Never in any age were the nobles so little informed as to natural
science, and never was judicial astrology held in greater honor; for
at no period in history was there a greater general desire to know the
future. This ignorance and this curiosity had led to the utmost
confusion in human knowledge; all things were still mere personal
experience; the nomenclatures of theory did not exist; printing was
done at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no
facility; the Church persecuted science and all research which was
based on the analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery.
So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist,
mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six
attributes, all meeting in the single person of the physician. In
those days a superior physician was supposed to be cultivating magic;
while curing his patient he was drawing their horoscopes. Princes
protected the men of genius who were willing to reveal the future;
they lodged them in their palaces and pensioned them.
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