with another in all such processes, for Nature cannot be outraged wilfully without at the same time reversing the laws of reason. Albertus Magnus was neither infanticide nor deicide; he was neither guilty of the crime of Tantalus nor that of Prometheus; but he had succeeded in creating and arming at all points that purely scholastic theology, outcome of the categories of Aristotle and the sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of syllogism consisting of argumentation in place of reasoning and of finding an answer for everything by subtleties concerning the terms. It was less a philosophy than a philosophical automaton, replying in an arbitrary manner and unrolling its theses like the revolution of machinery. It was in no sense the human _logos_, but the unvaried cry of a mechanism, the inanimate speech of an android. It was the fatal precision of machinery, in place of the free application of rational necessities. St. Thomas Aquinas,[191] with one blow, shattered this scaffolding of words when he proclaimed the eternal empire of reason in that magnificent sentence which has been cited already so often: “A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just.” The approximate consequence of this proposition, in arguing from the greater to the lesser, was: A thing is not true because Aristotle has said it, but Aristotle could not say it reasonably unless it were true. Seek first therefore truth and justice, and the science of Aristotle shall be added unto you. Aristotle, galvanised by scholasticism, was the veritable android of Albertus Magnus, while the master’s wand of St. Thomas Aquinas was the doctrine of the _Summa Totius Theologiæ_, a masterpiece of power and reason which will again be studied in our theological schools when it is proposed to return seriously to sane and healthy subjects.[192]