COSMOLOGY 47 



the beings that have been formed of such elements, must 

 be eternal; just as a flower consists of elements similar 

 to those of the plant on which it grows. 



" Nature being the Universe, is one, and its origin can 

 only be one eternal Unity. It is an organism in which 

 all natural things harmonise and sympathise with each 

 other. It is the Macrocosm. Everything is the product 

 of one universal creative effort ; the Macrocosm and man 

 (the Microcosm) are one. They are one constellation, 

 one influence, one breath, one harmony, one time, one 

 metal, one fruit " ^ (Philosophia ad Athenienses). 



There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is 

 organic and living, and consequently the whole world 

 appears to be a living organism. "There is nothing 

 corporeal which does not possess a soul hidden in it. 

 There exists nothing in which is not a hidden principle 

 of life. Not only the things that move, such as men 

 and animals, the worms of the earth, and the birds of the 

 air and the fishes in the water, but all corporeal and 

 essential things have life." 



There is no death in Nature, and the dying of the 

 beings consists in their return into the body of their 

 mother ; that is to say, in an extinction and suppression 

 of one form of existence and activity, and in a re-birth of 

 the same thing into another and more interior world, in 

 a new form, possessed of new faculties that are adapted 



^ This description of the sympathy existing between Man and Eternal 

 Nature recalls to memory the old hfroirav and the ffvfnrvoia fxia, avppia 

 fita, avfivaSeia iravra of Hippocrates, and it especially reminds us of the 

 "Timaeus" of Plato and the "Emerides" of Plotin, in which works the 

 whole of Nature is represented as a living and rational being (fwoi'), 

 having come into existence by the will of the Supreme Cause. The head 

 of man is there pictured as being an imitation of the peripheric con- 

 stitution of the world. The basis of the natural philosophy of Paracelsus 

 is the evidently existing correspondence, correlation, and harmony be- 

 tween the human constitution and the constitution of the starry world, 

 including all terrestrial things, and this philosophy is almost identical 

 with that of Plato, which speaks of the formation of all things in the 

 inner world according to eternal patterns existing in the realm of the pure 

 Ideal. 



