It is well known that the heroes of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution were themselves by no means free of the occultist modes of thought from which they were supposed to be rescuing the human mind. Far less attention has been paid to occult tendencies in the philosophy of the time. [1] Since there was no sharp distinction between philosopher and scientist in the seventeenth century, it would be most surprising if the savant wearing his philosophical thinking-cap were somehow immune from occult influences to which he was prone as a scientist. The main purpose of this paper will be to suggest a few such influences. A secondary purpose will be to draw some more general conclusions about the definability of occultism, and its demarcation from philosophy and science.

One of the reasons why historians of philosophy have tended to overlook occult influences is that there is much greater indeterminacy of interpretation in philosophy than in science. [2] In the history of science, there used to be considerable ideological prejudice against the very idea that occultism could co-exist with rational science in one and the same mind, let alone be inextricably bound up with it. The prejudice eventually receded in the face of overwhelming, unambiguous empirical evidence, such as the Portsmouth collection of Newtonian manuscripts on alchemy and on the prisca sapientia. [3] Philosophy, on the other hand, is too abstract for it to be generally possible to pin down a philosopher’s meaning as unambiguously occultist. And the area of potential contamination with occultism is precisely the area of greatest indeterminacy in interpretation.

A further complication is that many non-philosophical beliefs intruding into a philosopher’s writings can be interpreted as religious. For certain positivists, anthropologists, and others, [4] this makes no difference, granted that metaphysics, religion, and occultism are all equally meaningless superstitions anyway. For them, the only demarcation which matters is that of all three from genuine science. Of course, such an attitude cannot be shared by a religious historian of philosophy. Surprisingly, perhaps, even atheist philosophers tend to treat religious beliefs with special respect. They take off their hats when entering churches, and they allow religion to be intellectually respectable when occult superstition is not. By piously labelling extraneous beliefs as religious, historians of philosophy side-step the awkward issue of demarcating metaphysics from superstition.

I shall therefore start by considering certain problems over the demarcation between philosophy and occultism which are subject to contamination by a religious dimension. I shall discuss three topics in particular: disembodied spirits, embodied spirits, and causality. First, that of disembodied spirits.

It is difficult enough to draw a line between religious and non-religious spirit beliefs in twentieth-century England. Presumably angels belong to religion, fairies not. But what of ghosts? And even among religious people, an active belief in angels might seem odder than a belief in the possibility of communicating with the souls of the departed. In the seventeenth century, the categorisation of beliefs was very different. All philosophers believed in angels, if only on Biblical authority. [5]

Conversely, on the same authority, any attempt to communicate with the dead constituted the dreadful sin of necromancy. It was in any case generally considered impossible for the spirits of the dead to return, or to communicate with us in any way. The single exception was the miracle of Christ’s return after the resurrection. [6] The Biblical report of the success of the Pythoness of Endor in summoning the soul of Samuel for King Saul was frequently dismissed as a delusion. [7] Similarly, ghosts were variously explained away as melancholic delusions, [9] as evil demons taking on the shapes of the dead, [9] or as detached ‘astral bodies’ (the semi-material vehicles of the now departed immortal souls). [10]

As for séances, the modern fashion is for summoning the spirits of the dead. In the seventeenth century, mediums avoided such overt necromancy, and communicated instead with angels, or with good fairies. [11] The distinction between the two was far less significant than we might expect. The essential religious belief was that there were all sorts of spiritual beings in Heaven and on Earth. It hardly mattered if one added various ranks not explicitly mentioned in the Bible — the spirits and genii of Graeco-Roman mythology, the celestial hierarchies of Cabalism and of Neoplatonism, or the fairies and gnomes of folk-lore. Thus, Robert Boyle approved the project of the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle to provide empirical confirmation of Christian spiritualism by assembling reported sightings of fairies, elves, and fauns in the Highlands of Scotland. [12]

If we now turn to theories of embodied spirits, we find it no easier to put a finger on what makes a belief superstitious rather than religious or philosophical. Descartes’ account of the soul is an excellent example of the conflicting ways in which a single theory can be classified and evaluated. Most of his critics have accused him of superstition, but on a variety of incompatible grounds. Ryle’s catch-phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ catches the spirit all right. [13] However, Ryle himself was only interested in the logical mistake which led Descartes to postulate mental events and entities underlying dispositional properties. He did not expand on the locus of the ghost in Cartesian ontology.

Most twentieth-century dualists would approve of Descartes’ insistence on the absolute immateriality of the soul, precisely because it raised dualism above the primitive superstition of the soul as a quasi-material ghost trapped within the spatial confines of the human body. If Descartes was superstitious, it was because he was not wholly successful in escaping from the old modes of thought. In particular, he retained the traditional belief in a tenuous spirit mediating between mind and body. [14] And though he insisted on its strict materiality, this did not distinguish him from the majority of occultists, who also treated spirits as consisting of a highly rarefied, and ghostly form of matter. As for his mechanical explanations of mental events, they owed as much to analogy and sheer invention as rival spiritualist accounts, such as those of the Paracelsians.

Materialists, on the other hand, commend Descartes for his attempt, however half-baked, to explain mental functions in terms of the motions of small particles of matter obeying the same mechanical laws as gross bodies. For them, his superstitiousness consists in the pious retention of an occult, immaterial soul, which could have no intelligible function in explaining the behaviour of the whole person. Although Descartes himself probably saw the unity of thought and extension in Man as a religious mystery, [15] he is often accused of inconsistently treating the soul as if it were a little ghost sitting in the pineal gland, watching what was going on in the head, and magically moving the gland from time to time. [16] Commentators like Kenny and Rée emphasise the naivety of this position by labelling it the ‘homunculus concept’. [17]

Somewhere between the two extremes of dualist and materialist critics, Henry More (1614–1687) complained, not about his belief in a spatially extended ghost inhabiting the body, but precisely about the lack of it. For More, Descartes’ immaterial substance existing nowhere was the ultimate occult entity. He insisted that spirits must occupy space, and ridiculed Descartes’ version of immaterialism as nullibism, or ‘nowhereism’. [18]

The third topic in which religion complicates the demarcation between occultism and philosophy is that of causation. As long as attention is confined to extremes, there is a clear enough contrast between the new, mechanistic philosophy, and occultism. Mechanists believed that ultimately the only medium of causal interaction was pushing, or impact between material bodies. Occultists believed in all sorts of interactions: mutual attractions and repulsions (sympathies and antipathies); influences operating immediately over a distance (those of the stars, or of magic spells); the effects of incantations; purposeful, vital principles, and so on. Scholasticism fell somewhere between the two extremes, with its final causes, substantial forms, and hidden ‘virtues’.

Mechanists got into considerable difficulties trying to explain attractive forces, such as the cohesion of solids, gravitation, and magnetism, in terms of corpuscles pushing against their neighbours. One can sympathise with Newton’s refusal to ‘invent hypotheses’ about how gravitational forces were mediated. [19] On the other hand, one can equally sympathise with Leibniz’s accusation that Newton was admitting occult forces, by explaining gravitation as due to ‘gravitational forces’ operating immediately at a distance, and knowable only by their effects. [20] We may now prefer the public Newton who confined himself to finding mathematical formulae to describe the phenomena — yet the private Newton was as convinced as Leibniz that there had to be some underlying mechanism involving etherial particles. [21]

On the other side, many occultists went out of their way to translate magic powers into strictly mechanist terms. The favourite medium for occult interaction was the World Spirit transmitting the influences of individual spirits. By conceiving spirits as rarefied matter, they obliterated any difference in kind between their World Spirit and the ether of the mechanists. [22] Magic powers were thus brought into the same class as attractive forces — given (or so it was believed) in experience, and explicable by a supposed hidden mechanism.

Religion adds an extra dimension of complication. It had long been believed that miraculous effects could be brought about in religious contexts: a priest’s words could transform bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ, and holy water or saints’ relics could cure the sick. More peripherally, the kings of England and of France were believed to have the power of curing scrofula (the ‘King’s Evil’). [23] In England, at least, the normal view was that this was a divine sacrament performed by God’s annointed, rather than magic. The ceremony took place in the Royal Chapel, with a priest officiating, and in accordance with a special form of prayer included in some editions of the Book of Common Prayer. Further removed from the aegis of the Church were other healers, such as the famous ‘stroker’ Valentine Greatrakes (1629–83). He himself believed that God was working through him; but others attributed his powers to diabolical agency, or to natural forces mediated by rarefied material effluences akin to magnetism. [24]

Witches were in much the same category. The orthodox view was that their powers were due to devils, and their existence was often cited as evidence for the spiritualist world-view of Christianity (for example by Robert Boyle, Henry More and Joseph Glanvill). [25] Conversely, others explained their powers in purely mechanistic terms. In the seventeenth century, only a small minority believed either that their powers were irreducibly magical, or that they were wholly delusory. [26]

Even archetypally occultist practices such as alchemy were given a strong religious aura. No doubt, at one end of the spectrum, some alchemists carried out their experiments without any thought of God except, perhaps, for a prayer at the beginning of The Work. But equally, many a village wise-woman would charm away a wart without worrying whether she was doing it with demonic assistance, with spiritual effluences, or just doing it. More reflective alchemists were very concerned with the theory of what they were doing. They generally believed that they had a special understanding of the natures of things through divine illumination. It was this that enabled them to see behind the appearances of things to their occult virtues, which they could then manipulate. [27] At the other end of the spectrum, for example in the so-called ‘Rosicrucian Manifestoes’, the actual practice of alchemy was even forbidden: the extraction of gold from base metals was not to be understood as a physical process, but as an allegory of the purification of the soul. [28] In effect, the way of alchemy was little other than a fringe religion. Again, in any particular case it is far from clear whether we have to do with practical technology, superstitious magic, mystical religion, or some blend of all three.

There was a comparable ambiguity within religion itself. Most Protestants denied all miracles: not only was the ‘Age of Miracles’ past, but no magical changes were brought about in the Eucharist or other sacraments. [29] Even Catholics tended to go along with the denial of religious magic, and to attribute any non-natural event directly to God himself. However, this did not necessarily constitute any real limitation on the powers of the priesthood. There is no practical difference between God’s granting a priest the power to change wine into blood on uttering certain words, and himself bringing about the change on the occasion of the utterance of those words. Indeed, an occasionalist would have to say that there was no difference at all between the sacramental event, and anything else that happened in nature. During the seventeenth century, a significant body of philosophers, including Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz, came to believe that there was no such thing as a real causal connection at all. All talk of ‘influence’ was equally superstitious. The only question was the ultimately theological one of the principles by which God governed the evolution of the universe. So, Leibniz in particular often phrased questions about what was natural or possible in overtly theological terms: would God create a universe which needed re-winding? Would God create two identical atoms? [30]

The conclusion to be drawn from the above examples is that it is virtually impossible to force any confrontation between occultism and the mechanical philosophy. When challenged, occultists can easily dress up their beliefs either as essentially religious, or as not different in kind from mechanist theories. At the same time, many religious believers wanted to off-load religious magic, and at least some scientists wanted to dismiss all supposedly natural influences as superstitious, and attribute everything directly to God. The resultant conceptual chaos makes it difficult either to assert or deny occult influences on the philosophy of the time. Yet there are other areas in which at least the religious dimension is relatively subordinate.

One way of showing the importance of occultist modes of thought in seventeenth-century philosophy would be to take a range of writers who were all equally regarded as philosophers at the time, and demonstrate that many of them were heavily influenced by occultism. Such an approach would be a walk-over: for every unsuperstitious philosopher such as Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, or Bayle, there is a Campanella, Fludd, Kircher, Comenius, Henry More, Cudworth, or F. M. van Helmont. And whereas the first list is nearly exhaustive, the second is only a small, random selection. However, the evidence would not persuade anyone who was not already convinced of the importance of occult influences on philosophy. It would immediately be countered by the denial that the writers in the second list were philosophers at all.

A more effective strategy would be to take figures who are now still recognized as genuine philosophers, such as Bacon and Leibniz, and show how their philosophies are permeated with occultism. In particular, Leibniz’s system was deliberately intended as a sort of highest common factor of mechanism and occultist vitalism. [31] Yet this too would meet with the reply that, in so far as Leibniz’s thought is capable of contamination by occultism, he is not really functioning as a philosopher: producing theories about the world is not a proper part of philosophy.

I do not myself agree that philosophy should be defined so narrowly that there were only half-a-dozen philosophers throughout the seventeenth century — and then only part-timers. Nevertheless, in order to circumvent what one might call the ‘Thrasymachus gambit’, [32] I shall leave the obvious examples on one side. I shall limit myself to more ambiguous cases in certain topics central to our philosophical tradition: the theory of perception, primary qualities, the Cartesian cogito, what was later known as the synthetic apriori, and empiricism.

Before the seventeenth century, the nature of visual perception was not a point at issue between the occultist and scholastic philosophers. It was generally agreed that objects emitted infinitesimal surfaces or effluences, often called ‘intentional species’, which entered the body through the pupils of the eyes. On mingling with the spirit which animated the body, they ended up as the sensory images immediately present to consciousness. The main point at issue among scholastics was whether or not there was also a simultaneous emission of a ‘visual stream’ searching out its objects. This was an essential element of Plato’s theory, intended to account both for the phenomenon of projection, and for the observer-relativity of the objects of perception. [33] As for the occultists, the visual stream theory was virtually essential for the conceptual grounding of various superstitions, such as fascination, the evil eye, the influence of a mother’s imagination on an unborn child (even Kepler, Gassendi and Descartes believed in this), [34] and perhaps also the astrological influences of the intelligences governing the heavenly bodies.

The early mechanist philosophers, such as Galileo and Descartes, took great pains to explain the radical differences between their theories, and the effluences and visual streams of their scholastic and occultist contemporaries. [35] Above all, they insisted on an absolute dualism of appearance in the brain or mind of the observer, and the qualitatively different reality of the object of perception; they explained all reality, including whatever carried sensory information from object to observer, as consisting of nothing but matter in motion; and they took it for granted that the mind was fundamentally passive in perception.

Paradoxically, the new philosophers following the ‘way of ideas’ were even more dependent than the occultists on hidden or occult entities. According to the traditional theories, perceptible qualities were located in external objects themselves. Occultists differed from the more sober scholastics in their stress on additional, occult qualities underlying the surface ones. However, as Berkeley saw, the new dualism deprived objects of all their surface qualities by locating them in the mind, so that reality itself consisted entirely of hidden qualities known only to the philosopher or scientist. [36] Therefore the mechanists of the seventeenth century had a considerable problem if they wanted to maintain that they were different in kind from the magicians of old, and were not simply the first generation of successful magicians. [37]

Some occultists exploited this weakness in the new philosophy. For example, John Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft attacked the view that witchcraft provided evidence for the existence of evil spirits. For Webster, the new philosophy of the Royal Society had shown how little could be known about the true causes of things; consequently, there were no grounds for denying that witches were genuinely able to tap hidden magical virtues. [38]

Locke, on the other hand, seems not to have noticed how little separated him from the enthusiasts he so despised. He believed that we can only guess at the ‘real essences’ of things. [39] Perhaps he assumed that his scepticism distanced him enough from the occultists who thought they knew. But as it happens, occultists themselves prudently avoided rash claims about the details of the hidden natures of things. Furthermore, Locke made knowledge of essences only contingently unattainable, since angels could become miraculously acquainted with them. [40] And what could happen miraculously in a religious context, could conceivably be achieved magically in a secular one.

Locke did at least see that his empiricism gave him the problem of explaining how our guesses about hidden essences could be meaningful. His solution was that, although our ideas of secondary qualities give us no insight into the powers that cause them, our ideas of primary ones are qualitatively identical with their archetypes, thus affording us a conceptual bridgehead in reality itself. [41] Now, in view of Descartes’ sharp distinction between real and perceived geometrical properties, [42] the casualness of Locke’s assumption might seem quite remarkable. It is less surprising, however, if we bear in mind the survival of the traditional theories of perception. Locke himself admits that he sometimes lapses into talking as if ideas and qualities were numerically as well as qualitatively identical. [43] This tendency is reinforced by his frequently describing perception in terms of ideas travelling from objects into the mind via the sense organs. [44] In theory, his language should be taken as metaphorical; but in practice, it is a sign that he was allowing himself to be seduced back into the magical imagery of the effluence theory of perception, according to which our minds are fed with the very qualities of objects themselves.

It might be claimed that the real differentia of mechanist accounts of perception (as indeed of the mechanical philosophy in general) is preciseiy that they were mechanist, and thereby closer to the truth than their rivals. However, although mechanics itself was a strikingly successful piece of science, we should not close our eyes to the complete arbitrariness and inadequacy of the various corpuscularian hypotheses thought up by the mechanists. It is a hangover from Victorian prejudice to see theories as especially virtuous simply because they happen to be couched in materialist, atomistic terms. If the claim is diluted, so that the differentia becomes that of understanding the world in mathematical terms, then it fails to differentiate the new philosophers from occultists and Neopythagorean mystics such as John Dee and Kepler, [45] who also saw reality as fundamentally mathematical. Ironically, in the seventeenth century itself, mathematics was popularly regarded as one of the principal occult sciences. As Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, ch.v: ‘Geometry [the most part of men] have thought Conjuring.’ [46]

Advances in the understanding of perception were due to developments in geometrical optics that owed nothing to the replacement of visual streams and effluences by corpuscles. The laws of linear perspective had been developed long before by thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci, who was working within the framework of the older concepts. [47] The theory that light consisted of cohorts of material corpuscles reflected from surfaces differed little from the effluence theory, beyond making corpuscles colourless. [48] Effluences and corpuscles were both on the interface between the material and the immaterial, and they both gave rise to similar problems, such as why images were invisible sideways on, and why there was no mutual interference when they crossed paths. The alternative theory that light consisted of wave motions in a material ether had its own difficulties. The corpuscular hypotheses were invented in order to satisfy an ideological need to account for everything materialistically; but if anything they hampered progress in scientific optics. It is far from obvious that the new philosophers’ wrong guesses about the nature of light should be regarded as of a different order of rationality than those of their predecessors.

Corpuscularianism was not even fatal to the visual stream theory. Just as fascination could be explained as an emission of rarefied matter, [49] so was there no reason in principle why visual streams should not be accounted for in a similar way. The same goes for other alleged phenomena, such as extra-sensory perception. John Wilkins, for example, explained short-range ESP as due to material, magnetic effluences. Long-range ESP, on the other hand, he attributed to the assistance of guardian angels, who were capable of instantaneous communication without any material medium. [50]

This all goes to show that the availability of a corpuscular explanation is really irrelevant to whether a belief is to be classed as superstitious or not. Thus, Robert Fludd (1574-1637) claimed that in a state of ecstasy, a ‘geomancer’ could emit mental rays which would penetrate the macrocosm and return with warnings of the future. [51] This belief would not deserve to be taken any more seriously if he had added that the rays consisted of very fine material particles. Similarly, in the following century, Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) tried to make hypnotism intellectually respectable by explaining it as a form of magnetism. [52] Ironically, it is precisely his materialist explanation that has dated.

There is an interesting and instructive twist to the changing fortunes of mechanist and visual-stream theories of perception. The mechanists can fairly be criticised for emptying the baby with the bath: they over-reacted against visual streams by refusing the mind any active rô1e whatever in the process of perception. Kant’s theory of constructive imagination was an important corrective. The irony is that some modern magicians have seen Kant, and his follower Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as having contributed towards the reinstatement of a magical world-view in which imagination rivals science as a source of knowledge and power. [53]

I shall now move to what Descartes had to say about our knowledge of the hidden reality underlying the perceptible qualities of things. Superficially, his approach is very similar to Plato’s in its dependence on the magical principle that like is known by like. For Descartes, the world is really only matter in motion. Particular motions are represented by sensory images, which are themselves motions of spiritual matter in the brain of the observer. General truths about extended substance are known by the immaterial, rational soul. Such knowledge includes that of ‘first philosophy’ itself, together with the sciences of geometry, mechanics, and physics.

In order to explain how the soul becomes acquainted with the essence of matter, Plato had postulated an ante-natal acquaintance by contact. Descartes’ account owed much more to the Christian tradition of mystical meditation, [54] and the related approaches of intellectualist magicians and alchemists. Will-Erich Peuckert, a leading historian of occultism, defines a magus as one who follows the ‘light of nature’, as contrasted with the cabalist, who follows the ‘light of grace’. [55] If he is right, then the core of Descartes’ philosophy is both magical and cabalistic. [56]

Having arrived at the indubitable proposition, ‘I am,’ Descartes appealed to the light of nature in order to prove that the information carried in the idea of a perfect being could not have come from himself. Just as the magus used the light of nature to read the ‘signatures’ of the macrocosm in the microcosm, so Descartes argued back from the signature or idea of a perfect being which he discovered embedded in his own essence, to the macrocosmic existence of that being. It was then by the grace of the non-deceiving God that he was assured that his clear and distinct ideas (those unsullied by perceptual imagery) corresponded to the archetypes on which God had modelled reality. Descartes did not himself call the criterion of clear and distinct perception the ‘light of grace’, but this is undoubtedly what he meant; and he was heavily criticised for appealing to as subjective a criterion as that of any enthusiast. [57]

Around the time of his famous dreams, Descartes first heard about the Rosicrucians, and tried to make contact with them in case they had forestalled him in the discovery of the new wisdom. He was rapidly disillusioned. [58] On the other hand, the main thrust of his epistemology is hardly distinguishable from that of the alchemist Oswald Croll, in the ‘Admonitory Preface’ to his Basilica Chymica. Croll also slates the sterility and authoritarianism of university teaching, and commends the reader to turn inwards to discover God, ‘the one Rector of that great university in the sky . . . Everyone learns by going back to the source, and hence to God, who created knowledge for man . . . The true route to true wisdom is the gnothi seauton of the Delphic Oracle . . . By starting out from his own self, and understanding himself, Man can see and understand everything in himself as in a sort of divine mirror . . . The notion of all things is born with us . . . God is known by the light of nature . . . Man can derive most of his knowledge of what he is from contemplation of himself ’ [59]

Neither sceptics nor empiricists should be surprised at Descartes’ using the conceptual apparatus of magic and occultism to justify his rationalist epistemology. Both sorts of philosopher deem it a superstition to suppose that human reason alone can attain non-trivial knowledge of external reality. Locke (or at least the Locke of the first two books of the Essay) saw himself as both sceptical, and what we now call empiricist. He correctly diagnosed the crucial rôle played by innate ideas in justifying rationalist claims to bridge the gulf between knower and known. Yet by Book IV, Locke had himself lapsed back into comparable claims. Unlike philosophers such as Hobbes and Leibniz, who reduced all logical truth to definitions, [60] Locke wanted to preserve a contrast between ‘trifling’ verbal propositions, [61] and the real knowledge we had in mathematics, ethics, and theology. He based it on intuitions of the ‘agreement’, and ‘disagreement’ or ‘repugnancy’ of ideas. [62] However, he could give no account of what the intuition of agreement or disagreement consisted in, beyond appealing to the usual metaphor of light. [63] It is no accident that the terms he chose were, in his day, standard synonyms for the ‘sympathy’ and ‘antipathy’ of the occultists. [64] In the context of the rest of his philosophy, any necessary connections between distinct ideas had to be either non-existent or magical; and his choice of terminology is a tacit admission of that fact.

Strict empiricism was in an even worse position than rationalism for avoiding superstition, since it could provide no apriori criterion for judging between credible and incredible reports of experience. This aspect of empiricism would have been more evident in the seventeenth century than now, since it is only since the nineteenth century that the term ‘empirical’ has acquired its present, commendatory sense. Previously it meant only ‘anti-scientific’, or ‘quack’, as in the expression ‘empirical remedy’. [65] In antiquity, the empirical school of medicine rejected all forms of treatment based on theory, and confined itself to what had been found successful in practice. Consequently, the empirical doctor did not differ in kind from the village wise-woman, or witch. Broadened into a general, sceptical philosophy (as with Sextus the Empiric), [66] empiricism had no basis for excluding generally accepted beliefs about occult phenomena. Certainly some empiricists were less credulous than others; but this was more a question of temperament than of theoretical stance. It is therefore hardly surprising that there should be as much superstition in the Sylva sylvarum of Francis Bacon, the so-called father of modern empiricism, as there is in the Magia naturalis of the occultist della Porta, and rather more evidence of practical experimentation in the latter. [67]

The examples that I have given, and others that could be adduced, show that in the seventeenth century there was no clear line of demarcation between occultism, philosophy, religion, and science. Over large areas of belief, it simply was not the case that the modern philosophers had a monopoly of truth, meaningfulness, evidence, reasonableness, or even of a rational scheme of concepts. It would be possible to cobble together some sort of a definition of occultist as opposed to rational philosophy, by taking extreme examples, and setting up contrasting paradigms in terms of families of overlapping characteristics. However, such a descriptive procedure would have limited value. It would be tied to a particular historical period and culture, and it would be incapable of clarifying either the area of overlap between superstition and rationality, or the process of conceptual change.

Rather than trying to understand the contrast merely through characteristics internal to the belief-systems themselves, it is necessary to take into account an additional, intentional dimension, namely the perceived relation between the occult philosopher himself, and orthodoxy. [68] The position of the occultist is closely analogous to that of the heretic, whose status depends as much on the fact of his being branded as a religious deviant, as on what he actually happens to believe. The occultist is essentially an intellectual deviant. So in order to understand the contrast between occultism and orthodoxy, we have to take into account not merely its internal logic, but also the rhetoric of the labels.

As a deviant, the occultist is faced with three possible strategies: he can go underground, [69] he can protest his innocence, or he can embrace the label. [70] During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the occult sciences were practised in relative secrecy, if only out of fear of religious or secular persecution. By the seventeenth century, however, the accelerating collapse in respect for the authority of the Church and the universities allowed advocates of occultism an unprecedented freedom of thought. For a while, many occultists saw themselves as a legitimate wing of the intellectual revolution against the scholastic establishment. [71] As experimentalism and mechanism gradually took root, a significant body of occultists tried to make their beliefs intellectually respectable by formulating them in corpuscularian terms, and by trying to verify them experimentally. [72] Then, as now, occultists were often at least as meticulous about their experimental methodology as orthodox scientists. [73]

At the same time, others willingly described their own philosophy as ‘occult’, and positively gloried in anti-rationalism and anti-materialism. When the resurgence of occultism was at its height, at around the middle of the century, it was far from clear what the orthodoxy of the future was going to be: it could have been represented by vitalist physics, astrology, Hermetic medicine, and alchemy. [74] Only towards the end of the century did it become evident that mechanism had replaced scholasticism as the new orthodoxy.

An integral part of the process of establishing the new orthodoxy was a rigid defining of its borders with religion and superstition, and the ruthless purging of all occult tendencies. For the first time in nearly a century, it was clearly decidable what was to count as irrational belief. The immediate consequence was that the survivors of extreme occultism had once more either to go underground, or to identify themselves openly as committed opponents of philosophy and science rather than as fellow-travellers. This is precisely what we find at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the emergence of consciously anti-rational occult societies, such as Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and of anti-scientific romanticism. [75]

An excellent illustration of the changing climate is provided by Leibniz’s attitude to alchemy. [76] In his youth (in the 1660s), Leibniz was heavily involved in alchemy: his first job was as secretary to a society of alchemists at Nuremberg, he participated in a number of gold-making enterprises (though, unlike Newton, he seems to have done no actual laboratory work), and he probably owed his posts at Mainz and Hanover to his reputation as an adept. He maintained at least a casual interest in alchemy for the rest of the century. It is quite possible that he deliberately destroyed documentary evidence of his activities at Nuremberg, and he certainly lied to his biographer about how he felt when he was young. In his early days, there was the single art known indiscriminately as ‘alchemy’, or ‘chemistry’. By the time he was an old man, chemistry was an established science, and alchemy an outmoded and shameful superstition. [77]

Just as the term ‘alchemist’ had acquired a pejorative sense, so a whole range of beliefs became defined as beyond the pale for a serious philosopher or scientist. [78] All the same, the concept of deviance by itself no more provides an adequate line of demarcation between orthodox and occult sciences than a purely internalist criterion. There are many forms of intellectual deviance which have nothing to do with occultism or superstition. Yet it is possible to identify a group of ‘occultist’ attitudes and concepts, often clustered around particular ancient and mediaeval texts, which have historically tended to remain on the fringes of the intellectual world. Internalist historians would say that occultism has inevitably remained underground because it is objectively antipathetical to rational thought and successful science. Others would explain its ostracism as resulting from the anti-authoritarianism implicit in its stress on individual enlightenment. But such questions cannot sensibly be discussed without involving live philosophical controversies about the nature of rationality itself.

My historical conclusion is that the concept of occultism is of little use when there is no well-defined orthodoxy for it to deviate from. In a period of transition and intellectual ferment, the widespread mingling of different approaches robs the term of much of its meaning. As far as the seventeenth century is concerned, its most valuable use is the negative one of reminding the historian that it was above all a century in which philosophy and science cannot be sharply demarcated from the occult.

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