discovery.  The error here is the application of spiritual clairvoyance to physical relations.  The insight into reality, which is unquestionably the reward of the pure heart and the single eye, does not reveal to us in detail how nature should be subdued to our needs.  No spirits from the vasty deep will obey our call, to show us where lies the road to fortune or to ruin.  Physical science is an abstract inquiry, which, while it keeps to its proper subject—­the investigation of the relations which prevail in the phenomenal world—­is self-sufficient, and can receive nothing on external authority.  Still less can the adept usurp Divine powers, and bend the eternal laws of the universe to his puny will.

The turbid streams of theurgy and magic flowed into the broad river of Christian thought by two channels—­the later Neoplatonism, and Jewish Cabbalism.  Of the former something has been said already.  The root-idea of the system was that all life may be arranged in a descending scale of potencies, forming a kind of chain from heaven to earth.  Man, as a microcosm, is in contact with every link in the chain, and can establish relations with all spiritual powers, from the superessential One to the lower spirits or “daemons.”  The philosopher-saint, who had explored the highest regions of the intelligence, might hope to dominate the spirits of the air, and compel them to do his bidding.  Thus the door was thrown wide open for every kind of superstition.  The Cabbalists followed much the same path.  The word Cabbala means “oral tradition,” and is defined by Reuchlin as “the symbolic reception of a Divine revelation handed down for the saving contemplation of God and separate forms.[338]” In another place he says, “The Cabbala is nothing else than symbolic theology, in which not only are letters and words symbols of things, but things are symbols of other things.”  This method of symbolic interpretation was held to have been originally communicated by revelation,[339] in order that persons of holy life might by it attain to a mystical communion with God, or deification.  The Cabbalists thus held much the same relation to the Talmudists as the mystics to the scholastics in the twelfth century.  But, as Jews, they remained faithful to the two doctrines of an inspired tradition and an inspired book, which distinguish them from Platonic mystics.[340]

Pico de Mirandola (born 1463) was the first to bring the Cabbala into Christian philosophy, and to unite it with his Neoplatonism.  Very characteristic of his age is the declaration that “there is no natural science which makes us so certain of the Divinity of Christ as Magic and the Cabbala.[341]” For there was at that period a curious alliance of Mysticism and natural science against scholasticism, which had kept both in galling chains; and both mystics and physicists invoked the aid of Jewish theosophy.  Just as Pythagoras, Plato, and Proclus were set up against Aristotle, so the occult philosophy of the Jews, which on its speculative side was mere Neoplatonism, was set up against the divinity of the Schoolmen.  In Germany, Reuchlin (1455-1522) wrote a treatise, On the Cabbalistic Art, in which a theological scheme resembling those of the Neoplatonists and speculative mystics was based on occult revelation.  The book captivated Pope Leo X. and the early Reformers alike.