Historical Lectures and Essays

The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, then probably the best botanist in the world, arrived at Madrid; and, asking the reason of Vesalius’s departure, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles de Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, that Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with all facilities which Philip could grant him, in performance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous illness.  Here, at least, we have a drop of information, which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near to the fountain-head: but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley’s fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his shoulders; especially if he had heard Alva say, as he wrote, “that every time he saw the despatches of those three señors, they moved his choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper it, he would seem a frenzied man.”  In such times, De Tisnacq may have thought good to return a diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concerning a third fellow-countryman, especially when that countryman, as a former pupil of Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and therefore of possible treason.

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the story about the Inquisition; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed’s foot of the prince.  He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the operation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint Diego;12 and he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment, have spoken them.

For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander.  The crisis of his country was just at hand.  Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion, horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on having the command of the Netherlands.  In his rage, at not having it, as all the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two years after.  If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild confidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a crime in Philip’s eyes.  And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was, as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which Philip’s doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing ever more and more intolerable.  Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps men and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief inquisitor.  The “day of the maubrulez,” and the wholesale massacre which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase.  And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason and observing fact?  What wonder if, in some burst of noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant’s court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthy of a German man?

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a grain of truth in it likewise.  Vesalius’s religion must have sat very lightly on him.  The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons.  He had handled too many human bones to care much for those of saints.  He was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan, while his lady, Anne van Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may have caused in them that wretched vie à part, that want of any true communion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic countries.

Be these things as they may—and the exact truth of them will now be never known—Vesalius set out to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564.  On his way he visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book against Fallopius.  The Venetian republic received the great philosopher with open arms.  Fallopius was just dead; and the senate offered their guest the vacant chair of anatomy.  He accepted it: but went on to the East.

He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the Isle of Zante, as he was sailing back from Palestine, he died miserably of fever and want, as thousands of pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died before him.  A goldsmith recognised him; buried him in a chapel of the Virgin; and put up over him a simple stone, which remained till late years; and may remain, for aught I know, even now.

So perished, in the prime of life, “a martyr to his love of science,” to quote the words of M. Burggraeve of Ghent, his able biographer and commentator, “the prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch when everything was still an obstacle to his progress; a man whose whole life was a long struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of truth against lies.”

Plaudite: Exeat: with Rondelet and Buchanan.  And whensoever this poor foolish world needs three such men, may God of His great mercy send them.

PARACELSUS 13

I told you of Vesalius and Rondelet as specimens of the men who three hundred years ago were founding the physical science of the present day, by patient investigation of facts.  But such an age as this would naturally produce men of a very different stamp, men who could not imitate their patience and humility; who were trying for royal roads to knowledge, and to the fame and wealth which might be got out of knowledge; who meddled with vain dreams about the occult sciences, alchemy, astrology, magic, the cabala, and so forth, who were reputed magicians, courted and feared for awhile, and then, too often, died sad deaths.

Such had been, in the century before, the famous Dr. Faust—Faustus, who was said to have made a compact with Satan—actually one of the inventors of printing—immortalised in Goethe’s marvellous poem.

Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa—a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the famous “De Vanitate Scientiarum,” and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable—such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit’s “Disquisitions on Magic”14—that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in “Hudibras”:

Agrippa kept a Stygian pugI’ the garb and habit of a dog—That was his taste; and the curRead to th’ occult philosopher,And taught him subtly to maintainAll other sciences are vain.

Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar and physician, the father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan’s rule,) believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in old age.

Cardan’s sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, you can, and ought to read for yourselves, in two admirable biographies, as amusing as they are learned, by Professor Morley, of the London University.  I have not chosen either of them as a subject for this lecture, because Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is to be known about them, that I could tell you nothing which I had not stolen from him.

But what shall I say of the most famous of these men—Paracelsus? whose name you surely know.  He too has been immortalised in a poem which you all ought to have read, one of Robert Browning’s earliest and one of his best creations.

I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning’s interpretation of Paracelsus’s character.  We must believe that he was at first an honest and high-minded, as he was certainly a most gifted, man; that he went forth into the world, with an intense sense of the worthlessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and quacks of the schools; an intense belief that some higher and truer science might be discovered, by which diseases might be actually cured, and health, long life, happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on man; an intense belief that he, Paracelsus, was called and chosen by God to find out that great mystery, and be a benefactor to all future ages.  That fixed idea might degenerate—did, alas! degenerate—into wild self-conceit, rash contempt of the ancients, violent abuse of his opponents.  But there was more than this in Paracelsus.  He had one idea to which, if he had kept true, his life would have been a happier one—the firm belief that all pure science was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic philosophers round him did) in the place of God: but by going straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls “the voice of God revealed in facts.”  True and noble is the passage with which he begins his “Labyrinthus Medicorum,” one of his attacks on the false science of his day,

“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 birdHid 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?

And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the Occult sciences.  It had always been haunting the European imagination.  Mediæval monks had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a great necromancer.  And there were immense excuses for such a belief.  There was a mass of collateral evidence that the occult sciences were true, which it was impossible then to resist.  Races far more ancient, learned, civilised, than any Frenchman, German, Englishman, or even Italian, in the fifteenth century had believed in these things.  The Moors, the best physicians of the Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the “Arabian Nights” prove, of enchanters, genii, peris, and what not?  The Jewish rabbis had their Cabala, which sprang up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of the text of Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam talked with angels, the sun and moon, summoned spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed; and by that book of Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon became the great magician and master of all the spirits and their hoarded treasures.

So strong, indeed, was the belief in the mysteries of the Cabala, that Reuchlin, the restorer of Hebrew learning in Germany, and Pico di Mirandola, the greatest of Italian savants, accepted them; and not only Pope Leo X. himself, but even statesmen and warriors received with delight Reuchlin’s cabalistic treatise, “De Verbo Mirifico,” on the mystic word “Schemhamphorash”—that hidden name of God, which whosoever can pronounce aright is, for the moment, lord of nature and of all dæmons.

Amulets, too, and talismans; the faith in them was exceeding ancient.  Solomon had his seal, by which he commanded all dæmons; and there is a whole literature of curious nonsense, which you may read if you will, about the Abraxas and other talismans of the Gnostics in Syria; and another, of the secret virtues which were supposed to reside in gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek gems, carved into intaglios with figures of heathen gods and goddesses.  Lapidaria, or lists of these gems and their magical virtues, were not uncommon in the Middle Ages.  You may read a great deal that is interesting about them at the end of Mr. King’s book on gems.

Astrology too; though Pico di Mirandola might set himself against the rest of the world, few were found daring enough to deny so ancient a science.  Luther and Melancthon merely followed the regular tradition of public opinion when they admitted its truth.  It sprang probably from the worship of the Seven Planets by the old Chaldees.  It was brought back from Babylon by the Jews after the Captivity, and spread over all Europe—perhaps all Asia likewise.

The rich and mighty of the earth must needs have their nativities cast, and consult the stars; and Cornelius Agrippa gave mortal offence to the Queen-Dowager of France (mother of Francis I.) because, when she compelled him to consult the stars about Francis’s chance of getting out of his captivity in Spain after the battle of Pavia, he wrote and spoke his mind honestly about such nonsense.

Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young.  Among his MSS. in Lord Portsmouth’s library at Hurstbourne are whole folios of astrologic calculations.  It went on till the end of the seventeenth century, and died out only when men had begun to test it, and all other occult sciences, by experience, and induction founded thereon.

Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of metals.  As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other mancies—there was then a whole literature about them.  And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves.

Everyone, almost, believed in magic.  Take two cases.  Read the story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life (everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum at Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks back with the magician, jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the houses.

And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his researches.  A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of the Reformation, being unable to track an escaped heretic, “caused a figure to be made by an expert in astronomy;” by which it was discovered that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny coat and was making for the sea.  Conceive the respected head of your College—or whoever he may be—in case you slept out all night without leave, going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of his meritorious exertions!

In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born.  The son of a Swiss physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus was his Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus.  Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita—the hermit.  Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine, addressed him by that name.

How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard to say.  He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of that day had in the Tyrol.

It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from the study of nature and of facts.  He had heard all the learned doctors and professors; he had read all their books, and they could teach him nothing.  Medicine was his monarch, and no one else.  He declared that there was more wisdom under his bald pate than in Aristotle and Galen, Hippocrates and Rhasis.  And fact seemed to be on his side.  He reappeared in Germany about 1525, and began working wondrous cures.  He had brought back with him from the East an arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum was its name.  He boasted, says one of his enemies, that he could raise the dead to life with it; and so the event all but proved.  Basle was then the university where free thought and free creeds found their safest home; and hither Œcolampadius the reformer invited young Paracelsus to lecture on medicine and natural science.

It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he never opened his lips.  He might have done good enough to his fellow-creatures by his own undoubted powers of healing.  He cured John Frobenius, the printer, Erasmus’s friend, at Basle, when the doctors were going to cut his leg off.  His fame spread far and wide.  Round Basle and away into Alsace he was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new Æsculapius.

But these were days in which in a university everyone was expected to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus began lecturing; and then the weakness which was mingled with his strength showed itself.  He began by burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and declared that all the old knowledge was useless.  Doctors and students alike must begin over again with him.  The dons were horrified.  To burn Galen and Avicenna was as bad as burning the Bible.  And more horrified still were they when Paracelsus began lecturing, not in the time-honoured dog-Latin, but in good racy German, which everyone could understand.  They shuddered under their red gowns and hats.  If science was to be taught in German, farewell to the Galenists’ formulas, and their lucrative monopoly of learning.  Paracelsus was bold enough to say that he wished to break up their monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medicine.  “How much,” he wrote once, “would I endure and suffer, to see every man his own shepherd—his own healer.”  He laughed to scorn their long prescriptions, used the simplest drugs, and declared Nature, after all, to be the best physician—as a dog, he says, licks his wound well again without our help; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its own accord.

Such a man was not to be endured.  They hated him, he says, for the same reason that they hated Luther, for the same reason that the Pharisees hated Christ.  He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and language as coarse and violent as their own.  The coarseness and violence of those days seem incredible to us now; and, indeed, Paracelsus, as he confessed himself, was, though of gentle blood, rough and unpolished; and utterly, as one can see from his writings, unable to give and take, to conciliate—perhaps to pardon.  He looked impatiently on these men who were (not unreasonably) opposing novelties which they could not understand, as enemies of God, who were balking him in his grand plan for regenerating science and alleviating the woes of humanity, and he outraged their prejudices instead of soothing them.

Soon they had their revenge.  Ugly stories were whispered about.  Oporinus, the printer, who had lived with him for two years, and who left him, it is said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from him unfairly the secret of making laudanum, told how Paracelsus was neither more nor less than a sot, who came drunk to his lectures, used to prime himself with wine before going to his patients, and sat all night in pothouses swilling with the boors.

Men looked coldly on him—longed to be rid of him.  And they soon found an opportunity.  He took in hand some Canon of the city from whom it was settled beforehand that he was to receive a hundred florins.  The priest found himself cured so suddenly and easily that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the money, and went to the magistrates.  They supported him, and compelled Paracelsus to take six florins instead of the hundred.  He spoke his mind fiercely to them.  I believe, according to one story, he drew his long sword on the Canon.  His best friends told him he must leave the place; and within two years, seemingly, after his first triumph at Basle, he fled from it a wanderer and a beggar.

The rest of his life is a blank.  He is said to have recommenced his old wanderings about Europe, studying the diseases of every country, and writing his books, which were none of them published till after his death.  His enemies joyfully trampled on the fallen man.  He was a “dull rustic, a monster, an atheist, a quack, a maker of gold, a magician.”  When he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus (one of his enemies) that he used to offer to call up legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in abject terror of his spells, entreated him to leave the fiends alone—that he had sent his book by a fiend to the spirit of Galen in hell, and challenged him to say which was the better system, his or Paracelsus’, and what not?

His books were forbidden to be printed.  He himself was refused a hearing, and it was not till after ten years of wandering that he found rest and protection in a little village of Carinthia.

Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of St. Sebastian at Salzburg, in the Tyrol.  His death was the signal for empirics and visionaries to foist on the public book after book on occult philosophy, written in his name—of which you may see ten folios—not more than a quarter, I believe, genuine.  And these foolish books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all his faults was a true pioneer of science.15  I believe (with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) that under all his verbiage and confusion there was a vein of sound scientific, experimental common sense.