SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 135 



self-praise, as when he says: "My back hair knows more than you and all 

 your hack writers; my shoe-laces are more learned than your Galen and Avi- 

 cenna." And his confidence in success is unbounded. "I shall be king and the 



kingdom shall be mine . I wish I could protect my bald head from flies 



as easily as I do my kingdom, and were Milan as secure against its enemies as 

 ray kingdom is against you, no Swiss nor Landsknecht would find his way 

 there." The coarse expressions with which he spices his controversial writ- 

 ings are such that they could not possibly be quoted. Otherwise his language 

 is vigorous and original; he wrote in German, like his great contemporary 

 Luther, for whom in his writings he expresses the greatest admiration. 



Alche7nistic conceptiofi of the human body and its junctions 

 Paracelsus's scientific theories are far more difficult to characterize than his 

 personality. As the essential part of his activities he always regarded his 

 medical practice, and his general theories of life invariably have direct 

 reference to diseases and how to fight against them. And, being originally an 

 alchemist, at bottom he despised anatomy as he did all detailed research in 

 general. He sought rather to get the human body and its functions regarded 

 as a part of the world in its entirety and therefore also as dependent upon the 

 cosmic process, as it goes on both on the earth's surface and in the firmament 

 that surrounds it. This was, indeed, just what Aristotle strove after, but 

 while the latter sought to solve the problem by means of a theory which had 

 primary reference to the forms of being, to Paracelsus, who from his early 

 youth had lived in the thought-world of mediaeval alchemy, existence 

 represented one single mighty chemical process. The alchemistic thought- 

 structure was, of course, based upon experiments of an essentially magical 

 character and upon speculations of neo-Platonic-oriental origin, especially 

 upon the Hebrew cabbala, with its belief in the secret power of words and 

 graphical signs and their mystical connexion with the things they denoted. 

 All these elements of learned speculation Paracelsus interwove with all that 

 he had learnt of folk-magic during his years of wandering, into a natural- 

 philosophical system of unique character. Its guiding thought probably 

 emanates directly or indirectly from the cabbala — that is to say, the in- 

 trinsic connexion that Paracelsus believes is to be found between everything 

 that exists: the celestial bodies, the things on the earth, and human beings. 

 This occult connexion, which Paracelsus considers it to be the function of 

 science to investigate, leads him, the more involved he becomes, into a 

 mysticism which a modern reader will find extremely difficult to grasp even 

 in its main features. And the systematic divisions of the subject, with which 

 Paracelsus is excessively generous, certainly do not make the matter any 

 clearer. In one of his principal works on science in general, which he himself 

 published under the title of Paramirum, he divides the causes of sickness, 

 which he always takes as his starting-point, into five classes: Ens astrale. 



