ea to which, if he had kept true, his
life would have been a happier one--the firm belief that all pure science
was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second or
third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or Hippocrates or
Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic philosophers round him
did) in the place of God: but by going straight to nature at first hand,
and listening to what Bacon calls "the voice of God revealed in facts."
True and noble is the passage with which he begins his "Labyrinthus
Medicorum," one of his attacks on the false science of his day,

"The first and highest book of all healing," he says, "is called wisdom,
and without that book no man will carry out anything good or useful . . .
And that book is God Himself. For in Him alone who hath created all
things, the knowledge and principle of all things dwells . . . without
Him all is folly. As the sun shines on us from above, so He must pour
into us from above all arts whatsoever. Therefore the root of all
learning and cognition is, that we should seek first the kingdom of
God--the kingdom of God in which all sciences are founded . . . If any
man think that nature is not founded on the kingdom of God, he knows
nothing about it. All gifts," he repeats again and again, confused and
clumsily (as is his wont), but with a true earnestness, "are from God."

The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who seeks first the
kingdom of God in facts, investigating nature reverently, patiently, in
faith believing that God, who understands His own work best, will make
him understand it likewise. The false man of science is he who seeks the
kingdom of this world, who cares nothing about the real interpretation of
facts: but is content with such an interpretation as will earn him the
good things of this world--the red hat and gown, the ambling mule, the
silk clothes, the partridges, capons, and pheasants, the gold florins
chinking in his palm. At such pretenders Paracelsus sneered, at last
only too fiercely, not only as men whose knowledge consisted chiefly in
wearing white gloves, but as rogues, liars, villains, and every epithet
which his very racy vocabulary, quickened (it is to be feared) by wine
and laudanum, could suggest. With these he contrasts the true men of
science. It is difficult for us now to understand how a man setting out
in life with such pure and noble views should descend at last (if indeed
he did des