There are other considerations that deserve to be weighed before a final judgment should be made up respecting the conduct of our fathers in the witchcraft delusion.  Among these is the condition of physical science in their day.  But little knowledge of the laws of nature was possessed, and that little was confined to a few.  The world was still, to the mass of the people, almost as full of mystery in its physical departments as it was to its first inhabitants.  Politics, poetry, rhetoric, ethics, and history had been cultivated to a great extent in previous ages; but the philosophy of the natural and material world was almost unknown.  Astronomy, chemistry, optics, pneumatics, and even geography, were involved in the general darkness and error.  Some of our most important sciences, such as electricity, date their origin from a later period.

This remarkable tardiness in the progress of physical science for some time after the era of the revival of learning is to be accounted for by referring to the erroneous methods of reasoning and observation then prevalent in the world.  A false logic was adopted in the schools of learning and philosophy.  The great instrument for the discovery and investigation of truth was the syllogism, the most absurd contrivance of the human mind; an argumentative process whose conclusion is contained in the premises; a method of proof, in the first step of which the matter to be proved is taken for granted.[C] In a word, the whole system of philosophy was made up of hypotheses, and the only foundation of science was laid in conjecture.  The imagination, called necessarily into extraordinary action, in the absence of scientific certainty, was still further exercised in vain attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and experiment, the elements and first principles of nature.  It had reached a monstrous growth about the time to which we are referring.  Indeed it may be said, that all the intellectual productions of modern times, from the seventeenth century back to the dark ages, were works of imagination.  The bulkiest and most voluminous writings that proceeded from the cloisters or the universities, even the metaphysical disquisitions of the Nominalists and Realists, and the boundless subtleties of the contending schools of the “Divine Doctors,” Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, fall under this description.  Dull, dreary, unintelligible, and interminable as they are, they are still in reality works of fancy.  They are the offspring, almost exclusively, of the imaginative faculty.  It ought not to create surprise, to find that this faculty predominated in the minds and characters of our ancestors, and developed itself to an extent beyond our conception, when we reflect that it was almost the only one called into exercise, and that it was the leading element of every branch of literature and philosophy.