●   ●   ●    few such experimenters among both the accused and the accusers, and he suggests that within the seventeenth-century theological framework it would have been natural for them to think of themselves as having made a pact with the devil. On these terms the psychic explosion of that year would be attributable to a diabolism that was no less actual because a later age would reclassify its demons and incubi as neuroses and psychoses, its witches and warlocks as dabblers in hypnoidal suggestion.