the First employed much of his learned leisure upon questions of
witchcraft and demonology, in which he fully believed and sir Matthew
Hale in the year 1664 caused two old women to be hanged upon a charge
of unlawful communion with infernal agents.

The history of mankind therefore will be very imperfect, and our
knowledge of the operations and eccentricities of the mind lamentably
deficient, unless we take into our view what has occurred under this
head. The supernatural appearances with which our ancestors conceived
themselves perpetually surrounded must have had a strong tendency to
cherish and keep alive the powers of the imagination, and to penetrate
those who witnessed or expected such things with an extraordinary
sensitiveness. As the course of events appears to us at present, there
is much, though abstractedly within the compass of human sagacity to
foresee, which yet the actors on the scene do not foresee: but the
blindness and perplexity of short-sighted mortals must have been
wonderfully increased, when ghosts and extraordinary appearances were
conceived liable to cross the steps and confound the projects of men
at every turn, and a malicious wizard or a powerful enchanter might
involve his unfortunate victim in a chain of calamities, which no
prudence could disarm, and no virtue could deliver him from. They were
the slaves of an uncontrolable destiny, and must therefore have been
eminently deficient in the perseverance and moral courage, which may
justly be required of us in a more enlightened age. And the men (but
these were few compared with the great majority of mankind), who
believed themselves gifted with supernatural endowments, must have
felt exempt and privileged from common rules, somewhat in the same way
as the persons whom fiction has delighted to pourtray as endowed with
immeasurable wealth, or with the power of rendering themselves
impassive or invisible. But, whatever were their advantages or