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In the next century, in Van Helmont we meet with the Archaeus everywhere presiding, controlling and regulating the animate and inanimate bodies, working this time through agents, local ferments. The Rosicrucians had their direct inspiration from his writings, and such mystics as the English Rosicrucian Fludd were strong Paracelsians.
He recognized three basic substances, sulphur, mercury and salt, which were the necessary ingredients of all bodies organic or inorganic. They were the basis of the three principles out of which the Archaeus, the spirit of nature, formed all bodies.
So that the one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, more closely than anything else.
And as he was fingering at my heart, and discoursing sneeringly about Van Helmont's dreams of the Archaeus, and the animal spirit which dwells within the solar plexus, Eleanor glided by again, like an angel, and drew my soul out of the knot of nerves, with one velvet finger-tip.
The spiritual agencies of diseases, he said, had nothing to do with either angels or devils, but were the spirits of human beings. He believed that all food contained poisons, and that the function of digestion was to separate the poisonous from the nutritious. In the stomach was an archaeus, or alchemist, whose duty was to make this separation.
Now, this here elixir, sold for no more than sixpence a phial, contains the essence of the alkahest, the archaeus, the catholicon, the menstruum, the sun, the moon, and, to sum up all in one word, is the true, genuine, unadulterated, unchangeable, immaculate, and specific chruseon pepuromenon ek puros." The audience were variously affected by this learned oration.
He believed the whole body to be controlled by an archaeus influus, the soul by the archaei insiti, and these in turn controlled by the central archeus. His system is too elaborate and complicated for full explanation, but its chief service to medicine was in introducing new chemical methods in the preparation of drugs.
So that the one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending the one scheme which the Archaeus of the old speculators strives to carry out, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent or parents, more closely than anything else.
Nevertheless, Bichat rendered a solid service to physiological progress by insisting upon the fact that what we call life, in one of the higher animals, is not an indivisible unitary archaeus dominating, from its central seat, the parts of the organism, but a compound result of the synthesis of the separate lives of those parts.
In digestive disorders the archaeus failed to do this, and the poisons thus gaining access to the system were "coagulated" and deposited in the joints and various other parts of the body. Thus the deposits in the kidneys and tartar on the teeth were formed; and the stony deposits of gout were particularly familiar examples of this.
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