Note 253 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

It is at this stage that we begin to realize the full play of the Counter-Reformation, as against the spirit of science. The movement of mere theological and ecclesiastical heresy had visibly begun to recede in the world of mind, and in its stead, alike in Protestant and in Catholic lands, there was emerging a new activity of scientific research, vaguely menacing to all theistic faith. Kepler represented it in Germany, Harriott and Harvey and Gilbert and Bacon in England; from Italy had come of late the portents of Bruno and Galileo; even Spain yielded the Examen de Ingenios of Huarte (1575), where with due protestation of theism the physicist insists upon natural causation; and now Vanini was exhibiting the same incorrigible zest for a naturalistic explanation of all things. His dialogues are full of such questionings; the mere metaphysic and theosophy of the Amphitheatrum are being superseded by discussions on physical and physiological phenomena. It was for this, doubtless, that the De Arcanis won the special vogue over which the Jesuit Garasse was angrily exclaiming ten years later.253 Not merely the doubts cast upon sorcery and diabolical possession, but the whole drift, often enough erratic, of the inquiry as to how things in nature came about, caught the curiosity of the time, soon to be stimulated by more potent and better-governed minds than that of the ill-starred Vanini. And for every new inquirer there would be a hostile zealot in the Church, where the anti-intellectual instinct was now so much more potent than it had been in the days before Luther, when heresy was diagnosed only as a danger to revenue.