SOURCE: "Knowledge and Faith in the Thought of Cornelius Agrippa," in Bibliotheque D'Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXVI, 1964, pp. 326-40.

[Daniels discusses inherent contradictions in Agrippa's writings, noting that his main contribution was to demonstrate "the profound difference between the [Baconian] method… and the method of modern science."]

The enigmatic figure of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) has been subjected to various interpretations since the early 16th Century. Even his contemporaries were never quite sure what to do with him. Lauded as a great scholar and leading man of letters on the one hand, he was condemned as a wicked practitioner of the black arts and collaborator with devils on the other. Men of later generations were equally divided. The great skeptical works of Sir Philipp Sidney and of Montaigne were consciously modeled after Agrippa's volume, On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, while Giordano Bruno and Thomas Vaughan took his three books of occult philosophy as a model. For Marlowe and, to a lesser extent, for Goethe, Cornelius Agrippa was the original Faust.

The difficulty is that there has always seemed to be two Agrippas—the one who wrote De Occulta Philosophia, proclaiming that the world was tied together with pervasive mystic bonds and that the intelligence of man was capable of utilizing the occult qualities of the universe for his own advantage, and the other Agrippa, the author of De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum, Declamatio Invectiva, et Excellentia Verbi Dei, a violent declamation against all of man's learning and against the possibility of his reaching understanding through reason. On the surface at least, the two Agrippas do seem incompatible, and until very recently, historians have followed the pattern of choosing one of them and discounting the other as a fraud, or at least, the victim of a temporary intellectual aberration. A few, following Marlowe, have looked upon him as a Faustian character who, at a certain point, renounces scholarly allegiance to human sciences and turns to the black arts.

In 1957, an ingenious attempt was made by Charles G. Nauert [in his "Magic and Skepticism in Agrippa's Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas (April, 1957)] to unite the two strands in the character of Agrippa, by interpreting him as a paradigm of the dialectical movement of Western European thought which Hiram Haydn [in his The Counter-Renaissance, 1951] saw as characterizing the period.

This [essay] arose out of the conviction that an insistence upon viewing Agrippa either in terms of intellectual development or discounting one side of his thought necessitates an entirely false final evaluation of the man, and, what is more serious, a misunderstanding of his real significance in the history of thought. A comparison—implied or otherwise—of Agrippa with Faust does have a certain seductive appeal, and interpreting him as a paradigm of the dialectical movement of Haydn's "Counter-Renaissance" thesis is even more tempting. But either effort precludes a real understanding of the relationship between magic, skepticism, and modern science….

[It] is evident that Agrippa, to say the least, was hardly a Faust figure. True, both Faust and Agrippa had grasped the whole range of human learning and both had found it wanting. But it is not accurate to say that Agrippa turned to magic—there is no dramatic turning point in his life, nor is there a series of minor turning points which can fit into any obvious rational pattern. His text on magic was written before and published after he had written his skeptical treatise; therefore, it must be considered as indicative of a continuing interest, if not commitment. His skeptical work condemns not only science, but magic as well and much more besides; and his last letters indicate that he never lost interest in either science or magic. Moreover, his commentary on Lull, his last major published work (although it was apparently written much earlier), is a highly favorable account of the intricate rational system. It has nothing about it which would indicate that its author has rejected human reason. Here we have a complex series of intellectual events that cannot be reduced to an easy systematization, but if a key to the puzzle does exist, it should be found in a formal elaboration of his doctrine of knowledge. What I propose to do in the remainder of this [essay] is to assume—with Nauert and others—that de Vanitate does represent Agrippa's mature thought, and after analyzing the concept of knowledge upon which it seems to be based, to try to understand the interest in magic in terms of this epistemology.

The topical arrangement of the 102 chapters of Agrippa's de Vanitate is a study in itself, and the book as a whole still makes fascinating reading today. In this [essay], however, I shall concern myself solely with what the book can tell us about the author's attitude toward human knowledge. This approach will undoubtedly obscure important elements in the work—Erasmus, for example, considered it to be primarily an attack upon the theologians—but interesting as these matters are, they can be ignored for our purposes.

Of the sciences in general, Agrippa tells us that all of them are evil as well as good, and that in themselves they bring no advantage to men beyond that which was promised by the Serpent, when he said, "Ye shall be as Gods, Knowing good and evil". The sciences can bring no happiness, for true happiness consists not in the knowledge of good things, but in good life; not in understanding, but in living understandingly. Thus far, the attitude expressed is anti-intellectualism, not skepticism, but Agrippa soon advances to a more positive assertion:

So large, however, is the liberty of the truth, and the largeness thereof so free, that it cannot be contained within the speculations of any science, nor with any compelling judgment of the senses, nor with any argument of the art of logic, with no evident proof, no syllogism of demonstration, and not with any discourse of human reason, but with faith only.

Agrippa has not, in this passage at least, ruled out the existence of truth; quite the contrary, he has merely ruled out various ways of reaching it, including the "compelling judgment of the senses", reason and logic. Furthermore, truth is to be actively pursued in every possible manner:

… what a wicked tyranny it is, to bind the wits of students to prescribed authors, and to take away from scholars the freedom of searching out and following truth.

He does not seem, in this last quotation, to be talking about faith; indeed, he seems to speak of the ordinary ways scholars search out truth. It is, in effect, merely a plea for intellectual freedom. But this seems paradoxical, since in his introductory chapter Agrippa makes the flat statement that

All sciences are nothing else but the ordinances and opinions of men; as noxious as useful, as pestilent as wholesome, as bad as good; in no respect complete, but even ambigious, full of error and contention—all of which we now hide by scattering them through the various scientific disciplines.

We are confronted, then, with the curious situation in which a scholar pleads for intellectual freedom—the freedom to employ one's wits—in one breath, and in the next castigates the fruits of this use of reason. Faith is the only avenue to Truth and, at the same time, it is a "wicked tyranny" to deprive scholars of liberty to use their mental gifts in searching out truth. Is Agrippa simply saying that it is a wicked tyranny not to allow scholars to damn themselves by the free use of their wits? Hardly—it seems, rather, that 'truth' is here given two different meanings. We have, in effect, the old familiar of all students of literature—the semantic confusion. A further analysis of the work may serve to clear it up.

In Chapter VII, Agrippa, in speaking of the scholastic doctrine of knowledge, brings out this double meaning of "Truth":

The peripatetics suppose that nothing can stand or be understood unless it is proved by syllogisms from demonstration; that is to say, in the manner described by Aristotle. But yet he [Aristotle] never observed the method in his dogmatic opinions, for he deduced all his arguments from presupposed matters; and all the professors of sciences; imitating him, have so far not given any, or very few, true demonstrations—much less in terms of natural phenomena—but all deduce them from precedents either from their Aristotle or from some other who spoke before, whose authority to give principles of demonstration the professors keep to themselves … If, therefore, the principles of demonstration are not well known, and the circular argument be not admitted, certainly one can have none but very slender and uncertain knowledge. We are required to believe things shown by certain weak principles, to which we assent to known limits either on the authority of the wise, or else with experience we allow [the principles] through the senses. For every concept (as they say) has its beginning from the senses, and the proof of true statements (as Averroes says) is that they agree with sensory objects. And that thing is better known and more true about which most [men's] senses agree. Through sensory objects, then, we are led by the hand to all things that may be known by us. Since all the senses are often fallacious, we cannot prove with certainty to ourselves any genuine experience. Furthermore, since the senses cannot attain to the intellectual nature, and since the cause of inferior things, from which their natures, effects, and properties—or rather passions—should be demonstrated, are by the consent of all men altogether unknown to our senses, is it not clearly demonstrated that the way to truth is closed to the senses? Therefore all these demonstrations and sciences which are fast rooted in the senses will be uncertain, erroneous, and deceitful. What, then, is the profit of logic, and what fruit comes from that learned demonstration by principles and proofs to which we of necessity assent, as it were, to known limits? Are not these principles and proofs already assumed rather than demonstrated?

Agrippa is discussing a number of subjects in this paragraph. It contains, in very abbreviated form to be sure, his entire doctrine of knowledge. Observe first of all his attitude toward authority—he is scornful of it when the arguments are based upon "presupposed matters", and not upon demonstration in "natural phenomena". Aside from the authority of "certain weak principles", he mentions, and in part rejects, the possibility of admitting that which comes to us through the senses. He then observes Averroes' arguments for the sensory basis of proof, and poses two distinct objections to it. First of all, he cites the psychological objection that the senses can deceive us as to the reception of particulars. He does not deny that knowledge of particulars can come to us through the senses; he merely states that it is difficult to be certain one has a true perception. Significantly, he does not deny the Averroistic contention that "that thing is better known and more true, about which most men's senses agree". The psychological objection is not a serious one; it is, in fact, a truism which has nothing to do with epistemology.

But Agrippa sees a second, more serious, objection to knowledge attained through the senses. The senses, he tells us, cannot attain to the "intellectual nature", or to the causes and properties of things. This is a serious epistemological criticism similar to that later made by Hume, and here is where Agrippa's real skeptical attitude lies. When one passes from sensory perception of singulars to the higher levels of thought, he says, one has to make some kind of assumption to guide one's synthesis of particular perceptions into a meaningful whole. This is why Agrippa observes in another place that every science "has in it some certain principles which must be believed, and cannot by any means be demonstrated". If the fundamental principles of any science be denied, no amount of logical disputation can demonstrate them. Nature, as Hume was later to put it more explicitly, gives us no objective guide for combining intuitions into any pattern. We can, though, subject to the limitation of perceptual error, rely upon our intuitions [In a footnote, the critic writes: " 'Intuition,' as used in this paper has no mystical denotation; it is used in the philosophical sense of 'immediate apprehension.' "]. Since the reach of the senses is limited and, on the other hand, "so large is the liberty of truth", we cannot perceive it even with a "compelling judgment of the senses". When we move into this kind of "Truth"—that is, the truth of patterns or judgments on the facts—immediate perception is obviously not enough, especially if one can only perceive singulars. In retaining the concept of "Truth" as opposed to the limited truths available to the senses, Agrippa moved into the fideistic position attributed to him in the beginning.

Agrippa's general position as it appears in de Vanitate, then, is a thorough-going dismissal of any and all constructions that can be labelled as "human", nonetheless coupled with a willingness to accept the facts of experience subject only to the limitations of perceptual error. But as the last chapter of his work indicates, he is convinced that he lives in a God-centered universe which ultimately makes some kind of sense independent of human ability to perceive the sense in it. There is thus only a very limited justification for labelling Agrippa a skeptic, even on the basis of the publication which earned him the title. The word "skepticism" has a number of common meanings, and at least two of them are incompatible with each other. As a philosophical position, skepticism involves the denial that any certainty is possible concerning the phenomena of nature. As a theological position, it involves the denial of revelation or the existence of God. As it is currently used in commonsensical discourse, it signifies a critical attitude toward any theory, statement, experiment, or phenomenon until adequate proof has been produced. It is evident that none of these definitions fit Agrippa. He never denied the existence of knowledge of nature in the realm of individual fact; he certainly never denied either revelation or God, and everyone who studies the man notices the extreme credulity manifested in his other works. It can be said, in accordance with common usage, that Agrippa exhibited a "skeptical attitude" toward certain classes of statements (constructions), but to call him a skeptic is to confuse matters, for this kind of "skeptical attitude" is characteristic of empiricism, not of skepticism. His epistemological position can best be characterized as that of the pure empiricist who also believed, on faith, that his God-centered world was ultimately meaningful, if only according to some supernatural pattern. This is the same kind of combination of Platonism with empiricism which some students have attributed to Telesio and other thinkers of the period.

If this analysis is correct, it has somehow to be made to accommodate Agrippa's extreme credulity, evidenced in his three books on occult philosophy. This is the wellknown problem of "reconciling" Agrippa's belief in magic with his "skepticism". Actually there is no problem of reconciliation, once it is realized that empiricism rather than skepticism was the foundation of his epistemology. Empiricism without theoretical guidance practically guaranteed the belief he showed in magical phenomena [In a footnote, the critic writes: "It is only fair to point out that Nauert does recognize a close relationship between Agrippa's magic and what he called his 'skepticism', but within the framework of intellectual development, the notion of scientific hypothesis was called in to connect the two. The point of this [essay] is that there was no such connecting agent."]. For instance, when Aristotle asserts that the sublunar world is composed of four elements and the heavens of a fifth, Agrippa (as a hypothetical example of his reasoning) could immediately rejoin that since Aristotle cannot demonstrate this, it remains mere conjecture. On this level of argument, there was no stage in Agrippa's life when he was subservient to scholarly authority. Agrippa did appeal to the past, and he did so throughout his productive life; it can be found in the de Vanitate as well as in de Occulta Philosophia. But it was a quite different kind of appeal. Agrippa searched the records of the past for the only kind of information that he felt men could communicate to each other—individual facts. Although he could scornfully dismiss Aristotle's theoretical constructs, as he had those of the "peripatetic theology" as early as 1519, it is a different matter when he is faced, not with a construct, but with a report of an individual fact.

If, for example, Agrippa reads that a man has been revived from the dead, he has no theory to confute this reported fact. He can only argue that "the one who reported this is a liar", or "the one who reported this is guilty of perceptual error". What, though, if he finds a great number of respected authorities testifying to the same thing? He can only—as he did—remark that although the facts are hard to believe, they must be credited, inasmuch as they are certified abundantly by approved scholars. And in cases like this, of course, he would cite a great number of instances and think that he had established another "marvel" actually to have occurred. This kind of acceptance of authority signifies something quite unlike blind subservience to that authority; it is rather an example of a profound respect for brute fact and acquiescence in the weight of empirical evidence. He has, after all, no grounds for casting out the testimony, and no theory for testing its validity.

Most of the "marvels" reported in his books of magic are of this nature, and he is constantly making appeals to experience in order to establish their truth. A marvel, in its simplest definition, is only a fact that is beyond ordinary comprehension, and what is beyond ordinary comprehension varies with place and time. Science had no effective way of dealing with that which seemed to oppose itself to laws of nature until the time of David Hume. What, then, is a scholar to do at a time when he has no universal laws of nature to guide him, especially if he is committed to the belief that on the human level one can be sure only of that which is intuited? He has no choice but to place all intuitions on the same level, and as a corollary to this, to place all theoretical constructs on the same level. Many things exist in the world, Agrippa maintains, that "no otherwise than by experience and conjecture can be inquired into by us". In another place, he notes that qualities are called "occult", simply because their causes lie beyond the reach of human intellect, and philosophers attain to knowledge of them with the help of experience alone.

Among the occult qualities that Agrippa thought experience had revealed are the fact that any substance standing for a long time with salt turns to salt, the fact that the power of the lodestone may be transferred to iron by simply rubbing the two together, and that by eating the herb ditany a wounded stag can expel the arrow from his body. Again, he accepts claims that cranes have been known to medicine themselves with bulrushes, leopards with wolfsbane, and boars with ivy. Agrippa sincerely believed all the reports and he believed that knowledge of occult qualities could be useful. For example, as a thing angrily shuns its contraries or drives it out of its presence, so rhubarb acts against bile, treacle against poison, amethyst against drunkeness, and so on for a long list. Experience is also the basis for joining earthly things to heavenly things. It is experience, for example, which informs us that asparagus is under Aries' jurisdiction and garden-basil under Scorpio's, since asparagus is generated from the shawings of rams' horns and garden-basil rubbed between two stones has been known to produce scorpions.

Among all these examples of "occult qualities", some have a sound basis in fact—the power of the lodestone, for instance, may indeed in a certain empirical sense be transmitted to the iron. Most, of course, are absurd. But the fact that this is true in the light of modern knowledge should not obscure the reality that his belief in every one of these qualities stems from the same source. Observers reported each of these "occult instances" to have been the case at a particular time. The intellectually honest man who refuses to recognize the validity of theoretical guidance has no alternative but to accept or reject both the sound and the absurd on exactly the same basis—the weight of evidence, including testimony. This, of course, creates a dilemma which Agrippa expressed in a letter written toward the end of his life:

Oh! How many writings are read concerning the irresistible power of the magic art, concerning the prodigious images of the astrologers, the marvelous metamorphosis of the alchemists, and that blessed stone which Midas-like turns all to gold or silver at its touch. All which are found vain, fictitious and false as often as they are practiced literally. And yet they are handed down in writings by great and most weighty philosophers and holy men whose traditions who will dare to call false? Nay it would be impious to believe that they have written lies in those works. Therefore there is another sense than what is passed down in the letters, a sense concealed by various mysteries, but up to now openly expounded by none of the masters, which sense I doubt whether anyone can attain to solely by the mere reading of books without a skilled and trusty master, unless he be illuminated by a divine spirit, a thing which is granted to very few.

This is perhaps as close as Agrippa ever came to recognizing the the sterility of his empiricism even on the level of individual fact. All of his examples are statements of fact which were reported by a great number of writers—exactly the kind of facts he used in his de Occulta Philosophia. The alternative to accepting reported fact is not to dispute an interpretation, but—as he says—to accuse the writers of having "written falsehoods". Agrippa never hesitated to dispute anyone's interpretation—anyone's "conjecture"—but, as we have seen, he felt that facts had to be accepted if enough testimony could be accumulated in favor of them. If his own senses could err, as he realized they could, and if the weight of testimony could not be accepted, as he was on the verge of realizing here, then one must doubt even the reality of individual fact. But obviously when one doubts the reality of individual fact, one completely loses contact with the external world. In order to avoid epistemological nihilism, Agrippa retreats to his psychological insights into the nature of the human mind. Perhaps, he seems to be saying here, he just did not understand what was being said.

One cannot interpret Cornelius Agrippa as a consistent empiricist without facing the apparently contradictory fact that he offers an interpretation of his own in de Occulta Philosophia. Although the work is largely a catalogue of magic and occult miscellanies, Agrippa was not afraid to drawn conclusions from them. The picture that emerges from the three books is of a universe intimately connected by occult bonds in which man has a prescribed role. As for the role of the magician, Agrippa invokes the classic Renaissance belief concerning the relationship between the individual and the external world:

Let, therefore, everyone who would work in magic, know and understand the property, virtue, measure, order, and degree of his own soul among the powers in the universe itself.

The form of Platonism characteristic of the Renaissance is evident in this sentence—microcosm mirrors macrocosm, and is affected by it, but yet through the knowledge and understanding of his soul, the magician can be as one with the mystical powers of the universe. He had expounded the philosophy of Ficino in his early years as a lecturer, and was no doubt greatly influenced by it. Neither, of course, was this empiricism at all original. He lived in the midst of the revival of ancient skeptical schools of thought, and this, too, entered into the formation of his thought.

Although Agrippa, like many other Renaissance thinkers, was able to unite these two strains of thought—that is, he did not merely report facts in his work, but commented upon them—this seeming inconsistency offers no real challenge to my interpretation. After all, even Hume, a far greater and more sophisticated empiricist than Agrippa, adopted and even defended a pattern of interpretation. The peculiarity of Agrippa is that he did not attempt to defend any of his interpretations; he merely offered them in the spirit of one who realized that all patterns were artificial and who considered them all on the same footing. Realizing that mere experience was not enough, he had said that one penetrated to the nature of things by experience and conjecture. His use of the word "conjecture", I think, is significant. He was no doubt thinking of the difference between fact and conjecture when he said in the dedication of his first book of occult philosophy that while it probably contains much that is in error, it nevertheless contains many useful and necessary "things". The facts, he thought, would be useful no matter what the value of the pattern he had placed upon them.

His unusual religious attitudes—unusual at least for the time—are another indication of his undogmatic acceptance of a pattern. He had defied the authorities as early as 1519 by defending the views of Jacques LeFevre d'Etaples; in 1525, he possessed the books of Luther and Carlstadt. He never left the Roman Catholic faith and we have no reason to suspect hypocrisy [In a footnote, the critic adds: "There is not one shred of evidence which could explain why Agrippa never actually broke with the Roman faith. It is a matter of common observation, though, that while all kinds of skeptics (using the word loosely here) are usually at odds with the established order, they do not make good revolutionaries. Both Montaigne and Hume, for example, were suspect to many of their contemporaries, but both were staunch defenders of the social status quo. From the viewpoint of an empiricist, there is no reason for change—what we have at least has the virtue of being established and, presumably, tolerable, while we have no way of knowing what evils a change will bring with it. The outcome of the empirical view of reality is most clearly seen in Burke, although there were other elements involved in his case."]; yet he could write to Melancthon in a letter dated September, 1532:

May God keep you in safety and prosper you, according to the desire of your Christian mind. Salute for me Martin Luther, that unconquered heretic, who, as Saint Paul says in the Acts, after the way which they call heresy worships the God of his fathers.

At about the same time, he was interrogated by the authorities for publicly calling Luther an "unconquered heretic". The theologians contended that since the Church had declared him wrong, Luther was, indeed, conquered. From their viewpoint, "unconquered heretic" was a contradiction in terms. Agrippa countered their argument by pointing out the absurdity of mistaking the word for the fact. Luther was, after all, making new converts daily and, however desirable that end might be, he was not conquered. The theologians could condemn him with every known invective without bringing his "conquest" any closer.

Perhaps the best way to sum up this evaluation of Cornelius Agrippa is to say that, as in the controversy over Luther, he was always willing to confront any notion with sheer fact. Whatever the pattern he might place upon the world in order to make some sense of it, the pattern had to yield to the fact. That this approach has its dangers has been shown—pursued consistently, it guarantees credulity as to reported fact, and there is a possibility that it will evolve into nihilism. But it can also, at times, produce the instances of hard-headed, commonsense realism which is apparent in his argument with the theologians.

One must ask, though, why the faith which Agrippa postulated as the only way to arrive at eternal "Truth" seemingly had so little to do with the rest of his philosophy. An answer was at least implied at the beginning of this [essay]: Faith applied to a different world from the world of fact—the world of inner connections between things, of essences, and of purpose. That this higher world existed was an article of belief for Cornelius Agrippa; his chief insight into it was that he could only conjecture about its nature. With this attitude, faith could have no relation to fact: it could only justify the use of facts in conjecture, and cause a continuing belief in "constructions" throughout all his failure to find the right one.

It is always hazardous to speculate about whether a given attitude is "scientific". Contributions to science have come from men holding such vastly different presuppositions that any generalization this broad is likely to be refuted as soon as it is made. Kepler, for example, who undoubtedly made great contributions to science, was a good deal like Agrippa. He observed facts, and by the method of trial and error tried to find a pattern that would fit them. Although he tested countless fantastic schemes before finding the right one, his ultimate success is a matter of record. Whether his success was by accident is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, without going into the broader, and perhaps insoluble question, one can give an answer to the limited question of whether the methods of trial and error is the same as the method of "scientific hypothesis and experiment".

I think that the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this analysis of Agrippa is that the two methods, trial-and-error and scientific hypothesis, are radically different. It is, then, necessary to reject the notion that Agrippa was reaching, even unconsciously, toward the concept of scientific hypothesis and experiment. It is at the same time necessary to reject the close relationship which Haydn found between unsystematic empiricism and modern scientific methodology. While the concept of scientific hypothesis does, of course, have to do with facts, and requires a certain respect for fact, Agrippa's empirical epistemology bears no relationship to scientific hypothesis. Modern physical science owes its origin, to a great extent, to relinquishing the unquestioning acquiescence in fact which was typical of Agrippa. The making of a verifiable hypothesis, as the example of Galileo illustrated, requires that one initially leave the realm of intuited fact for the world of mathematical idealizations. Who could conceive of Agrippa studying the path of a projectile by rolling a ball down an inclined plane? Or of announcing, when the weight of empirical evidence was overwhelmingly against him, that under ideal conditions a projectile would continue in a straight line forever? He would, rather—as Galileo's Aristotelian contemporaries did—study the projectile itself, and pronounce the scientific constructs "fantastic". After all, there is no place on earth where the ideal conditions demanded by Galileo could be found to exist.

The crucial difference is at what point the respect for fact enters. The method of modern science is to subject the hypothesis to facts after the idealized conditions are calculated and proper allowances are made for the operation of the hypothesis under actual conditions. Pure empiricism, however, demands that if hypotheses are introduced at all they shall be used to rationalize facts already accepted at their face value. For instance, one first accepts the "fact" that people have been raised from the dead, then elaborates a theory to explain the fact. The flitting from theory to theory, the acceptance of one occult system after another provided it can "explain" some intuition or reported fact, is the logical absolute of pure empiricism when it is held in conjunction with a faith that the world ultimately makes sense. Unystematic and unguided trial-and-error is the only method an empiricist can regard as trustworthy, and as long as he is true to his presuppositions he will never advance beyond it.

From this point of view, Agrippa's endorsement of Lullian rationalism is perfectly understandable. So with geomancy, astrology, and innumerable other black arts, he was willing to flirt with Lullian rationalism if it could explain some of the facts of the world. According to Agrippa's empiricism, it was not required, or even expected, that the various theories he held should be related to one another. The principle of non-contradiction was simply a "construct" like all the others be tried and found wanting. "Do I contradict myself?" he might have said with Walt Whitman, "Very well then, I contradict myself". One thing should be apparent by now—whatever the chance contributions this trial-and-error procedure might make, it cannot be called "the scientific method". The real significance of Cornelius Agrippa in the history of thought is to illustrate the profound difference between the method that came to be known (if unjustly) as "Baconian", and the method of modern science.

Agrippa was a widely learned man and he was as versatile as either l'uomo universale or Faust. But the habitat of the universal man was Renaissance Italy and that of Goethe's Faust was a Germany modeled after Renaissance Italy. The universal man knew his place in the cosmos, and knowing this, had no doubts about his ability to penetrate to the inner nature of that cosmos by the method of human intelligence and human activity. Faust, still a Renaissance man, repudiated human science, but only to reaffirm his ability to penetrate into the meaning of the world by another method. Had Agrippa lived in Renaissance Italy, he would perhaps have been l'uomo universale, and in his own time and place had he been less intellectually honest, he might have been Faust. But living in Reformation Germany where two rival dogmatisms faced each other on equally insecure grounds, and having his particular blend of faith and empiricism, he was closer to the two worlds of Immanuel Kant than he was either to I'uomo universale or Faust.