ii PARACELSUS 149 



the Faust who acquired all the knowledge and most 

 of the arts of his time, wrote a compendium and 

 justification (from Neoplatonist philosophy) of magical 

 practices, 1 and at the close of his life the great declama- 

 tion " on the uncertainty and vanity of all sciences and 

 arts," 2 a plea for the simple life and the simple gospel. 

 The De occulta philosophia is the chief source from 

 which Bruno drew the fantastical lore of the De 

 Monade? The satires upon Asinity, as the chief 

 human virtue, in the Spaccio and the Cabala, directed 

 as they are against blind faith without works or wisdom, 

 found their occasion at least in Agrippa's praise of the 

 Ass (in the De Vanitate) as the mouthpiece of God in 

 the story of Balaam, and the bearer of Christ in the 

 New Testament history. 



Paracelsus 4 proposed a reform of medicine on Neo- Paracelsus, 

 platonist principles, attacking the Galenian doctrine of 

 the Four Humours, which was based on the four 

 elements of the Aristotelians (the warm and the cold, 

 the moist and the dry). His own more <c natural " 

 theory made salt, sulphur, and mercury the (chemical) 

 elements of all things those which in living organisms 

 were vivified and directed by an inner spirit (e.g. 

 the Archaeus in man), a direct emanation from the 

 soul of the universe. Through their common con- 

 stitution, and the spirit that infused all things alike, 

 there was a subtle, mysterious sympathy between the 

 microcosm and the macrocosm, the individual body 

 and the universe, and it was by the study of the 

 relations (magical, astrological, and the rest) between 

 the stars and the things of earth, between the 



1 De occulta philosophia. 2 De Vanitate Scientiarum. 



8 Tocco. Fonti piu recenti, etc. p. 534. 

 4 Theophrastus Bombastes von Hohenheim, 1493-1541. 



