210 PARACELSUS 



nature ; and if this should take place, many of our Phari- 

 sees, strutting about in scarlet coats and pretending 

 to be benefactors of mankind, while they in reality care 

 for nothing but for the gratification of their ambition 

 and lusts, would be born in the shape of monkeys, camels, 

 and buffaloes " {De Fhilosophia). 



" He is not a physician who can see only that which 

 is visible to every boor. The experienced gardener can 

 tell by looking at a seed what kind of a plant will grow 

 from it, and likewise the physician should be able to 

 perceive how a disease originates, and in what way it 

 will develop. He who knows how the rain originates 

 will also know the origin of dysentery ; he who knows 

 the origin of the winds knows how colic originates ; he 

 who knows the periodical changes of the seasons may 

 know the origin of intermittent fevers ; he who knows 

 the ebbs and tides in the Macrocosm will know the cause 

 of raenorrhagias of the Microcosm, &c. The quack studies 

 diseases in the affected organs, where he finds nothing 

 else but effects which have already taken place, and he 

 will never arrive at an end ; for if he were to kill a 

 thousand people for the purpose of studying those effects, 

 he would still be ignorant in regard to the causes. The 

 true physician studies the causes of diseases by study- 

 ing man as a whole. In him exist all the diseases that 

 did exist in the past or will exist in the future. The 

 destroyer is not a physician, but an executioner and 

 murderer. Let the honest man ask his own conscience 

 whether God meant that we should acquire wisdom by 

 murder " ^ (Faragran., i.). 



" As the sunshine penetrates through a glass window 

 into a room, so the influences of the astral light enter 

 into the body of man, and as the rain is absorbed hj the 

 soil, while stones and rocks are impenetrable to it, so 

 there are certain elements in man's organisation which 

 absorb these influences, while other elements resist their 

 * Let the vivisectionists consider that question. 



