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Updated: April 30, 2025
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.
His attitude towards existing doctrines was as revolutionary as that of Paracelsus, and he rejected the teachings of Galen and all the ancient writers, although retaining some of the views of Paracelsus. He modified the archaeus of Paracelsus, and added many complications to it.
Nor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that mad scoundrel, Paracelsus, with which he pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor archaeus or spiritus rector of that visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gas, ferments, and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilised vitriol of other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your weak heads with such jargon, just as a Germanised m r throws dust in your eyes, by lugging in and ringing the changes on the balance of power, the Protestant religion, and your allies on the continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera.
I have endeavoured, in the first part of this discourse, to give you a conception of the direction towards which modern physiology is tending; and I ask you, what is the difference between the conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, and the old notion of an Archaeus governing and directing blind matter within each living body, except this that here, as elsewhere, matter and law have devoured spirit and spontaneity?
How far he was a believer in astrology, charms and divination it is not easy to say. From many of the writings in his collected works one would gather, as I have already quoted, that he was a strong believer. The Archaeus, not the stars, controls man's destiny. No one has held more firmly the dualistic conception of the healing art.
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