The Reformation: The Story of Civilization, Volume VI

by Will Durant

Agrippa now warns, was “false, or, if you will, lying”; if formerly he practiced astrology, magic, divination, alchemy, and other such “nesciences,” it was mostly through the importunate solicitation of patrons demanding esoteric knowledge, and able to pay. The Cabala is “nothing else but a pestilent superstition.” As for the philosophers, the self-canceling diversity of their opinions puts them out of court; we may leave them to refute one another. So far as philosophy seeks to deduce morality from reason, it is stultified by the irrational contrariety of morals in place and time; “whereof it cometh to pass that that which at one time was vice, another time is accounted virtue, and that which in one place is virtue, in another is vice.” The arts and occupations are as vitiated as the sciences with falsehood and vanity. Every court is “a school of corrupt customs, and a refuge of detestable wickedness.” Trade is treachery. Treasurers are thieves; their hands are sticky with bird-lime, their fingers end in hooks. War is the slaughter of many in the sport of the few. Medicine is “a certain art of manslaughter,” and often “there is more danger in the physician and the medicine than in the sickness itself.”