SOURCE: "Derivations and Inferences," in The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature, 1936. Reprint by Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1975, pp. 32-60.

In the following excerpt, Craig discusses the means by which "cosmological pseudosciences"—astrology and magic—influenced the thinking of Renaissance populations.

For after the articles and principles of religion are placed, and exempted from examination of reason, it is then permitted unto us to make derivations and inferences from and according to the analogy of them.

—Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

The subject [of man's role in and reaction to the formal order of the Renaissance] is of course both vague and complicated; but perhaps some idea of the situation can be arrived at by looking at the subject from two major aspects,—first, the aspect of science or the rational aspect, and, secondly, the aspect of religion. With the latter we shall consider certain political and moral...