Faust’s studies were not confined to medicine and the physical sciences.  He was also considered eminent as a philologist and philosopher.  Physiology, however, with its various branches and degenerate offshoots, was the idol of the scholars of that age, and of Faustus among the rest.  A passionate desire to fathom the mysteries of Nature, to dive into the most hidden recesses of moral and physical creation, had seized men of real learning, and seduced them into mingling absurd astrological and magical fancies with profound and scholarlike researches.  The deepest thinkers of their time, like Nostradamus, Cardan, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Thomas Campanella, flattered themselves that they could enter, by means of art and science, into communion with good or evil spirits, on whose aid they depended for obtaining knowledge, fame, wealth, and worldly honors and enjoyments.  Faustus was one of those whom a passion for inquiry, in league with a powerful, sensual nature, led astray.  What had been originally an honest thirst for knowledge, a deep interest in the supernatural, became gradually a morbid craving after the miraculous, the pretension of having attained the unattainable, and the attempt to represent it by means of vulgar jugglery.

Dr. Faustus seems at first to have settled as a practising physician, and at this period of his life Wagner appears as his famulus; for we never find this Philister among scholars as a companion of the travelling Faustus, although his connection with him was apparently lasting.  According to the popular legend, the Doctor made him his heir, and expressly obtained for him Auerhahn, (Heathcock,) a familiar spirit in the shape of a monkey.  This was a sort of caricature of Mephistopheles, who became, through his ludicrous clumsiness, a pet-devil of the populace in the puppet-shows, particularly in Holland.  Widmann calls Wagner Waiger; while in all other publications referring to him he bears his right name, Christoph Wagner.

What city it was where Faustus lived before the reputation of witchcraft made him the subject of so much talk remains unsettled.  Wittenberg and Ingolstadt are alternately named.  Some of his biographers relate, that he led a loose and profligate life, and soon wasted his cousin’s inheritance.  Others represent him as a deep, secluded student, laying hold of one science after another, and unsatisfied by them all, until he found, by means of his physical and chemical experiments, the secret path to the supernatural, and, in order to reap their full fruits, allied himself with the hellish powers.  Faustus himself tells us, in his “Mirakel-, Kunst-, und Wunder-buch,” (or rather, the author of this book makes him tell us,) how his intercourse with the Devil commenced almost accidentally and against his intentions:—­