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I must observe that the hermetic attempt to get back to Adam’s condition has some of the homunculus phantasy in it. Adam was regarded as androgyne, a being at once man and woman, but sufficient in himself alone for impregnation and procreation.
A quick visualization of that gnomish, froggish face was enough to dispel the suspicion. At least the petted and rather fastidious Miss Brewster's fancy would be captured only by a gentleman, not by any such homunculus as the mountain dweller. Her interest, perhaps; the man possessed the bizarre attraction of the freakish. But anything else was absurd.
In short, if we regard the matter somewhat more closely, it is after all not so extraordinary that they made serious attempts to create the homunculus. Generally Paracelsus is regarded as the author of the idea, which to the somewhat uncritical, could not, in my opinion, help being in the air. There are different views regarding the part played by Paracelsus.
The Sphinx, that double being, symbolizes the double natured man, to whom his bestiality still clings. The homunculus motive would likewise have to be regarded in a new light. That means the same thing as the artificial creation of a man. We recognize therefore the anagogic significance of the homunculus, the idea of which we found closely interwoven with alchemy in general.
+26+. Savage science, though it generally identified the soul with the breath, and regarded it as a separate interior form, seems not to have attempted to define its precise locus, posture, and extension within the body the early man was content to regard it as a vague homunculus.
By some accident one of the bottles fell one day and was broken. The homunculus within died after a few painful respirations in spite of all efforts to save him, and the body was buried in the garden. An attempt to generate another, made by the Count without the assistance of the Abbé, who had left, failed; it produced only a small thing like a leech, which had little vitality and soon died.
Today, after dinner, Goethe read me the second scene of the second act of "Faust," where Mephistopheles visits Wagner, who is on the point of making a human being by chemical means. The work succeeds; the Homunculus appears in the phial, as a shining being, and is at once active.
The venerable ex-President, then a Member of the House, mentions him as the homunculus Douglas and with acrid malevolence describes him as raving out his hour in abusive invectives, his face convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and lashing himself into such heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burned out.
Again began that difficult dragging up-stairs and down-stairs of the naked, dead stoker, with the help of the young admirer of Kropotkin. The dispute between Ingigerd and Deborah, his sermonising of Füllenberg and the man in the smoking-room repeated themselves, each repetition intensifying his torment. The homunculus in the glass sphere in Doctor Wilhelm's cabin appeared again.
The conception of man as the creator of man was quickly discredited in the material domain; but the psychical homunculus still persists among the practical conceptions of pedagogy.
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