128 Van Helmont and the Rise [lect. 



Death is the loss of the archceus, the natural chemical changes 

 being then left entirely to themselves. Disease is the failure 

 of the archceus to govern aright, and is often the result of 

 the entrance into the body of germs bringing about chemical 

 changes which the archceus cannot master. 



From this basis of philosophy there naturally followed his 

 system of therapeutics, which consisted on the one hand in 

 drugs which by their chemical properties assist the archceus in 

 its struggles with chemical changes, and on the other in occult 

 invisible spiritual agencies, magnetic, astral and the like (for 

 the stars working through the archcei affect the chemical pro- 

 cesses of the body) which more directly join hands with the 

 archceus. 



Paracelsus' doctrines as he put them forward had little or 

 nothing in common with either the Galenic teaching of the 

 day or the anatomical teaching of the succeeding age. They 

 stood outside these, and seemed to such men as Vesalius 

 and his followers the ravings of an ignorant charlatan. 

 Nevertheless after a time, after the lapse of nearly a 

 hundred years, they were taken up by a man, who so bandied 

 them that in a modified and developed shape they found 

 lodgement in ordinary medical teaching, and served as the 

 starting-point of that chemical investigation of the problems 

 of living beings which since that time and especially in these 

 later years has been so fruitful of results. As Paracelsus, with 

 the aid of some fifty years of increased knowledge, extended 

 and developed Valentine's ideas, so his doctrines were in 

 turn extended and developed with the aid of a hundred years 

 of increased knowledge (and those hundred years were as we 

 have seen rich beyond measure in intellectual gains) by van 

 Helmont, to whom we must now turn. 



Jean Baptiste van Helmont was born at Brussels in 1577, 

 some thirty odd years after Paracelsus' death, and more than 

 ten years after that of Vesalius. His father died when he was 

 three years old, and his mother, who was of one of the best 

 Belgian families, took much care of his education, sending him 

 at seventeen years of age to study philosophy at Louvain, which 

 university was still of great repute. The teachers there however, 



