WHY EUROPE? WHY THEN? 203
honor, of omnipotence," were diversion and obstacle. If anything, the
world of magic was a parody of reality, a shrinking residual of igno
rance, a kind of intellectual antimatter. Magic's occasional successes
were serendipitous by-products of hocus-pocus. Its practitioners were
easily seen as crazies, if not as agents of the devil, in part because of
their frequentiy eccentric manner and occasionally criminal behavior.*
Such practices went back to the dawn of time; they are still with us and
always will be, because, like people who play the lottery, we want to be
lieve. That they revived and flourished in the rush of new knowledge,
of secrets uncovered, of mysteries revealed, should come as no surprise.
Magic was more response than source, and insofar as it played a role,
it was less as stimulant than as allergenic.^7
Note that for some, this is cause for regret, as at a self-imposed im
poverishment: "... the new quantitative and mechanistic approach
eventually established a metaphysics which left no room for essences,
animism, hope, or purpose in nature, thus making magic something
'unreal,' or supernatural in the modern sense."^8 Not to feel bad: the
road to truth and progress passed there. As David Gans, an early
seventeenth-century popularizer of natural science, put it, one knows
that magic and divining are not science because their practitioners do
not argue with one another. Without controversy, no serious pursuit of
knowledge and truth.^9
This powerful combination of perception with measurement, verifi
cation, and mathematized deduction—this new method—was the key
to knowing. Its practical successes were the assurance that it would be
protected and encouraged whatever the consequences. Nothing like it
developed anywhere else.^10
How to experiment was another matter. One first had to invent re
search strategies and instruments of observation and measurement,
and almost four centuries would elapse before the method bore fruit
in the spectacular advances of the seventeenth century. Not that knowl
edge stood still. The new approach found early application in astron
omy and navigation, mechanics and warfare, optics and surveying—all
of them practical matters. But it was not until the late sixteenth cen
tury, with Galileo Galilei, that experiment became a system. This en-
- Hence the poison scandal (l'affaire des poisons) of the 1680s in France, which saw
hundreds of fortunetellers, astrologers, and their clients arrested and strenuously in
terrogated, and some thirty-four executed for complicity in murder. Nothing, says
Grenet, La passion des astres, pp. 136-59, did more to discredit astrology and magic
among the larger public and the political authorities. The scientists had already aban
doned this nonsense.