 The usual compilation of discordant opinions of philosophers was partly shaped by texts of the ancient skeptics; but for the most part Agrippa made use of more recent sources: Ficino, Reuchlin, and Francesco Giorgio Veneto. There are no quotations from Gianfrancesco Pico’s Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, the first detailed reading of the work of Sextus Empiricus (Schmitt 1967: 237–42). This significant omission suggests that Agrippa did not agree with the skeptical fideism expressed by Gianfrancesco. De vanitate did not, in fact, question the human ability to know causes. Rather, it questioned the capacity of Aristotelian epistemology to account for the nature of things. In chapter 7, Agrippa states that knowledge based on sense perception is not able to guarantee a sure and truthful experience, since the senses are fallible; nor does it succeed in revealing the causes and properties of phenomena or in knowing what is only intelligible, since this escapes the grasp of the senses. Not all human knowledge was open to question, however. Instead, Agrippa, by proving that a sense-based theory of knowledge cannot produce science, intended to introduce another epistemology, one which he regarded as the foundation for true knowledge. So, in chapter 52, “On the Soul”, he did not uphold even the façade of skepticism. “Demonic Aristotle” (daemoniacus Aristoteles) made the soul dependent on the nature of the body, defining it as “the first perfection of a natural body possessing organs, which potentially has life” (Aristotle, De anima II.1). “Divine Plato” (divinus ille Plato) aligned himself with those philosophers (Zoroaster, Hermes, and Orpheus) who had defined the soul as a divine substance: the “product of an incorporeal maker” and dependent “solely on the power of its efficient cause, not on the bowels of matter” (52, pp. 109–10). Agrippa noted the disagreement between Aristotle and Plato on this subject, not in order to lead his readers to a skeptical “suspension of judgment” (epoché). Rather, he intentionally contrasted two different models of rationality, explicitly weighing up their value. At least on this matter, the “ancient theology” (prisca theologia) and the Platonic school were found to be consistent with the criterion of truth, the Holy Scriptures.