opher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501)
was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the
appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war,
and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superstitious,
he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud
connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more
as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural
philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development,
for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed
from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic
under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad
Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about
it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always
moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of
novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked
the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature;
his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general
praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than
of direct impressions from without; and his many references to
ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases.

Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of
history, as represented by Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547) and Johann
Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to
wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the
imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an
impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere,
especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for
Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany
at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who
were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of
such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535).
His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these:
everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's
strings is struck, the others sound with it: the analogical
correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations
between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists
between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon,
growth; Mercury, imagin