“The first and highest book of all healing,” he says, “is called wisdom, and without that book no man will carry out anything good or useful . . .  And that book is God Himself.  For in Him alone who hath created all things, the knowledge and principle of all things dwells . . . without Him all is folly.  As the sun shines on us from above, so He must pour into us from above all arts whatsoever.  Therefore the root of all learning and cognition is, that we should seek first the kingdom of God—­the kingdom of God in which all sciences are founded . . .  If any man think that nature is not founded on the kingdom of God, he knows nothing about it.  All gifts,” he repeats again and again, confused and clumsily (as is his wont), but with a true earnestness, “are from God.”

The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who seeks first the kingdom of God in facts, investigating nature reverently, patiently, in faith believing that God, who understands His own work best, will make him understand it likewise.  The false man of science is he who seeks the kingdom of this world, who cares nothing about the real interpretation of facts:  but is content with such an interpretation as will earn him the good things of this world—­the red hat and gown, the ambling mule, the silk clothes, the partridges, capons, and pheasants, the gold florins chinking in his palm.  At such pretenders Paracelsus sneered, at last only too fiercely, not only as men whose knowledge consisted chiefly in wearing white gloves, but as rogues, liars, villains, and every epithet which his very racy vocabulary, quickened (it is to be feared) by wine and laudanum, could suggest.  With these he contrasts the true men of science.  It is difficult for us now to understand how a man setting out in life with such pure and noble views should descend at last (if indeed he did descend) to be a quack and a conjuror—­and die under the imputation that

   Bombastes kept a devil’s bird
   Hid in the pommel of his sword,

and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk.  To understand it at all, we must go back and think a little over these same occult sciences which were believed in by thousands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The reverence for classic antiquity, you must understand, which sprang up at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating as it was earnest.  Men caught the trash as well as the jewels.  They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato himself.  And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, believers in magic—­Theurgy, as it was called—­in the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and gems, in the power of adepts to evoke and command spirits, in the significance of dreams, in the influence of the stars upon men’s characters and destinies.  If the great and wise philosopher Iamblicus believed such things, why might not the men of the sixteenth century?