Introduction What Was the Occult?

This book is a study of the occult, and of its intellectual and practical aspects. Magical behavior is a concept that inevitably comes up in discussions of the occult; in fact, writers on occult subjects might refer to popular magic favorably, although this depends on how confident they felt in endorsing what many reject as “superstition.” There exists a complex relationship between scientific discovery and occult thinking, but the initial chapters of the book show that they were not necessarily at war with each other. Discrediting magic or the occult does not help advance natural science; on the contrary, occult claims help draw some definite conclusions when submitted to scientific scrutiny. The gradual dying out of the formal dialogue between natural science and the occult in the eighteenth century was due mainly to the burden of a rigorous distinction between questions that could be answered by natural explanations and those that could not.