line between dogmatico-fantastical magic and a philosophy in the sense of the old Greeks and of modern times. If already previously some magicians of the old type had died from persecution, it was not to be wondered at that such "atheists" as Vanini and Bruno must now ascend the pile. The occult sciences of the Middle Ages with their origin not from paradise and Noah's ark, as believed by their adherents, but from an ancient Oriental culture and with their power over even the strongest and most independent souls that could arise under the influence of a Church which levels all thought, may properly remind those who are willing to forget it, of a sad but incontestable truth: That humanity may embrace during the course of many and long centuries with the most candid faith, and construct with immense labor into a system, dogmas which have been received without questioning, and which contain more of the false than of the true, the great antiquity of which does not give them more claim for validity than is possessed by the error which arose yesterday and vanished to-day. No special divine influence has saved or will save the generations from inheriting the errors less than the acquired truths of their predecessors--no other divine influence, I should say, than the impulse we feel to think for ourselves in order to attain to clearness. IV. THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT. Wherever religious thought divides the empire of the world and humanity into two absolutely opposed powers, a good and an evil, there it also distinguishes two kinds of magic: the divine and the infernal. So with the Persians who knew a white and a black magic. So also in the Middle Ages of Christianity. The Greeks, on the contrary, knew nothing of this distinction. The world being to them a harmonious whole, both in moral and physical respects, magic was with them only a means of finding out and using the secret powers in the harmonious cosmos; and the wonder-worker who could not be thought of as deriving his powers from an evil source, was undoubtedly a favorite of the gods and an equal with the heroes, not unworthy of statues and temples, if he used his art for the benefit of humanity. For the rest, magical speculation was with the Greeks more and more pushed aside by philosophy,--by scepticism and rational investigation, until on account of the nearer contact between Europe and Asia, after the death of Alexander, it began again to exercise its influence, and finally celebrated its triumph in that dualistic form of religion which by the name of Christianity took possession of the Occident.