SOURCE: "The Science of the Counter-Renaissance," in The Counter-Renaissance, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950, pp. 176-276.

In this excerpt, Haydn provides an overview of the three realms of magic and discusses the characteristics of the "magician-scientist" of the Counter-Renaissance.

The dissatisfaction of men like Agrippa and Montaigne with Scholastic science led them to positions of extreme skepticism about the existence of any ascertainable natural laws. But this is not to say that they denied the existence of these laws. They maintained rather that the knowledge of them was proper to God but not to man—that man could not, with his reason, attain to any considerable understanding of them.

Lynn Thorndike on natural magic:

Natural magic is the working of marvelous effects, which may seem preternatural, by a knowledge of occult forces in nature without resort to supernatural assistance. It was therefore regarded, unless employed for evil purposes, as permissible...