2 28 Science Religion and Reality 



who say that there is no such directing faculty end by supposing 

 that the soul itself is a mere nonentity." 



To Tertullian, at any rate, there was no way of admitting 

 mechanism to be supreme in biology and at the same time giving 

 any validity to spiritual experience. So the former, being but an 

 opinion of certain philosophers, had to go. 



After the patristic period is over, we do not find anything of 

 significance for this subject until the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century. And now, although very feebly and dimly, there begin 

 to be at work those influences which later on are to bear profoundly 

 on the mechanism problem — namely, those of the experimental 

 method. The early history of Alchemy is not of great interest to 

 us here, but its discipline produced such remarkable men as Abbot 

 Trithemius and Basil Valentine, the teachers of Paracelsus von 

 Hohenheim. This great man, now rehabilitated as a genuine 

 thinker after four centuries of calumny due to the survival of the 

 writings of his adversaries, introduced ideas of the utmost import- 

 ance into biology. One would think from the pronouncement of 

 his which has already been quoted, that he was singularly free from 

 the daemonistic and spiritualistic prepossessions of his time. This, 

 however, was not the case. Side by side with a peculiarly clear 

 treatment of the chemistry of the period there existed in his mind a 

 hylozoism which led him to a most strange conception of the nature 

 of living matter. The animal body, according to him, contained, 

 besides its innumerable chemical constituents and processes, an 

 innumerable number of " archaei " or subsidiary daemons which 

 in the last resort were responsible for the functioning of the different 

 parts. If food was digested in the stomach, it was indeed because 

 chemical processes were going on in it, but these processes were 

 governed, controlled, and perhaps caused by an archaeus. Paracelsus 

 never very clearly stated that the anima of man was not the sum of 

 the archaei of all the separate organs, but he rather tended to the 

 view that the anima was something quite different from them. 

 His whole pathology was grounded on the view that in the diseased 

 organ the corresponding archaeus was absent or for some reason 

 had let loose the reins of control. But in spite of these theories, 

 which might have been expected to cripple seriously his experi- 

 mental work, he brought about a revolution in medicine by 

 abandoning largely the old pharmacopeia with its vast assortment 



