Such in its chief features was the cosmic philosophy of the Middle Ages; not abstractly considered, but such as existed in reality during many centuries among Christian people, guiding their thoughts, imagination and feelings, and governing their actions. Remains of it are still apparent in the systems of existing sects, though incompatible with the new philosophy which the human mind has been laboring to unfold. Ever since the intellect of Christendom began to free itself in the sixteenth century from faith by authority, the influence of the old views upon the various forms which life takes on, has been gradually declining. Many of those characteristics which so strangely contrast the state of society in the Middle Ages with the preceding Hellenic and the subsequent modern European civilizations, have their origin in different theories of the universe. It is not mere chance that we encounter, on the one hand, in the history of Greece, so many harmonious forms with repose and tranquil joy depicted in every lineament of their countenance, and on the other, in that of the Middle Ages, so many beings buried in deepest gloom or exalted in frenzied rapture, dripping with blood from self-inflicted wounds, or glowing with the fever of mystic emotion--not a mere chance that the former age loves those serene forms and immortalizes them in its heroic galleries, while the latter worships its eccentric figures and describes them in its legends as saintly models. It is not a mere accident that the art of Greece mirrors a beautiful humanity, while that of the Middle Ages loves to dwell upon monstrosities and throws itself between the extremes of awful earnestness and wild burlesque; not an accident only that the science of the Greek is rational--that he discovers the categories in Logic, and rears a most perfect structure of rigid demonstration in his Geometry, while the science of the Middle Ages on the contrary is _magic_,--is a doctrine of correspondencies, Astrology, Alchemy, and Sorcery.