270 PARACELSUS 



we must see it and feel it and be identified with it 

 ourselves. Things that transcend the physical power 

 of sight can only be known if they are experienced 

 and seen by the soul. Love or hate, reason and con- 

 science, are unknown things to those who do not 

 realise their existence. The attributes of the spirit 

 are not only beyond the power of sensual perception, 

 but they are beyond the power of intellectual com- 

 prehension ; they can only be known to the spirit 

 itself, and they are called occult because they cannot 

 be understood without the possession of the light of 

 the spirit. This spiritual light is an attribute of the 

 spirit and beyond the reach of the merely intellectual 

 but unspiritual mind. 



"Man has two kinds of reason, angelic and animal 

 reason. The former is eternal and of God, and remains 

 with God ; the latter is also, but indirectly, originating 

 from God, and not eternal ; for the body dies and its 

 animal reason with it. No animal product can be vic- 

 torious over death. Death kills that which is animal, 

 but not that which is eternal. A man who is not 

 a man as far as wisdom in him is concerned, is not a 

 man but an animal in human shape" {Be Fundamento 

 Sapientice). 



To be able to understand good, it is necessary that 

 man should experience evil, for without the know- 

 ledge of darkness the true nature of light could not 

 be known ; but no amount of evil experience will 

 enable a man to know that which is good and divine 

 if he is not in possession of the true understanding, 

 which endows him with the power to profit by his 

 experience, and which is not of his own making, but 

 given to him as a gift by wisdom itself. 



"The wise rules the stars in him, but animal man 

 is ruled by his stars, which force him to do as he is 

 directed by his animal nature. He who has escaped 

 the gallows once will repeat his crimes j for he thinks 



