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Lecky says: “The ‘Démonomanie des Sorciers’ is chiefly an appeal to authority, which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so conclusive, that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist it. He appealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages, and in all religions.
Whereunto is added a treatise upon the nature and substance of Spirits and Divels &c., all written and published in Anno 1584. By Reginald Scot, Esquire. Printed by R.C. and are to be sold by Giles Calvert dwelling at the Black Spread-Eagle, at the West-End of Pauls, 1651. De la Demonomanie des Sorciers.
He had brought all the resources of his scholarship to bear upon the subject, and he had written a great part of his "Demonomanie des Sorciers" before the appearance of the last work of Wier. John Wier was a physician of Cleves who had in 1563 published a work which he called, "De Præstigus Dæmonum."
And yet Bodin, the author of the De Republica, reckoned one of the ablest books of that age, believed all this filthy nonsense, and prefixes it to his Demonomanie, as proof conclusive of the existence of sorcerers. This was in 1587.
Nothing but an abject panic, in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to grind out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for some chapters in Bodin's Demonomanie. Men were surrounded by a forever-renewed conspiracy whose ramifications they could not trace, though they might now and then lay hold on one of its associates.
Yet even this single step of Wierus was strenuously resisted by the learned Bodin, who, in his amusing volume of "Demonomanie des Sorciers," 1593, refutes Wierus. These are the leading authors of the times; who were followed by a crowd. Thus James I. neither wanted authorities to quote nor great minds to sanction his "Dæmonologie," first published in 1597.
Such were the opinions which were promulgated towards the close of the sixteenth century by one of the most advanced intellects of one of the leading nations of Europe at that time; promulgated, too, with a tone of confidence and of triumph that shows how fully the writer could count upon the religious sympathies of his readers: the "Demonomanie des Sorciers" appeared in 1581.
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