Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (review)

598 JOURNAL OF TIlE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 1987 Although Allen generally, but by no means slavishly, follows P. O. Kristeller's interpretation of Ficino's thought, he is able to add many significant and illuminating details based on his own sound, wide-ranging and careful scholarship. The few tiny errors he does make are hardly worth quibbling about: Seneca's De beneficiis is attributed to Cicero (28n. 63); o~ta is translated as "prison" rather than grave or tomb (lo3); and it is rather confusingly claimed that Ficino and his contemporaries did not know the original of the Liber de Causis (~9), when in fact--as Thomas Aquinas recognized in the thirteenth century--this work was ultimately based on Proclus's Elements of Theology. JILL KRAYE The Warburg Institute Brian Vickers, editor. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 4o8. $39.5o. This collection is the result of a symposium held at the Eidgen6ssische Technische Hochschule in Zfirich in 1982. It is appropriate that the institution that had Jacob Burckhardt, Albert Einstein, C. J. Jung, and Wolfgang Pauli on its staff should sponsor an exploration of this topic. At the symposium, thirteen scholars from such diverse felds as the history of science, cultural history, literary history, and political science attempted to trace and differentiate the complex and intertwined movement from the occult and irrational mind to the scientific and rational mind during the period x5oo to 17oo. The question of whether modern science emerges from a cluster of magical, occult, and quasi-rational intellectual activities is explored at length in several of these papers. As in any collection of this kind, the papers vary greatly in quality, depth, and novelty. There is a superb inroduction by Brian Vickers who surveys the past treatment of the topic, especially by historians of science who have generally brushed aside any role for occult thinking in the development of science, and describes the growing realization amongst a host of scholars in the history of thought that Hermeticism , Neo-Platonism, Alchemy, and Cabbalism all played a vital role in the development of Renaissance ideas, including scientific ones. Many of the papers in this volume raise more detailed questions about some of the new generalizations which have grown up in this field and focus sharply on both the similarities and differences in occult and scientific thought. Vickers summarizes much of this research in his introduction. He also discusses many of the particular controversies between scholars concerning the interpretations of such thinkers as Kepler, Newton, Bacon, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Fludd, and many others. Finally, Vickers indicates the light that might be thrown upon these issues by modern psychological, psychoanalytical, sociological, and anthropological studies. The essays include studies of John Dee by Nicholas H. Clulee; on the occult BOOK REVIEWS 599 tradition in English Renaissance universities by Mordecai Feingold; the rejection of occult symbolism by Vickers; Mersenne's views on Renaissance naturalism and Renaissance magic by William H. Hine; a study of nature, art, and psyche in the thought of Jung and Wolfgang Pauli and the latter's analysis of the Kepler-Fludd polemic by Robert S. Westman; an examination of the controversy between Cardano and Scaliger by Iam MacLean; two essays on Kepler's alleged astrology, mysticism, and numerology by the late Edward Rosen and by Judith Field; a consideration of Bacon's biological ideas in his recently discovered manuscripts by Graham Rees; an examination of Newton and alchemy by Richard S. Westfall; two studies on witchcraft and demonology by Robin Briggs and by Stuart Clark; and a concluding essay by Lotte Mulligan on "reason," "right season," and "revelation" in the occult and scientific mentalities. The contributions by Mulligan, Rosen, Vickers, Westfall, and Westman are truly outstanding. (Westman's is also an amazing piece of detective work.) Westfall's essay typifies the problem underlying the whole symposium, namely how could Newton, the great scientist of the period, the founder of the Age of Reason, have been an alchemist throughout most of his career and have believed that nature could be understood both by mathematical physics and by alchemy? Westfall raises this problem and, only briefly, the further problems...