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Updated: June 6, 2025
While Boyle was a far more skillful chemist than van Helmont, he did not have any greater diagnostic acumen. And clearly, from the standpoint of scientific method, he lacked any sharp criterion of cure. Various patients were ill with various diseases; he gave them one or another preparation; the patients recovered. Controls there were none.
Monsieur de Comminges prepared to question him strictly, hoping to discourse with him on the matters that he had read of in Van Helmont and Bodinus; but he was not able to do so, much to his regret, for the crowd became so great, and cripples and others pressed around so impatiently to be the first cured, that the servants were obliged to use threats, and even force, before they could establish order among them, or place them in proper ranks.
The "Capsula" entitled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at New London, and is in the possession of our own Society. He means, by these words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the "Vicar of Wakefield."
What then was it that prevented men apparently right up to the time of van Helmont from gaining the slightest inkling of the materiality of this substance? To find an answer to this question, let us resort once more to our method of observing things genetically, combined with the principle of not considering parts without considering the whole to which they organically belong.
Paracelsus was succeeded by his scholar van Helmont, who had much more learning, but was as great an enthusiast, both in the chemical and medical arts as his master, and embraced most of his paradoxical opinions; and, having more technical terms, he frequently used them rather to dazzle and confound the understandings of his readers, than to inform their judgments.
Metals also had great medicinal potency. Antimony, lead, iron, mercury, were well known, and of special importance was copper, the Venus of the early chemists. The medicinal virtue which inhered in Butler's stone and in other powerful fermental remedies, van Helmont designated as "drif," which he said means, in the vernacular, virgin sand or earth.
He pretended to find the elixir of life; and Louis expected, by his means, to have enjoyed the crown for a century. Van Helmont also pretended to have once performed with success the process of transmuting quicksilver; and was, in consequence, invited by the Emperor Rudolph II. to fix his residence at the court of Vienna.
He tried me on another occasion, and then gave me up. I was clearly not a "sensitive." Sir Charles had quite a library of occult books, from which I endeavoured to glean a little knowledge, and great rubbish most of them were. Raymond Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Van Helmont; they were all there, in French, German, Latin, and English.
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of mystics, Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc.
On the other hand, he is extremely uncritical when he himself uses the term "cure" and when he attributes cures to particular medicines. His skepticism he indicates in references, for example, to Paracelsus and van Helmont. Here, of course, we see further a feature of critical acumen.
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