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Updated: May 5, 2025
Hippocrates might well helpe Almanack makers, but here he had not a worde to saie, a man might sooner catch the sweate with plodding ouer him to no end, than cure the sweat with any of his impotent principles. Paracelsus with his spirit of the butterie, and his spirits of minerals, could not so much as say, God amend him, to the matter.
"Von Helmont, in the same pursuit, discovered the properties of gas," says Mackay; "Geber made discoveries in chemistry, which were equally important; and Paracelsus, amid his perpetual visions of the transmutation of metals, found that mercury was a remedy for one of the most odious and excruciating of all the diseases that afflict humanity." As we shall see a little farther on, alchemy finally evolved into modern chemistry, but not until it had passed through several important transitional stages.
They were the works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head.
He was human he was splendidly human. Browning's father was a bank-clerk; and Robert Browning, the Third, author of "Paracelsus," could have secured his father's place in the Bank of England, if he had had ambitions. And the fact that he had not was a source of silent sorrow to the father, even to the day of his death, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-six.
"Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever he be.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did three things in medicine shattered authority, laid the foundation of an accurate knowledge of the structure of the human body and demonstrated how its functions should be studied intelligently with which advances, as illustrating this period, may be associated the names of Paracelsus, Vesalius and Harvey. PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint."
Professor Sudhoff, of Leipzig, has made an exhaustive bibliographical study of his writings, there have been recent monographs by Julius Hartmann, and Professors Franz and Karl Strunz, and a sympathetic summary of his life and writings has been published by the late Miss Stoddart. Indeed there is at present a cult of Paracelsus.
He, like Paracelsus, had read that bitter sentence which declares that "collective man outstrips the individual": "God has conceded two sights to a man One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, The other, of the minute's work, man's first Step to the plan's completion." And the poor minute's work assigned him by the divine law of justice and pity he accepts as his whole life's task.
Yet, though he accepted us at our face value, and began to talk of his strange discoveries there was none of the old familiar prating about matrix and flux, elixir, magisterium, magnum opus, the mastery and the quintessence, those alternate names for the philosopher's stone which Paracelsus, Simon Forman, Jerome Cardan, and the other mediaeval worthies indulged in.
The spirit of his whole life is well expressed in his Paracelsus, written when he was only twenty-two years old: I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive, what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In his good time.
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