ject is
incapable of being reduced into a regular form, and is of a nature
particularly seductive to an excursive talent. He appears to have
studied legerdemain for the purpose of showing how much that is
apparently unaccountable can nevertheless be performed without the
intervention of supernatural assistance, even when it is impossible to
persuade the vulgar that the devil has not been consulted on the
occasion. Scot also had intercourse with some of the celebrated
fortune-tellers, or Philomaths, of the time; one of whom he brings
forward to declare the vanity of the science which he himself had once
professed.

To defend the popular belief of witchcraft there arose a number of
advocates, of whom Bodin and some others neither wanted knowledge nor
powers of reasoning. They pressed the incredulous party with the charge
that they denied the existence of a crime against which the law had
denounced a capital punishment. As that law was understood to emanate
from James himself, who was reigning monarch during the hottest part of
the controversy, the English authors who defended the opposite side were
obliged to entrench themselves under an evasion, to avoid maintaining an
argument unpalatable to a degree to those in power, and which might
perchance have proved unsafe to those who used it. With a certain degree
of sophistry they answered that they did not doubt the possibility of
witches, but only demurred to what is their nature, and how they came to
be such--according to the scholastic jargon, that the question in
respect to witches was not _de existentia_, but only _de modo
existendi_.

By resorting to so subtle an argument those who impugned the popular
belief were obliged, with some inconsistency, to grant that witchcraft
had existed, and might exist, only insisting that it was a species of
witchcraft consisting of they knew not what, but certainly of something
different from that which legislators, judges, and juries had hitherto
considered the statute as designed to repress.

In the meantime (the rather that the debate was on a subject
particularly difficult of comprehension) the debating parties grew warm,
and began to call names. Bodin, a lively Frenchman of an irritable
habit, explained the zeal of Wierus to protect the tribe of sorcerers
from punishment, by stating that he himself was a conjurer and the
scholar of Cornelius Agrippa, and might therefore well desire to save
the lives of those accused of the same