an 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

PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint." He roused men against the
dogmatism of the schools, and he stimulated enormously the practical
study of chemistry. These are his great merits, against which must be
placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental medicine, some his own,
some foisted in his name, the influence of which is still with us.

"With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged to you again" is the
verdict of three centuries on Paracelsus. In return for unmeasured abuse
of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been held up to obloquy
as the arch-charlatan of history. We have taken a cheap estimate of
him from Fuller and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers
who debased or perverted his writings. Fuller(4) picked him out as
exemplifying the drunken quack, whose body was a sea wherein the tide
of drunkenness was ever ebbing and flowing--"He boasted that shortly
he would order Luther and the Pope, as well as he had done Galen and
Hippocrates. He was never seen to pray, and seldome came to Church.
He was not onely skilled in naturall Magick (the utmost bounds whereof
border on the suburbs of hell) but is charged to converse constantly
with familiars. Guilty he was of all vices but wantonnesse: . . . "

(4) Fuller: The Holy and Profane State, Cambridge, 1642, p. 56.

Francis Bacon, too, says many hard things of him.(5)

(5) Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Bk.
II, Pickering ed., London, 1840, p. 181. Works, Spedding ed.,
III, 381.

To the mystics, on the other hand, he is Paracelsus the Great, the
divine, the most supreme of the Christian magi, whose writings are too
precious for science, the monarch of secrets, who has discovered the
Universal Medicine. This is illustrated in Browning's well-known poem
"Paracelsus," published when he was only twenty-one; than which there
is no more pleasant picture in literature of the man and of his
aspirations. His was a "searching and impetuous soul" that sought to win
from nature some startling secret--". . . a tincture of force to flush
old age with youth, or breed gold, or imprison moonbeams till they
change to opal shafts!" At the same time with that capacity for
self-deception which characteri