ABSTRACT
Between the middle of the fifteenth century when Leonardo da Vinci was born and the middle of the seventeenth which saw the birth of Isaac Newton, people's relationship with the physical world was changing at an increasingly startling rate. Everywhere people looked, they seemed to see confirmation of the dire straits to which humanity had reduced itself – lack of faith, moral decadence, rampant evil. The signs of Christ's advent, listed by St Mark and St Luke, had appeared already, too, and Nature herself seemed to be reflecting this universal decay. Theoretical awareness of the moral dangers inherent in such actions, then, does not seem to have affected the behaviour of those very closely involved in the development of the sciences. This ambiguity, indeed, can be seen in the designation 'natural magic' applied to an enormous range of subject-matter most of which does not appear to be magical in the way ritual or demonic magic clearly is.
