(image from the title page, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot. The Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov, May 5 2013.)
Reginald Scot's The Discouerie of Witchcraft was published in 1584, some twenty years before the Witchcraft Act of 1604, and was probably in part responsible for James' vehement assertion in the Daemonologie that witchcraft legitimately belonged in the Christian worldview. The Discouerie can basically be divided into two segments: the first is the assertion that witchcraft does not exist, and the second pulls back the curtain from popular magic tricks to show that they are not magic at all, but instead illusion.
Scot lays his case bare in his introductory letter to Sir Roger Manwood Knight, in fact, when he says: "But they saie that witches are persuaded, and thinke, that they doo indeede those mischeefs; and have a will to performe that which the devil committeth: and that therefore they are worthie to die. By which reason everie one should be executed, that wisheth evil to his neighbor, &c. But if the will should be punished by man, according to the offense against God, we should be driven by thousands at once to the slaughterhouse or butcherie."
Further, in chapter nine of Book Three, Scot makes the case for witches as "melancholie" old women, and not purveyors of dark magics, as King James believed: "If anie man advisedly marks their words, actions, cogitations and gestures, he shall perceive that melancholie abounding in their head, and occupieng their brain, hath deprived or rather depraved their judgments...for you shall understand, that the force which melancholie hath, and the effects that it worketh in the bodie of a man, or rather of a woman, are almost incredible...But what is it they will not imagine, and consequentlie confesse that they can doo; specialie being so earnestlie persuaded thereunto, so sorelie tor/mented, so craftilie examined, with such promises of favour, as whereby they imagine, that they shall ever after live in great credit & welth?"
In these two passages we see Scot's case for witch hunts as persecution of old women. The "melancholie" of these weaker members of society as a disease that leads the old women in question to believe that they really are that which they have been accused of being. Witchcraft exists only in the minds of those who fear it and those who, because of their mental condition, have been conditioned by those in fear to believe that they really are responsible for random acts of chance.
For Scot, because women are accused of witchcraft both vile and healing, witchcraft is "a kingdom divided against itself"; if witchcraft is an actual threat, surely it does not need the persecution of the state, for it works at cross-purposes to itself, and should eventually die out for that reason. Likewise, if witchcraft is not theologically sound, as Scot believes, there can be no good reason for pursuing "witches" and putting them to death.