reason
began to appear. It is significant that at this very time, when the old
superstition was apparently everywhere triumphant, the declaration
by Poulet that he and his brother and his cousin had, by smearing
themselves with ointment, changed themselves into wolves and devoured
children, brought no severe punishment upon them. The judges sent him to
a mad-house. More and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit
to save the superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in
France, began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it.
Malebranche spoke against the delusion; Seguier led the French courts
to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; the great chancellor,
D'Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of Paris that, if they wished to
stop sorcery, they must stop talking about it--that sorcerers are more
to be pitied than blamed.(374)

(374) See Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, vol. i, pp. 488, 489; vol.
ii, p. 529.

But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approaching,
the theological current was strengthened by a great ecclesiastic--the
greatest theologian that France has produced, whose influence upon
religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was enormous--Bossuet, Bishop
of Meaux. There had been reason to expect that Bossuet would at least do
something to mitigate the superstition; for his writings show that, in
much which before his day had been ascribed to diabolic possession,
he saw simple lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal
interpretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other
scientific truth developed in his time, led him also to attack this:
he delivered and published two great sermons, which, while showing
some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the less that the
fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still to be tenaciously
held. What this idea was may be seen in one typical statement: he
declared that "a single devil could turn the earth round as easily as we
turn a marble."(375)

(375) See the two sermons, Sur les Demons (which are virtually but two
versions of the same sermon), in Bousset's works, edition of 1845,
vol. iii, p. 236 et seq.; also Dziewicki, in The Nineteenth Century, as
above. On Bousset's resistance to other scientific truths, especially
in astronomy, geology, and political economy, see other chapters in this
work.

III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.--PINEL