SOURCE: "Knowledge and Faith in the Thought of Cornelius Agrippa," in Bibliotheque D'Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXVI, 1964, pp. 326-40.

Daniels discusses inherent contradictions in Agrippa's writings, noting that his main contribution was to demonstrate "the profound difference between the [Baconian method… and the method of modern science."]

The enigmatic figure of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) has been subjected to various interpretations since the early 16th Century. Even his contemporaries were never quite sure what to do with him. Lauded as a great scholar and leading man of letters on the one hand, he was condemned as a wicked practitioner of the black arts and collaborator with devils on the other. Men of later generations were equally divided. The great skeptical works of Sir Philipp Sidney and of Montaigne were consciously modeled after Agrippa's volume, On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, while Giordano...