ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the attitudes of historians that have changed more in the last few decades than the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. But recently historians, especially those influenced by anthropological studies, have become increasingly aware of how entangled with magic science still was in the seventeenth century. Recent students of Francis Bacon, the ideological founder of modern science, have stressed the Hermetic and millenarian elements in his thought. Exponents of the Paracelsan and Hermetic traditions in the early seventeenth century were no less critical of the traditional scholastic Aristotelianism of the universities than were the experimental mechanical philosophers. Magic today is something that happens in fairy stories, or in Christmas pantomimes. The mechanical philosophy, among other things, rejected magic: it was a secularized Calvinism. In England too there were close links between the Hermetic tradition and politico-religious radicalism. In the revolutionary decades hitherto unpublishable works on astrology and alchemy were printed in profusion.
