and double Fevers Neither doth it also forbid a primary Disease to be con-folded with its own or with a secundary one bred from else where In such a manner as is a primary Fever which brings forth a Product from whence there is a resolving of the Blood into the putrifying Disease of a malignant Flux matched with a feverish Ferment At length neither is there a necessary passage of the three first Digestions unto the sixth by the fourth and fifth Because the greatest part of the venal Blood never comes unto the Heart and much less is it snatched into its left Bosom Because all particular parts are nourished no less with Venal than Arterial Blood From hence indeed it happens that the Vices of the three first Digestions do oftentimes immediately pass over into the sixth And therefore the transchanged Retents of the three first Digestions if they shall reach unto the sixth they offend not by transmission of a proper name but only by transmutation because a transmission from the third into the sixth Digestion is regular lawful and ordinary I will add concerning the Spleen If from the first Digestion a sharpness of the Chyle be immediately brought unto the Spleen A Quartane Ague is soon present to wit from a curdled Retent being there a stranger But if the sixth Digestion in the Spleen be troubled seeing it is the Couch of the first Conceptions The Excrements or things transchanged which are made of its proper nourishment are for the most part endowed with an imaginative Power such as occurs in many Simples and which is most plainly to be seen in the Spittle of a mad Dog and the which therefore I call inebriating or be-drunkening dreamifying or befooling Simples For therefore of one Wine there is a many-form condition of drunken Men That is one only Wine doth stir up diverse Madnesses For a mad Poyson halts with the similitude of Wine For a mad Poyson by reason of its excelling Power doth not follow the conditions of the Man but the very Conditions of the Man are constrained to obey the Poyson As is clearly seen in the Poyson of him that is bitten by a Mid-dog Poysons therefore which of a degenerate nourishment are bred in the sixth Digestion do follow their own Nature For by how much the nearer they shall be unto assimilating by so much the more powerfully do they infatuate For by how much the nearer the Ferment of the Bowel and an in-beaming of the implanted Spirit shall be present with it by so much also the nearer it calls unto it the Idea of a certain imaginative Power which at length it transplanteth into a venemous Poyson not indeed so destructive unto the Life as unto the Power of that Bowel But from what hath been before declared any one shall be hereafter able to erect unto himself the Stages of Diseases But it hath been sufficient for me to have shewn that every primary Disease doth objectively and subjectively fall into the Archeus and so into the Life it self whereof to wit it is immediately formed But that a secondary Disease fals objectively indeed into the Archeus but subjectively into a Matter either the solid one of the part containing or the fluide one of that contained And thus indeed to have shewn Diseases to be distributed in Nature by their Causes Roots and Essence according to their Inns I repose my Pen. Barrenness also seeing it is among Defects beside Nature hath hither extended its Treatise Wherefore Coldness Heat or moistness is not in either of the Sexes the cause of Barrenness however lowdly others may sound out this thing For truly first of all there is no dryness possible in living Creatures or the vitious moisture of the Womb is not of the complexion but a meer superfluity of Digestion or Transmission So in the next place Heat and Cold are signs of Defects in Nature but not Causes Because these Qualities do want a Seed vital Properties and potestative Conditions Therefore indeed Barrenness and Fruitfulness is in every Climate of the World Yet an Aethiopian Woman is far hotter than the most hot Woman of Muscovia But the excrementitious and superfluous Moistness of the Womb is an Effect of Diseases Yea if it shall be a companion of Barrenness yet not the containing Cause thereof For an internal Cause differs not from the Being it self So neither is the Defect of the Menstrues the cause of Barrenness if that Defect contains a denial or proceeds as an Effect of a nearer Indisposition Women of unripe Age have oft-times conceived even also before their Menstrues and those of more ripe years their Menstrues being silent Also oft-times Women affected in their Womb being trampled on by many Perplexities do succesfully conceive and accordingly bring forth In the mean time some Barren Women are in good health Also many conceive while their Menstrues is urgently present As also the Menstrues being afterwards silent hath deceived many of Conception Some Women do take notice of their Menstrues all the time of their bearing but many for some months only For indeed although Barrenness may after some sort bespeak a privative respect yet it is meerly a positive and diseasie Being for it ariseth from singular positive Defects Because by it self and in self it is a Malady of Nature Even as fruitfulness bespeaks an entire Cause For in a Man which is not Gelded not an Eunuch not hindred or disturbed not mischieved Barrenness hath scarce place For from hence an Old-man doth as yet generate Whence it follows that there is not so much perfection to be attributed as neither to be required in the Male as in the Mother But I call those hindered Males who do labour with a Gonorrhea or who have from thence retained a Vice And likewise who do labour with the notable Vice of some Bowel In a Woman the Menstrues abounding being Deficient Irregular Watery Yellow looking Blackish Slimy Stinking a Pain in her Loyns Belly Hips and movings of the Womb upwards downwards to the Sides are indeed Witnesses and Signs of the Sicknesses or Feeblenesses of the Womb and therefore also they fore-slow overflow Conception move Abortions and gushings forth of the Courses yet they do not altogether take away the hope of Conception nor are they the Disease which is called Barrenness For indeed old Women are Barren without all those For I find the one only suitable and co-equal Cause in Time and Age to be described in the holy Scriptures for a positive Being which is called Barrenness in these Words God opened the Womb of Sarah For it is the Gift of God derived into Nature whereby the Parchment or Membrane of the Womb being most exactly shut in its Foldings is opened and enlarged at the co-agreeing moment of Conjunction There is I say an attractive drawing Blas whereby for fear of a Vacuum or Emptiness an attraction of the Seeds and a suitable filling up of the opened Wrinckles follows that opening To wit the
mishapen And so in the next place Diseases do vary in respect of a six-fold Digestion being hindred inverted suspended extinguished or vitiated Diseases also do vary in respect of the distribution of that which is digested For a proportioned distribution doth exercise the force of distributive Justice due to every part But if they are disproportioned now there is an infirm and necessitated distribution and that as well in respect of the natural functions which are never idle as of a continual transpiration and from thence for the sake of an uncessant necessity But that disproportion is voluntary and as it were an overflowing distribution in respect of a symptomatical expulsion by reason of a conspirable animosity of the disturbing Archeus or at length the distribution is disproportioned as it is necessitated in respect of penury or scantiness whence at length also no seldom dammage invadeth the whole Body To wit while in some part the nourishment degenerateth is ejected and so is wasted Such as is the Consumptionary spittle in Affects or Ulcers of the Lungs a Snivelly Glew in the Stone in the Gonorrhea or running of the Reines c. For seeing the part its nourishment being once defiled and degenerate is thenceforth never nourished but despiseth and thrusts that forth yet by reason of a sense of penury that ceaseth not continually with importunity to crave new nourishment from the dispensing faculty and to obtain it by its importunity that it may satisfie its thirst Therefore new nourishment is many times administred unto it and is withdrawn from its other chamber-fellows because a sufficient nourishment for all parts is wanting From thence therefore is Leanness an Atrophia a Tabes or lingring Consumption and an impoverishment of all necessary nourishment So indeed Fluxes Bloody-Fluxes Aposthems Ulcers and Purgative things do make us lean and exhaust us For the infirm parts are like the Prodigal Son because they do waste and unprofitably cast away being those which have badly spent whatsoever was distributed unto them and the other parts do lament that lavishment Things Retained that are taken into the Body offend onely in quality or quantity or indiscretion or inordinacy For if they are immoderate in quantity if frequent or too rare for numbers are in quantities also one onely error doth sometimes give a beginning unto a Disease whereas in the mean time otherwise Nature makes resistance for some good while But Poysons received Solutive Medicines and likewise altering things which are too much graduated do chiefly hurt in quality Discretion also doth offend in things assumed if they are taken rashly out of their hour and manner As if the Menstrues be provoked in a Woman with young or in a Womb that doth excessively flow For indiscretion doth every where bring forth a frequent inordinacy when as any undue thing is cast into the Body or required the scopes of Causes and betokenings of being unknown Also harmless things which are cast into the Body are vitiated onely by their delay and long continuance of detainment And they become the more hostile by how much they shall be the more familiar or the further promoted for truly by reason of a mark of resemblance sometime conceived they do the sooner ferment and more deeply and powerfully imprint their enmities And as by things Assumed things Retained are sometimes at length made inbred So by things inbreathed Diseases are oft-times made like unto those made by things Retained For some inspired things are Retained and do affect the same parts which things Retained do Otherwise they differ in their internal Root as much as breath doth from drink and as much as food from blood But before I descend unto inbred Retentions it is necessary to represent the unknown Tragedy of the chief or primary Diseases Because inbred Retents do for the most part take their beginning from primary Diseases For indeed I have already before distinguished of all Diseases that they do either affect the Archeus implanted in or inflowing into the parts Although in both cases Diseases do proceed by the forming of Idea's The which I will have to be understood of primary ones To wit out of whose bosom superfluities do arise or degenerate which give an occasion for new Idea's or onsets of Diseases For it is scarce possible that the Archeus being remarkeably smitten by a voluntary Idea of a Man or the Archeus a lot of Disaster should not arise in the inferiour family-administration of the Body from whence the Digestions themselves first of all wandering from their scope do frame the pernitious collections of Superfluities whereby the primary distemperatures of the Archeus are nourished to wit if they shall proceed from the same root That is if the root of a primary Disease shall produce its like to wit the former Idea of exorbitancy persisting or the new off-springs of Diseases are stirred up But at leastwise after either manner the aforesaid Excrements are the Products of primary or the chief Diseases But primary Diseases are either of Idea's Archeizated to wit by the proper substance of the influous Archeus issuing into the composure of the Body the which indeed he by reason of his madness wasts And such kind of Diseases are oft-times appeased by Opiates yea are also utterly rooted out Because they are for the most part the off-springs of a more sluggish turbulency The flame of the chaffe either ceasing from a voluntary motion or being silent at the consuming of the Archeus informed by the vitiated Idea But Idea's arising from the implanted afflictions of the vital Spirits whether they are the governing Spirits of the similar or organical parts they do for the most part disturb the family-administration of Life especially if the Archeus being badly disquieted in some principal bowel shall form the Idea's of his own hurt For then he brings forth most potent afflictions Yea sometimes those remaining safe for term of Life For as they are the Rulers of a greater nobleness and more eminent power So also they draw forth the more efficacious Idea's and do propagate Diseases of a prostrating nature Because the Powers themselves the In-mates of the more noble parts are defiled with the same Images as it were with Seals the which diseasie Products arising from thence the foot-step of the Seal being as it were received into themselves do afterwards linkingly expresse through the ranks of the Digestions For so the primary Diseases of the Bowels do abound neither do they hearken unto Remedies but of a more piercing wedlock yea and do bequeath their inheritances on Nephews The Arcanums of which sort I have reckoned up in the Book of Long Life to wit the which do every one of them represent the Majesty of an universal Medicine Although I will not deny but that there is that Majesty in some the more refined Simples which can heal particular primary Diseases The Galenists do laugh at the promise of a generality but every Bird doth utter his voice according to
of things Lastly the Fluxes of ripenesles slownesses and swiftnesses And likewise they have not known the composures and resolvings of Bodies made as well by Nature as Art Likewise the necessities ends or bounds dispositions defects restorings deaths consequences of Seeds also of Ferments also their nearnesses and dependencies for that they diligently taught the natural Agent to be a forreiner and a stranger to things Also by way of consequence they have been ignorant of the births of forms as also of the properties proceeding from thence In whose place they have exposed fortune chance time a vacuum or emptiness that which is infinite although they are all strangers to Nature and those things which did contain ridiculous Disciplines Yea they have followed the Authour who believed the World to be extended from Eternity unto Eternity by its own proper forces or virtue and he contradicteth himself by denying an infinite Since the first moreover being to abide for ever to make all things in his eternal power doth necessarily include an infinite CHAP. V. The Chief or Master-Workman 1. The Archeus or chief Workman is the efficient cause 2. How it is in Seeds 3. The properties and differences of the same 4. The Composition of the natural Air. 5. The Birth of seminal Idea's or shapes 6. The seminal Garment of the chief Workman 7. The places of Hospitality with Curers appointed for the Seed 8. The Conjunction of the Stars imitated in Seeds 9. The first mover hath not the Vicarship in a man I Have touched at the birth and Causes of Natural things and least I may seem to have placed the efficient Cause undeservedly within I will the more fitly explain the Workman the Vulcan or Smith of generations Whatsoever therefore cometh into the World by Nature it must needs have the Beginning of its motions the stirrer up and inward directer of generation Therefore all things however hard and thick they are yet before that their soundness they inclose in themselves an Air which before generation representeth the inward future generation to the Seed in this respect fruitful and accompanies the thing generated even to the end of the Stage Which air although in some things it be more plentiful yet in Vegetables it is pressed together in the shew of a juyce as also in Mettals it is thickned with a most thick homogeniety or sameliness of kinde notwithstanding this gift hath happened to all things which is called the Archeus or chief Workman containing the fruitfulness of generations and Seeds as it were the internal efficient cause I say that Workman hath the likeness of the thing generated unto the beginning whereof he composeth the appointments of things to be done But the chief Workman consists of the conjoyning of the vitall air as of the matter with the seminal likeness which is the more inward spiritual kernel containing the fruitfulness of the Seed but the visible Seed is onely the husk of this This Image of the Master-Workman issuing out of the first shape or Idea of its predecessour or snatching the same to it self out of the cup or bosom of outward things is not a certain dead Image but made famous by a full knowledge and adorned with necessary powers of things to be done in its appointment and so it is the first or chief Instrument of life and feeling For example For a Woman with Child fashioneth a Cherry in her Young by her desire in that part in which she moveth her hand in desiring A Cherry I say in the flesh true green pale yellow and red according to the stations in which the Trees do promote their Cherries And the same Cherry sooner waxeth red in the same Young in Spain than in the Low-Countries Therefore a Cherry is made by Imagination So through the Imagination of lust a vitall Image of living Creatures is brought over into the Spirit of the Seed being about to unfold it self by the course of generation But since every corporeal act is limited into a Body hence it comes to passe that the Archeus the Workman and Governour of generation doth cloath himself presently with a bodily cloathing For in things soulified he walketh thorow all the Dens and retiring places of his Seed and begins to transform the matter according to the perfect act of his own Image For here he placeth the heart but there he appoints the brain and he every where limiteth an unmoveable chief dweller out of his whole Monarchy according to the bounds of requirance of the parts and of appointments At length that President remains the overseer and inward ruler of his bounds even until death But the other floating about being assigned to no member keeps the oversight over the particular Pilots of the members being clear and never at rest or keeping holyday Moreover as sublunary things do express in themselves an Analogy or proportion of things above So every thing by how much the more lively it is by so much the more perfectly it imitates the Stars so that sick persons do seem to carry in themselves sensible Ephemeries or daily Registers being skilful of future seasons Indeed in the bowels the planetary Spirits do most shine forth even as also in the whole influous Archeus the courses and forces of the Firmament do appear But the first mover hath no where had a member in men but onely under the Archeus of the wombe it meets by meditating by way of similitude as it were in the last finishing of created things For happily a Woman is therefore more stirred or troubled in her first Conceptions as she drawes with her other Orbs by her first motions As often as the wombe being swollen with the ascending Rule of Imagination doth suffer an animosity or angry heat it snatcheth the particular Archeusses of the bowels into the obedience of it self by striving to excel manly weaknesses and for the most part wretchedly deludes Physitians with a feigned Image The Archeusses of bruit Beasts are almost like unto mans Neither shall we draw an unprofitable knowledge of the shop of simples from the difference of Plants and their Sexes Because neither is it without a Mystery that in creeping things and insects being born in corruption alone Nature invariously sporting her self intends nothing so seriously as the proportionable differences of Sexes on both sides Wherefore neither must we think the same things to have been neglected in Plants although they may make one onely Seed blessed with a promiscuous Sex and a most fruitful of-spring But the most able effectress of the greater forces is discerned under the Signatures or Impressions of Venus she being very bright there is a care of the Sexes and now and then a hermaphroditical confused mixture For whatsoever Plants are femalls they do allure or procure the violent motion of the first mover Therefore the Natural Astrologie of the humane Seed frames its directions according to the general motion of the Heaven but it doth not beg it abroad for if
Degrees of Simples he hath not attempted it by the discretion of his Tongue and so he divined that more of the fire had concurred to a mixture where he found the more sharpness and bitterness Which thing the Schooles even till now hold as authenticall although Opium being bitter hinders it although Flammula or Scarrewort the Glasse being close shut layeth aside its tartness as also Water-Pepper and the like And what things are moyst do burn or sting but dried things do binde Neither shall the Galenists easily finde out a way whereby they may bring fire for water-Pepper under dirt For it hath been unknown in the Schooles that all properties not onely those which they call occult or hidden but also that any other properties do flow out of the lap of seeds and all those which it pleaseth the Schooles themselves also to call formall ones Surely I do experience four Elementary qualities to be as in the outward bark of things the second qualities to be more dangerous or destructive but the most inward ones to be immediately pressed in the Archeus Yet all of them to be from the bosom of the seede and forms But no quality to come forth from the first matter as neither from the Wedlock of the Elements because they are both feigned Mothers But because the water which is brought into a vapour by cold is of another condition than a vapour raised by heat therefore by the Licence of a Paradox for want of a name I have called that vapour Gas being not far severed from the Chaos of the â—â—untients In the mean time it is sufficient for me to know that Gas is a far more subtile or fine thing than a vapour mist or distilled Oylinesses although as yet it be many times thicker than Air. But Gas it self materially taken is water as yet masked with the Ferment of composed Bodies Moreover Paracelsus was altogether earnest in seperating four Elements out of Earth Water Air and Fire and so from his very own Elements which seperation notwithstanding he denieth to be from the three first things possible as if those three first things were more simple and before the Elements Being unmindefull of the Doctrine many times repeated by him To wit that every kinde of Body doth consist onely of three principles but not of Elements because Elements were not bodies but places and empty wombs of bodies or principles void of all body For although the Elements are among us commonly not believed to be undefiled yet Paracelsus calls them so the which he teacheth are by art to be seperated from pollutions But this description receiveth the air in one Glasse common water in another but the Earth either of the Garden or the Field in a third and at length the flame of the fire in a fourth But he shuts the Vessels with Hermes's Seal by melting of the neck And the water for a moneth continually to boyl in its Vessel As though that thing could possibly be done and the Glasse not the sooner leap asunder especially because he commands the water to be shut up without air unto the highest brim of the Vessel and the Glasse to be melted to wit with the water Lastly he conceives a flame in the Glasse and in the very moment wherein it ceaseth it is no more fire but an aiery smoak nor is the fire a substance Last of all nor can the fire be detained within the compass of the Vessel In another place he denieth any Element of fire besides the Heaven but now he calls the fire the Gas of the thing burnt up And he exalts these his trifles for causes of great moment the which notwithstanding he dared not to name Because the doubtful man hath exposed his Dreams to the World in hope of deserving thereby the name of the Monarch of Secrets CHAP. XIII The Gas of the Water 1. The Gas of the water differs from a Vapour 2. A Demonstration from Creation 3. That the Air in Genesis is signified by the Heaven 4. That in the Firmament is the operative Principle of dividing of the Waters 5. The seperating Powers of Waters in the air 6. A History of a Vapour 7. Gas differs from the exhalation of the auntients 8. A supposition of Principles 9. The manner of making in a Vapour 10. The Gas of the Water 11. An example in Gold 12. The Gas of the Water is shewne to the young beginner 13. The incrusting of the Water 14. The heat of the Alps is great yet not to be felt 15. That Gold is not the absence or privation of heat 16. Why Gas is an invisible thing 17. Why the Stars do twinckle 18. Why the Heaven is of an Azure colour 19. The Air knowes not the motion of snatching 20. Above all Clouds the Air is not voyd of all motion 21. What quietness there may be in that place 22. Gas is the Mother of a Meteor 23. Gas and Blas do constitute the whole re-publick of a Meteor 24. The Sun is hot by it self 25. The soils of the Air are the folding doores of Heaven 26. Why some are side-windes but others perpendicular or down-right ones 27. From whence the Blas of the air is originally stirred up 28. Two Causes of every Meteor 29. The water is in the same manner that it was from the beginning 30. From whence there is a stability in the quiet Perolede or Soil of the Air. 31. Peroledes are proved 32. A solving of an objection 33. The water is frozen of it self occasionally but not effectively by cold 34. Why Ice is lighter than water 35. The proportion of lightness in Ice by Handicraft-operation 36. The constancy and simplicity of the water 37. That all Beings do after some sort feel or perceive 38. A Vapour doth sooner return into water than into Gas 39. The changing into a Vapour in respect of the air the seperater is oblique or crooked 40. The air is dry and cold by it self 41. In an elementated Body there is not a simple and an every way sameliness of kinde 42. The rarefying of the Sulphur of water gives smoothness to Ice but not the immixing of a strange air 43. In the Patient or sufferer re-acting differs from resistance 44. It is proved by 17 Reasons that air is never transchanged into water nor this into that GAS and Blas are indeed new names brought in by me because the knowledge of them hath been unknown to the Antients notwithstanding Gas and Blas do obtain a necessary place among natural Beginnings Therefore this Paradox is the more largely to be explained And first after what sort Gas may be made of water and how different a manner it is from that wherein heat doth elevate water into a Vapour And likewise we must know after what sort these things do happen by the dissection of the water I will therefore repeat That the thrice glorious God in the beginning created the Heaven and the Earth and the great deep of waters But the
deepest things of Philosophy and of the most inward principles of nature and of the seminall resolutions and exhalations of any properties whatsoever At length to shew an emptiness in the air it is convenient more deeply to search into the thingliness or nature of its rarefying and condensing For first of all whatsoever I have hitherto spoken concerning the rarefying of the air that I confess hath been done for the capacity of the common sort else to speak properly although the air may seem to be pressed together and to be enlarged in the space of place yet rarefying it self doth not belong to the air its self that is that the very body of the air may be made thinner than it self in the same manner wherein a vapour is made of water Because I have already divers times shewn that a vapour is a Cloud of the atomes of the water rent a sunder from each other by the middle parts of the air interposing and that therefore the water in the vapour doth also alwayes remain water neither that it suffers any thing besides the extension of it self and division into atomes made by its seperater For if the body of the air be therefore made thin this should be either as it should be changed into another body more slender thin and simple than it self which is to feign a new and unheard of Element actually cold thinner than the others and more simple than the air Or the air should be made thin by the seperation of the atomes and the interposing of another unknown body and then the body coming between should admit of degrees of thinness And therefore the rarefying it self should not be so much referred unto the air as unto the unknown body coming between Nevertheless rarefying is not of the air but in the air and that not onely by reason of admitted smoaks as in the Handicraft operation of a dish but through a naked quality of heat as is manifest by the Instrument meating out the qualities of the encompassing air therefore as oft as rarefying doth appear in the air it must needes by all meanes happen through an increase of the Magnall Which sounds that a vacuum being increased in the air the pores of the air are enlarged and extended and so so far is it that by reason of heat the air by it self and in its own body doth sustain a rarefying and that the body of the Element is changed that rather it is coagulated at least is pressed together and that the little holes of the vacuum do extend themselves or that the Magnall it self is multiplied in the air Wherefore there is also an improper speech while we signifie the air to be tarified by it self when as rather it is thickned or pressed together by it self but the Magnall that is co-bred with it is therefore extended But from what hath been said before is deducted that the body of the air is under cold brought unto its just extention And again that which followes from thence is that cold is naturall or pleasant to the air But that the Magnall is contracted under cold But as oft as the Magnall is straightned the wayes or passages of the Stars to us are straightned And hence it is plainly to be seen why the Land of promise is very hot that is why in the more hot Zone there are the more happy confanguinities or neernesses of alliance of the Heaven with the earth the more plentifull fruits and the more savoury ones Therefore the Magnall is like light and is easily made and easily brought to nothing For that which is in it self the vacuum of the air is almost nothing in respect of bodies For it came forth from nothing also it may be reduced to nothing But not but against the will of the air because it hath need of this vacuum Alas how nigh to nothing is all nature which began of nothing In the aforesaid Instrument meating out the encompassing air by the heat or cold of the Sun the place of the air is seen to be greater or lesse but we perceive that at the rarefying of the thing contained the air is expelled whose breathing place if it then be shut up for want of air a sucking is felt Therefore by more fully looking into the matter the vacuum or Magnall of the air is increased and lessened but the Air is not rarefied So also the condensing or pressing together of the Air is not in respect of its body but onely of its Magnall or Sheath CHAP. XVI An Irregular Meteor 1. The Mysteries of the Rain-bow and the Images of the Sun 2. That before the floud there was no Rain-bow 3. That the Rain-bow was given for a signe of the Covenant yet that the cause thereof is not yet known 4. Yet the Rain-bow doth daily bring its own Covenant to remembrance 5. The Mystery of the Covenant is as yet under the Rain-bow 6. In what thing the Rain-bow doth denote the end of the World 7. The dotages or toyes of the Schooles concerning the Rain-bow 8. Things required of the Schooles 9. That the Rain-bow hath not its Colours immediately in a Cloud but in a place 10. That the Rain-bow is of the nature of Light 11. The existence of Colours immediately in place is proved 12. The Object of the sight is immediately in Place the object of hearing is immediately in the body of the Mean 13. Creatures of neutrality do subsist immediately in place without a body 14. Paracelsus concerning the Rain bow is refuted 15. The frequenoy of a Miraole doth not reduce that miracle into the number of nature 16. Some supernaturall things are ordinary 17. An Atheisticall and childish opinion of the Schooles concerning Thunder and Lightning 18. Wonderfull sights or visions in high mountains 19. The spirit all noyse or cracking is the Blas of the evill spirit 20. A Historie of Thunder 21. The noyse of Thunder how it putrifieth 22. Outward Salt preserveth I Have said that Meteors do consist of their matter Gas and their efficient cause Blas as well the Motive as the altering But the Rain-bow is irregular a divine Mysterie in its originall I judge the same thing of the Parelia or Image of the Sun whereby two or three Suns do appear at noon-day alike equally clear or lightsome But for Thunder it doth not alike include a Mysterie and monstrous token We being admonished by the holy Scriptures do believe by faith that the Rain-bow was given for a sign of the Covenant between God and mortall men that the World should no more hence forward perish by waters For first I draw from thence that the Rain-bow was never seen before the Floud Otherwise mortalls had justly complained For we have oftentimes already seen the Rain-bow and yet the World hath perished by a deluge what safety dost thou therefore promise us by an accustomed Rain-bow this Covenant is suspected by us it takes not away our fear The Rain-bow was therefore new to the World when it
first appeared for a sign of the Covenant Wherefore mortalls were amazed at that unwonted Being and being otherwise incredulous gave credit Secondly From hence I learn that the Rain-bow was given for a meer sign wherefore neither that it hath even to this day any reason of a cause with relation to any effect Thirdly seeing now the World before the floud had been about two thousand years old and yet there had been causes in nature which to this day the Schooles do attribute to the Rain-bow yet there was no Rain-bow Surely that convinceth of the falshood of those causes Whence at length in the fourth place it followes That unless the Rainbow be also at this day for a sign of the Covenant and for the sake of its first appointment it otherwise appeares for a frustrated purpose Therefore also the Rain-bow doth now and then remember us of the Covenant once stricken that we may believe and alway be mindfull that God the avenger on sinners sometimes sent the waters that they might destroy every soul living on the Earth that the same God might be a conscious or fellow-knowing revenger and Judge of our sin For all flesh had corrupted its way by luxurie which ought to be choaked by waters By the Rain-bow therefore God will alway have us mindefull of threatned punishments who by this sign doth signifie that he is the continuall President or chief Ruler the Revenger of nature But that the Rainbow might signifie that the World should be no more drowned with waters it was meet that it should bear before it not indeed a certain unwonted spectacle in the air without difference to any other thing but the mystery of the promised Covenant ought to lay hid in the Rainbow which might declare the promlse and belief of the thing promised by a signe Surely I seem to my self to admire with Noah three colours in the Rainbow and the pleasing splendours of three Sulphurs shining forth in co-burnt Mineralls And so the Colours do give testimony that the Earth being the womb of Mineralls is at length to satisfie the wrath of God by the extream melting of the burning of her Sulphurs Therefore the Rainbow doth not henceforth presage water but fire I wonder at the Schooles who will not hearken to the truth of the holy Scriptures delivered but that they even to this day proceed to make young men drunk with heathenish toyes or dotages For they hand forth that the Rainbow consisteth of a twofold Cloud to wit one being deeper and thicker but the other being thinner and moreover extended over that other that in manner of a Glasse it may resemble the Sun from the contrary part Verily it is a vain devise like unto an old Wives Dream For I have sometimes kicked the lower part of a Rainbow with my feet and have touched it with my hands and that not onely in Cloudy Mountains but in an open and Sunnie-field And so I have certainly known by my eyes hands and feet the falshood of that supposition Seeing that not so much as a simple Cloud was in the place of the Rainbow For neither although in the morning I did cleave the Rainbow and drew it by the colours of the Rainbow have I perceived any thing which is not every where on every side in the neighbouring Air. Yea therefore were not the colours of the Rainbow troubled nor suffered confusion The Schooles ought at least to declare why it should have alwayes the figure of a Bow or Semi-circle but never the resemblance of a Glasse Why if it be the Image of the Sun reflex doth it not shine in the middle of it self seeing the Parelia shines like the Sun with an undistinct and ruddie light Why should those two Clowds be alwayes folded together with the equall form of a Bow and variety of Colours Why doth not the Glasse that is against the Sun represent those Colours if that double Cloud be in the room of a Glasse Why doth not that doubled Cloud at least in its more outward and conjoyned part change the wandring Latitude of the Clouds if its hollow part be pierced with an abounding light of the Sun declining or going down Why doth a Rainbow also appear the Sun being hid under the Clouds and no where shining Why doth the Sun I say paint out alwayes those uniform and various Colours and so neerly placed together and not one onely Colour according to the simplicity of its own light Wherefore do many Rainbowes now and then appear together in one field For truly in so vast a Circle of the Air of the Horizon the reflexion falls not in one or two miles but the Cloud opposite to the Sun hath not its reflexion directly unless on the opposite part answering to it self in the Horizon but not on the part near to its side Lastly it is absurd that the upper and thinner Cloud which is void of Colour and which the light of the Sun doth easily pierce should fashion Colours in the other thicker Cloud which neither the Sun nor either of those Clouds have in themselves Surely I have very much admired at these vain positions of the Schooles while as I should handle a Rainbow with my hand and should see no Cloud at all round about Wherefore I have noted that the Rainbow by a peculiar priviledge hath its Colours immediately in a place but in the Air by the place mediating And so I have taken notice that those Colours and the figure of the Rainbow in their manner of existing are of the nature of light That is the Winde blowing the Colours which are immediately in a medium or mean do walk together with the mean and are dispersed according as the mean in which they are is but the Colours or Lights which are immediately in place are not changed although the Air or Mean in which they appear may change its place and flow So neither the winde blowing doth the Rainbow perish or walk For from hence it is that the object of sight is at one onely instant brought to the Eye but the object of hearing because it is not immediately in place but in an Air placed doth presuppose a durance of time and motion Wherefore the Rainbow not onely is not in a Cloud but moreover not indeed in the Air but immediately in place but in the Air immediately to wit as this is in a place For so the light of the Sun doth the more swiftly strike it self in an instant even unto the Earth because it is immediately in place but in the Air mediately to wit as this is in a place But that the Sun is the cause of the Rainbow that I believe is naturall but that a Bow immediately in place is appointed to be so coloured by the Sun but in no wise in the Air that hath the force of a sign For the Schooles have hitherto been ignorant that Light and Colours can subsist unless they do inherit or stick in some certain
substance But it is no wonder for truly they have not known some Creatures some whereof they have brought back into a substance to wit the fire substantiall forms c. but others they have surrendred into meer accidents as the Rainbow Light the Magnall c. The which notwithstanding I shall demonstrate in their place to be created things of a neither sort But let it be enough to have said it in this place But if the Rainbow should be immediately in the Air and not in a place it must needes be that by any little winde it should straightway flow abroad and be puft away by blowing together with a Cloud or the Air which is false in the Rainbow the which doth also remain a great while under the Windes sometimes without any presence of Clouds and yet in the same constant figure of a Bow or Semi-circle therefore the Rainbow seeing it is immediately in place it is a new figure of a coloured Light Indeed the Rainbow began supernaturally for a Sign and Mystery of the Covenant struck with Mortalls and since it hath at this day its Root in the Air without any matter yet after the manner of naturall things I do reverence its efficient cause and its presence and do ponder with my self that the Rainbow is at this day given for a Sign of the Covenant even as in times past Paracelsus supposeth the Rainbow to be the Evestrum of the Sun but the Evestrum he calls the Spirits or Ghosts of men The which from the absurdity of it self alone as sufficiently rejected I passe by For truly the Sun hath neither a Soul nor being as yet alive hath an Evestrum after its Buriall There are some who will laugh at me for these daily Miracles But certainly while I do more fully look into things I see divine goodness to be actually alwayes every where and immediately President or chief Ruler because all which things he in very deed even from end to end reacheth to strongly and disposeth of all things sweetly For in God we live are and are moved in very deed and act but not by way of proportion or similitude For truly when the Lord the Saviour said I am he to wit by whom ye are live and are moved he withdrew onely that his power whereby they were moved and straightway all the Souldiers fell on the ground And although the Instrument in nature whereby we are moved be ordinary yet there is another principall totall and independent cause of our motion and the originall thereof being a miraculous hand doth concur in every motion So also in the Rainbow the Sun and place do concur as it were second causes Yet there is another independent totall miraculous and immediate cause which hath directed the Rainbow to the glory of his own goodness and of the Covenant stricken not onely indeed with Noah and his Family but with the Sons of men his posterity even to the end of the World And so from the same originall and for the same end for which the Rainbow began it is promised to endure as long as Mortalls shall be and seeing it is a sign of the Covenant with the Sons of men but not onely with the Sons of Noah it also includes a certain Covenant or agreement Therefore there is a miraculous thing in the Rainbow that its colours are not in any body but immediately in place it self like light and that immediately from the hand of God without the concurrence of a second cause Nor is it a wonder that from the condition of the Covenant a supernaturall effect should interpose Because that in many places continuall miracles do offer themselves Therefore as the Rainbow is a sign of an everlasting Covenant and a Messenger of divine goodness so Thunder causeth an admiration and adoring of the power of God For there is nothing in the Catalogue or number of things whose rains the Almighty Creator doth not immediately rule Surely he every where inforceth his love and fear and so will have man to be ordinarily put in minde of his power According to that saying The Voyce af Thunder hath stricken the Earth For a sudden and monstrous Blas is stirred up in the Air. The Heaven is oft-times clear straightway also being without winde it is suddenly bespotted with a black Cloud For often times it thunders the Heaven being clear without any small Cloud And so Thunder doth not require a Cloud but if it doth suddenly stir up any it is made as the cracking noyse shakes the Peroledes and as Gas settles downwards into a thick Cloud being drawn together by the cold of the place Therefore the Doctrine of the Schooles is frivolous determining that an exhalation is kindled between the sheath of the Clouds that it dasheth forth Lightning and that there are so many rentings of that Cloud as there are sounds and cracking noyses For I have seen in Mountains wandring Clouds and most cold in the touching yet none of any firmness or strength that they being discontinued can utter so great a noyse or cast down Lightning of so great a power by a mooving downwards and with so violent a motion and that besides the nature of ascending fire I have seen I say Lightnings about me and have heard Thunder also under my feet Notwithstanding I have even least of all discerned those firmnesses of Clouds and trifles of Thunder I say I have seen Lightnings and Thunders diversly to play under my feet where at first there was no Cloud and a Cloud to descend as if it had been called to them by the voyce of the Thunder And so I have beheld Lightning with a magnifying of the Divine Power but not with fear although I have been twice in a house that was smitten with Thunder For I by so much the more admiring have praysed the magnificencies or great atchievements of the Lord by how much the nearer his effects were unto me I have seen also once nigh Vilvord and again at Bella in Flanders a certain black Sheath as if it were a long Horsemans Boot to fly among the Groves of Oaks or Forrests with a great cracking noyse having behinde it a flame as it were of kindled straw but great Snow succeeded it Therefore seeing Thunder hath no cause plainly naturall in the Clouds of a Meteor I believe that it hath wholly all its cause not above but besides nature and so that it is a monstrous effect For first of all we are bound to believe that the evill Spirit is the Prince of this World and that his Principality doth not shine forth amongst the faithfull unless onely in the office of a tempter For so it is said that the Adversary as a Roaring Lyon goeth about seeking whom he may devoure but that not from the office of his Principality Therefore he hath obtained the Principality of this World that he may be a certain Executer of the judgements of the chief Monarch and so that he may be the Umpire or
in its essence by the Divine Goodnesse And the mind hath an eternal permanency henceforward not from its own essence but from the essence of eternity freely given unto it and kept with it Therefore from elsewhere and from that which is infinitely more powerful than it self Therefore it is sufficient that the mind is a spiritual vital Substance and a lightsome creature And seeing there are many general kinds and species of vital lights that light of the mind differs from other vital lights in this that it is a spiritual and immortal substance but that the other vital lights are not formal substances although they are substantial forms and therefore by death they depart or return into nothing no otherwise than as the flame of a candle But the Mind differs from the Angels that it is after the likenesse and image of the eternal God for the mind hath that light and lightsome substance from the gift of Creation seeing it self is that vital light but an Angel is not a light it self noâ— hath it an internal light natural or proper to it self but is the glasse of an uncreated light And so in that it faileth of the perfection of a true divine Image For else seeing an Angel is an incorporeal spirit if it were lightsome of it self it should more perfectly express the image of God than man Moreover whatsoever God more loveth that thing is more noble for that very cause but God hath loved man more than the Angel who to redeem the Angelical nature was not made in the Figure of the evil Spirit even as the thrice glorious Lamb the Saviour of the world took on him the nature of a servant that he might redeem man Neither also doth that withstand these things That the least in the Kingdome of Heaven is greater than John For the Son of man is not lesse in dignity and essence than an Angel although he be also made a little lesse oâ— lower than an Angel because the Son of man in his condition of living was diminished a little lesse than the Angels while he was made man so also was John therefore also an Angel doth alwayes remain a ministring Spirit but he is no where read to be the friend or Son of the Father the delights of the Son of man and the Temple of the Holy Spirit wherein the thrice glorious Trinity hath made its Mansion For that is the famous or royal Prerogative of the Image of God which the eternal Light imprinteth on every man that commeth into this world In the year 1610. after a long wearinesse of contemplation that I might obtain some knowledge of my mind and because I then as yet thought that the knowing of ones own self was a certain compleating of Wisdome I having by chance slidden into a dream being snatched out of the paths of reason did seem to be in a Hall dark enough on my leâ—â— hand was a Table whereon there was a Bottle wherein there was a little Liquour and the voice of the Liquor said unto me Wilt thou have Honours and Riches I was amazed at the unwonted voice I walked about weighing with my self what that should denote in the mean time on my right hand a chink was seen in the wall through which a certain light with an unwonted splendour dazled mine eyes which made me unmindful of the Liquor of its voice and former counsel because I saw that which exceeds a cogitation or thought expressible by word and then that chink presently dispersed I returning thence unto the Bottle again but sorrowful brought this away with me But I did endeavour to taste down the Liquor and with long pains I opened the Bottle and being sore stricken with dread I awaked out of my sleep But the foregoing and great desire of knowing my Soul remained with which desire I breathed for 23 full years For at length in the year 1633. in the vexatious afflictions of Fortunes yet with the rest or quiet of my life given me to drink from the safety of an innocent life I saw in a Vision my mind in an humane shape but there was a light whose whole homogeneal body was actively seeing a spiritual Substance Chrystalline shining with a proper splendour or a splendour of its own but in another Cloudy part it was rouled up as it were in the husk of it self which whether it had any splendour of it self I could not discern by reason of the superlative brightnesse of the Chrystal spirit conâ—eined within Yet that I easily observed that there was not a sexual note or mark of the sex but in the husk But the Seal of the Chrystal was an unutterable light so reflex that the Chrystal it self was made incomprehensible and that not by a denial otherwise than because it cannot onely not be expressed in word but moreover because thou knowest not the essence or thinglinesse of the thing which thou feest And then I knew that that light was the same which I had seen for twenty three years before thorow the chink I likewise from thence comprehended the vanity of my long desire For howsoever beautiful the Vision was yet my mind obtained not any perfection to it self thereby for I knew that my mind in the dreaming Vision had acted as it were the person of a third neither that the representation was worthy of so great a wish But as to that which hath respect unto the Image of God I could never conceive any thing not indeed in the abstracted meditation of understanding which would not by the same endeavour bear some figure before it under which it should stand in the Considerer For whether I shall conceive the thing in imagining it by its own Idea or shape or whether the understanding doth transchange it self into the thing understood A conceipt hath alwayes stood under some shape or figure For neither could I consider the thinglinesse of the immortal mind with an individual existence deprived of all figure neither but that it at least would answer to an humane shape For as oft as the soul being separated doth see another soul Angel or evil Spirit that is made with a knowledge that these things are present with it while it distinguisheth the soul of Peter from that of John For truly such a distinction doth happen onely by a proper vision of the soul which vision of the Soul includeth an external interchangeable to urse and therefore also a figural one For truly an Angel is so in a place that at once he is not elsewhere wherein as well a local as a figural circumscription is of necessity included And then the Body of man as such cannot give unto it self a humane shape therefore it hath need of an Engraver which might be shut up within the matter of the seed and that had descended into it from elsewhere yet that Engraver for as much as it was of a material condition it hath of it self no more power of figuring than the Masse of the Body
act of love and one onely act of complacency or desire in the every way simplicity of it self But these two intellectual things to wit will and love were together with the understanding from the beginning of Creation neither must we think that the same are stirred up anew after death seeing they are of the essence of the minde or of the Image of God But as soon as the disturbed understanding gave place to the sensitive Imagination so also the will and love that were intellectual things have through corruption of nature admitted of a will and memory which together with the mortal Soul depart into nothing the integrity of the minde remaining For in an extasie the understanding will and memory do oft-times sleep the fiery act of love alone surviving but so distinguished from those three that notwithstanding it is not without the understanding and will which are substantial and also suited to it self Therefore love the other being as it were laid asleep stands in the superficies or upper part as long as it shall sup up the other into it self But in this life love is before desire because it is a passion of the amative or loving faculty which proceeds from that supposionality of the minde which is substantial love and resembles the Image of a corporeal faculty in this life and therefore all things do inclinably or readily rush into disorder and into dissolution But in the heavenly Wights that love doth neither constitute a priority as neither a distinction from desire neither hath it the nature of a power as neither is it a habit or act of willing neither doth it subsist out of the understanding Therefore the Intellect or understanding is a formal light the very substance it self of the Soul which beholdingly knoweth without the help of eyes even as also it discerneth willeth loveth and desireth without eyes in its own unity whatsoever it comprehendeth in it self and sheweth by willing For neither doth it then any longer remember by a repetition of particular kindes of a thing once known in an image or likeness neither is it induced any longer to know by circumstances But there is one onely-knowing at once of all things understood and a beholding Aspect of them within it self yet so as that it may know one thing more personally than another while the understanding doth reflect it self upon the things understood in a distinct oneness of truth no otherwise than as now in the artificial memory where that remembrative memory is not a distinct act from the inductive or brought-in judgement of the understanding Therefore that is a thing more proper to the minde being now once dispatched from the imaginary turbulences of understanding For neither doth it hinder these things that in living persons the memory decayeth or perisheth the judgement being safe or on the contrary For the faculties of the sensitive Soul are of a diversity of kinde distinct in the Body because they are conceived by the mortal Soul after the manner of the receiver Even as also unto Inanimate things I observe a certain deaf knowledge of the object likewise a feeling and affection of the object to belong And the which have therefore begun to be called Sympathetical things or things of a like passion or affection which deaf perceivance of objects is to them like sight and understanding For there is besides in those for whatsoever things do the farther depart from the simplicity of the minde for that very cause they are more ready for multiplicities of offices a certain vital virtue and natural endowment of a certain goodness ability and efficacy for ends ordained by the Creator Even as there is also a third power resulting from both the foregoing ones which is for rejoycing at the meeting of things helpful or delightful or of turning away from things hurtful wherein is beheld a certain affection toward things abjected or cast off and likewise fear flight c. which threefold degree is as yet more manifest in the more stupid Insects and in outragious or mad men in whom no understanding is chief and onely a power of a visual light the governess doth shine forth yet in these moreover there is an act of vital virtues and functions present by reason whereof they do subsist And thirdly there is in them a far more clear act of rejoycing and turning away or aversness which things are yet far more powerfully declared in other sensitive Creatures To whom indeed belongeth a certain sensitive imagination with a certain kinde of discourse of Reason shining forth in them instead of understanding more or lesse in every one So that wittiness or quick-sightedness will memory do happen unto them under the apprehension of understanding Yet the objects and offices or functions being continually changed according to the matter that is apt for divisions and singularities which matter doth therefore indeed accuse the diversities of receivers Also in these there is an issuing power of goodness and virtues whereby Souls do more or lesse favourably incline into the exercises of their own virtues or cruelties And at length there is also in them their own complacency or well-pleasing weariness and animosity or angry heat for the considerations of objects so co-united to sensitive Souls that it is scarce possible to behold two persons but we are presently addicted to one more than to another And these being incorporeal things after the manner of the receiver shall for that cause in man be more clarified Finally I will not therefore have the Image of God to be considered for any ternary of faculties which doth thus far belong to other things in the Systeme or frame of the World because the Dignity of the Image of God is not any way participated of by other created things For truly the Image of God is intimate onely with the minde and is as proper to it as it s very own essence is unto it self But the other properties are not the very essence of the minde but the products and following effects of essences because it is not beseeming the Majesty of the Divine Image to be drawn out of qualities For the properties of other things do co-melt into the essence of the Soul by virtue of the Divine Image But if they are reckoned as it were attributes or products that is by reason of a miserable common manner of understanding and an accustomed abuse thereof For truly the minde is one pure simple formal homogeneal undivided and immortal act wherein the incomprehensible Image of God doth immediately incomprehensibly and essentially consist and forme the minde So that in that Image even all the powers do not onely lay aside the nature of attributes but also do collect their own supposionalities into an undistinguished oneness Because the Soul is in it self a certain substantial light or a substance so clear that it is not distinguished by things supposed from the very light it self and its understanding is so the light of the minde that
wheresoever the beginning of conceptions is felt But those are called forces which are not in our power because they are the first conceits of the sensitive soul as yet out of order and not yet diligently examined by the command of the minde But that which I write touching the seat of the sensitive soul I understand also for the immortal minde For truly the minde hath not a subject more near and like to it self wherein it may be entertained than that vital light which is called the sensitive soul wherein indeed the minde is involved and tied by the bond of life by the Command of God But the sensitive soul perishing through the annihilating of it self the minde cannot any longer subsist in the Body and therefore it hastens to the Being of Beings that it may passe unto places appointed for it Therefore the radical Bride-bed of the sensitive soul is in the vital Archeus of the stomach and it stands and remains there for the whole life-time Not indeed that the sensitive soul is entertained in the stomach as it were in a Sack Skin membrane pot prison little Cell or bark neither is it comprehended in that seat in manner of Bodies enclosed within a purse but after an irregular manner it is centrally in a point and as it were in the very undividable middle of one membranous thickness And it is in a place nevertheless not plainly locally But because every Soul is a light given by the Father of Lights and Creator of things but I have proved elsewhere that lights are immediately in place and mediately in a placed Air So also the sensitive Soul is in a place or seat whereof I write at this present But the minde seeing it is a lightsome substance it pierceth a created light which is the sensitive soul and this likewise pierceth the minde and blunts it with its contagion of the corruption of Adam of which in the Book of long life concerning the entrance of death into man Therefore the frail mortal sensitive soul is a meer vital light given by the Father of Lights neither is it declarable after another manner or word seeing that in the whole World it hath not its like besides the light of a Candle the which because it burns may be compared to a spark yet onely by an analogical and much unlike similitude and as it were by the more outward husk Therefore indeed that sensitive soul although it be locally present and be entertained in a place yet it is not comprehended in a place otherwise than as the flame of a Candle is kindled in an exhalation and the light in that flame is as it were life in the aforesaid soul yet vital lights are never parching but are separated by as many diversities as there are differences of souls And from thence is God called by S. James the Father of Lights Therefore the heat of things soulified is not of the Fountain-light of the soul but a heating light of the vital life and so it is the product of life but not the life it self And therefore also it is emulous of a Sunny light even as in a Fish the vital light is actually cold because it is of the nature of the Moon And for that cause God made onely two and sufficient lights for the life of sublunary things yet the light of which light or the souls themselves are the subjects of inherency And they are altogether neither Creatures between a substance and an accident because of the Country of the intelligible world Therefore in the sensitive soul for neither ever elsewhere in frail things as it were a spiritual light made by the Father of Lights is the Immortal minde conjoyned and the which also by the hand of the Almighty every where present or by an Angel is co-knit unto the sensitive soul by the bond of life that is of a vital light which is an unseparable property of the aforesaid light But the immortal minde it self is a clear or lightsome incorporeal substance immediately shewing forth the Image or likeness of its God because it hath received the same engraven on it in creating or in the very instant of enlivening or quickning For both souls are created at once and conjoyned by God who will never attribute his own Honour of Creator unto any Creature But before the fall of Adam there was not a sensitive soul in man but by what meanes or after what manner that together with death hath descended at once into humane nature that shall be shewed in its own place At least by the coming of the sensitive soul death hath entred and the corruption of our whole nature and the Majesty and Integrity of our former nature was obliterated or blotted out For truly while the minde did immediately perform the offices of life neither was the sensitive soul as yet present immortality was also present neither had beast-like darkness occupied the understanding And so man indeed suffered Ship-wrack in his own nature and that an unrestorable one but by the new birth under the calamities of tribulations maâ—â—s exalted in a far more excellent manner while from the image of God he is taken as adopted for his Son Furthermore it is altogether necessary that every motion of the first force and of the first conception of the soul doth happen in the chamber of the soul which thing although it be chiefly felt about the Orifice of the stomach and God be admirable in his works because indeed it hath well pleased him to dispose such admirable powers in the membranes of the stomach womb and skins that cover the Brain because they do bear before them as it were a certain image of a Common-wealth yet I have found the Spleen readily to serve for the ferment of the stomach and for the Sun Cocter and Directer thereof Therefore I have decreed to call the conspiracy of both Bowels the Duumvirate or Sheriff-dome For although the digestive ferment and the like aids may seem to shew forth a Family-service of servants yet the service of houshold-servants in vitals as it contains a power and strength so also it promiseth dignity and authority So that as in the stomach there are feelings faintings of the whole body and most sensible manifest and open priviledges of coctions neverthelesse the vital breathing-hole causing the digestions of so manifold arteries and so mightily of the stomach hath commanded that without a duality disagreement or powerful preferrence there ought to be made one Family-administration of both Bowels indeed by divers offices into one conspiring scope although both do singularly attend on their own work therefore also separated in place Truly there is one onely endeavour of the Duumvirate and agreeing and set harmony of intention Therefore the neighbouring Spleen doth lay on the stomack without as if it would nourish the same by a lively co-weaving of arteries Not indeed that the arteries do give all force or virtue to the Spleen but they have themselves as
now what he would in times past it is not our part to aske of God a reason of his own will therefore it is a foolish Argument God doth not now do what he did in times past therefore he cannot do it The Hebrew people was a small people out of whom Christ ought to arise and that people were on every side beset with Enemies and the which unless they had been supported with the stretched-out Arme of God and as it were by a continual miracle they being presently brought to nothing had yielded as a prey to the Conqueror from whence notwithstanding it was decreed that the Messias should arise But the condition and Law of Christians is far otherwise For the Israelitish people in the hardness of their hearts did measure the grace or favour of God by the abounding of Wealth Of-spring Fruitfulness of Fruits and their peaceable Possession But we have known that offences should be necessary in the Church Tribulations also how great soever yet not worthy to be reckoned with the Expectations of the Age to come And likewise it hath so pleased God that for unjustice Kingdoms are translated from Nation to Nation But that I may shew that there is the same God of the Christians which there was in times past to the Hebrews I must not indeed run back unto the written Chronicles with which Atheists the Bibles themselves are of no credit the Argument of Atheists is to be overthrown Seeing their understanding admits not of that which is not introduced outwardly by the Senses Their whole Faith is from a knowledge but that knowledge is founded in a present Sensibility a fore-past Observation renouncing of Histories and succession of Ages for otherwise there ought to be no less Authority of sacred than of profane Writers Yea all the knowledge of Atheists descends to the Eyes to Sight Numbers Lines Figures Tones or Sounds Weights Motions Smells Touchings Handlings and Tasts that is it wholly depends on a brutal Beginning and they are unapt to understand those things which do exceed sense For that is the cause why they exclude themselves from the intelligible world and do kick against the corner Stone But at leastwise they confess that they do see and know those things which they are ignorant of which thing happens in the Speculations of the Planets But I wish that Atheists may measure the compass of the World I say the real distance of Saturn from us for they shall confess for that very cause even against their wills the distance of so many thousand Miles which their understanding it self will contradict by seen dimensions or they shall of necessity incline themselves to confess that a three-fold circuite of Saturne in respect of his own Diameter could not have arisen from himself or of his own accord but rather that there is some Author of these of infinite power wisdome greatness and so also of Duration c. But if the Atheist doth think that the Orbs of so incomprehensible greatness and so regular a constancy of successive changes have been thus of their own accord from everlasting at least wise the perpetuity of that infinite Eternity ought to follow a certain Law Order and ordained Government which did require a certain presiding or overseeing or ruling Being everlasting in continuance great and powerful Most miserable therefore are they who by an utter denial of all things do exclude Faith and the rewards of Faith For let us consider the Circle of the Earth to be cloathed with waters or that place without Earth and water to wit that all things do of their very own forceable Inclination fall towards their Center So that if two men were there to wit from East and West these should touch each other with their Feet and should look upwards with their head even as we and the Antipodes at this day This I say the Atheist doth believe although sense hath not suggested it unto him For weighty bodies do teach indeed their own ready Inclination of falling downwards but that the Heaven is on every side aboue in respect of one Center and that such is the property of this Center that there is not another like unto it neither yet hath the Atheist seen that property but nevertheless he believes it yea whatsoever he may at any time frame he alwayes finds the contrary and without that property of a Center he believes I say that same one only natural property in the universal Center but he never beholds or looks into the working cause thereof or that which is like it in the least and he had rather through unbelief exclude it from himself But at least if there be not a God nor he every where present and giving all things to all it should be all one if all things were confounded should fall upwards or downwards whether weighty Bodies did rush downwards or upwards whether Plants and Beasts did perish or not Therefore the constancy of order perseverance of the Species or particular kinds do of necessity require some primitive Fountainous Being from whence they began are and do propagate by a continual thred and the which doth govern all things at his own pleasure or by his own beck and gives a constancy and Succession of Continuation least all things should go to ruine and be confusedly Co-mingled Indeed he beares a universal care and keeps things in their essence or being In the next place let the Atheist consider the flowing and ebbing of the Water To wit that no water doth ascend of its own accord yet that the water of the Sea doth alwayes ascend as well in the flowing as ebbing of the Sea He believes this because he sees it but the cause thereof he believes not because he seeth it not neither hath the knowledge thereof entred by sense because it is that which contradicteth his senses But he at least ought to believe that those things do happen by a cause although he hath not known the same by which notwithstanding every thing hath drawn such a property For although all particular kinds should have this kind of power of seeds and gifts from everlasting yet nevertheless there is not a certain universal property in the Universe which may have respect unto all particular things that they may be ordained and which may know all particular things newly risen and to arise unless it be out of and besides the nature of all particular things Otherwise there should be innumerable Deities as there were in times past and moreover there should be continual Divisions and Dissolutions of the species or particular kinds For the Atheist denies to believe what things he knows not by sense he sees indeed the water to be moist but he knows not what that is which is moist in the water or why it is moist Therefore he believes that which he doth not know and that which he doth not pierce that is as the Beast doth for neither shall Humane knowledge ever raise him up
ceaseth from a sumptomatical motion toward the Pleura as long as shee remains enfeebled And therefore the Pleurisie not increasing for a while nature as it were repenting of the rumor and storm thinks of a ripening of the corrupt Pus that is to be framed of the out-hunted blood All which things would more successfully follow the blood being retained wherein the life that is the strength dwells because the life is nature which is the alone Physitianess of Diseases and she failing the Physitian takes away his shoulders Therefore the Schools have not hitherto taken heed unto the impulsive cause which pours forth the blood out of the veins into undue places beyond bound and measure and which furiously plucks away the Pleura from the Ribs and prepares a wound and hollowness Which causes being co-knit together are iddeed before the effect yet do they so persevere in the same effect that they are materially and efficiently the very effects themselves Unto which effect indeed slow and impotent is the race of false and salt Phlegm out of the head and the dreamed rheumy defluxions through channels or continuations of passages not existing But Paracilsus meditating of this pulling away of the Pleura and being willing to square a cause thereunto hath brought in other follies that he may defend his own mad laws of a little world in us For he feigneth anew and Ogertine salt else never named by him however variously he itcheth in himself concerning salts in Ulcers and Apostemes even to the fetching off of the skin And first of all he teacheth that this Ogertine salt is of the property of Arsenical Sulphurs in the mean time he is silent concerning its mines veins property history etymology and reason of its etymology because it was dreamed by him But at leastwise he had acted nothing more cleerly herein seeing he dawbs no less with the same elay than that wherewith the Schools are defiled For truly none hath hitherto declared why the Pleura departs from the Ribs whereunto it is adjoyned by a continued thred of fibers to wit whether it be pulled away of its own free accord or indeed by another tearer they are content as satisfied in the doubt if they shall say it is rent from the Ribs by the weight of a down-rouling Catarrh in the resolving nevertheless of which doubt as of the root the whole cure and prevention of a Pleurisie doth consist For the root of every Disease is worthy of the dumb silence of the Schools to wit I shall shew in a peculiar treatise that the very essence of any kind of Diseases whatsoever hath been hitherto unknown in the Schools it hath seemed to suffice them if they have applyed their doctrine unto without unto artificials unto the latter sumptoms unto the consequent fruits or products as though the stage of causes and essential roots were ridiculous and in vain Paracelsus also if he reckoned to confirm any solid thing toward a Disease of so great moment and to add his doctrine thereto if he determined not to derive his Ogertine salt it self from a power unto act out of the blood at leastwise that unwonted unnamed and unknown salt ought to have brought a necessity of its invention and of its generation that at least some place might be afforded for prevention For this the pretended title of the Monarch of secrets doth require But all things have remained neglected because the chiefdome of healing hath stood founded upon empty stubble I promise therefore that whatsoever hath been built thereon shall fall to the ground For whether a fire the searcher out of truth be built or next whether the voluntary corruption of dayes shall consume the stubble at leastwise I know that at length that building will fall to the ground But I in a Pleurisie consider the first inward moover or spur and afterwards the tearer of the Pleura And both those being one and the same efficient cause of it I call the Pleurisie it self But the venal blood flowing thither and that which is poured out thither and the aposteme sprung from thence I consider as the product to which end I will bring common experience for an example Let a Thorn be thrust into any part of the Body the which pain instantly succeedeth from the pain there is presently a Pulse from the Pulse an afflux of vendl blood whence ariseth a swelling a fever an Aposteme c. the Thorn therefore mooves the other things after it Therefore the Metaphorical Thorn of the Pleurisie and by speaking properly the Pleurisie it self is a forreign sharpness conceived in the Archeus the which if it chaseth or layes aside into the blood of the hollow vein surely that is expelled unto the vein Azugos yea or into the very flesh near the Ribs from whence ariseth an Aposteme as the product of the Pleurisie In the next place as an Aposteme which is bred from a Thorn fastened in the finger a not but rashly cured by cutting of a vein but it promiseth a cure by reason of the plucking out of the Thorn only so it happens in the Pleurisie For as sharpness in the stomack is an acceptable and ordinary savour so out of the stomack all sharpness is besides nature and hostile which hath been hitherto unknown in the Schools For so from a sharpness are wringings of the bowels there is a strangury in the Urine a corroding in Ulcers in the skin a scab in the joynts the Gowt c. And the which if thou wilt experience to thy hand mingle some drops at least of sharpish Wine with the Urine that hath been newly pissed out without pain and cast it in with a Syringe Thou shalt experience against thy will that I teach the Truth In the humor Latex also of which afterwards in its own place it raiseth up a bastard Pleurisie the which they altogether through the same carelessness of narrowly searching as in other Diseases do call a windy one but if the Archeus hath laid up a gentle sharpness into the lap of the venal blood unhappily applied to it it as despised is presently hunted out and cast out of the veins and brings forth an Aposteme in whatsoever place that shall happen but if that doth happen to be the deeper or lavisher in the veins a certain pestilent affect ariseth The which I prove for the venal bloud or flesh do never wax soure or sharp without an actual obtaining of putrefaction the which I have els-where on purpose proved by the fleshes of Beasts which do most swiftly Putrifie under the Dogstar therefore yielding soure Broath for the bloud waxing soure is contrary to the nature of the Veins and to the disposition of the whole flesh as long as it liveth presently coagulated For the venal bloud in a dead-Carcasse is preserved by the Vein a good while from coagulating out of which if it shall fall it waxeth presently clotty which is more largely declared els-where Hence it follows that of an
tenfold more Diseases at least possible in us than there are particular kinds thereof in Animals Plants Minerals and Stars to wit as many as there are particular kinds of Salts Sulphurs and Mercuries and of those folded together in nature He moreover giving a caution by an Edict that any one do not rashly put forth himself to Medicine who hath not sealingly certainly properly and distinctly known all things most inwardly and most outwardly by their causes essences particular kinds or species properties proportions interchangeable courses and defects That every one may believe that Paracelsue himself who teacheth these things had also thus sealingly known all these things Furthermore he will have us bring back the Microcosme or little World unto the Rule and therefore that the three beginnings of our Body doth bring forth as many Diseases in us as there are particular kinds of created beings Fot he drives the knowledge of Medicine and young beginners head-long into a thousand confusions obscurities ignorances and impossibilities by reason of one only fault to wit that he may seem to be skilful in all things and that his dreams may be thought true He indeed easily knew that the Medicine of the Schools was supported by false foundations for neither therefore as he supposed might it be hard for him utterly to overthrow the Schools Wherefore he meditated for himself of the Name of Monarch in healing but when as he thought it an easie way for destruction or throwing down at least wise for the building up of so great a principality strength was wanting unto him in so great idiotism He therefore hath brought the three beginnings into Diseases It is thus Those three things are found indeed in many Bodies or as I may more distinctly speak the three things are at least separated out of many Bodies But he being bold a certain absurdity of that which was unconsidered hath deluded the man because he hath not considered the impossibility of the matter for Diseases Because those are never separated or to be separated whether in us or elsewhere but with a corrupting of the whole Body and that indeed by the fire Whose sequestred Family-administration notwithstanding he hath judged to bring forth Diseases in us Because the Essences of the first things are co-knit in us by the middle life of the same under the dominion whereof they notwithstanding are restrained and do alwayes remain that which they are For first of all Salt it self hath deceived him that he might become unsavory because it confirmed to Paracelsus his own conceit in the Urine sweat and tears he nothing heeding that that Salt is not of the three first things of our body but a meer excrement of transchanged meats and drinks From hence therefore he being raised up into a credulity by thinking was led aside into Errors For he had well marked that a Wound being badly healed doth pour out salt water the proper Latex of the body begotten with child by a strange Salt or that the blood it self doth degenerate throughout its whole as in an Ulcer Dropsie c. and hence he hath collected a plenteous Harvest of Ulcers Diseases for Salt which he being deceived thought to be one of the three things or beginnings and not the whole blood at once converted into a salt water without a separation of the Sulphur Mercury by erroneous transmutations He thought therefore that as much falt â—â—â—here was so many turns of Mercury and parts also of Sulphur there were and being confident that his Houshold-stuffe would be sufficient he had willingly designed the predicament of Diseases unto them But remaining unfit for the burden he dyed But he had discovered his own Error if he had not been deceived by a bold attempt of great matters For he ought without the hope of ambition and head-longness of preventions to have examined where the remaining Sulphur should stay if the salt in Ulcers in the Dropsie c. should by so plenteous a separation be plucked away from the whole and its other two companions He ought also to have been mindful of his own although erroneous Doctrine whereby he calls the Salt which is fluide out of us and present within us a meer expressure of the Salt-peter of an evil Star or Cagastral And so he endeavours to perswade that not only fleshes and blood but also that the whole Body is with the life of Salt-peter and that Cagastrical For the blood as the water yeelds all fruits is wholly similar or alike which being seasoned with a poysonous or strange ferment doth sometimes degenerate into divers off-springs of Salt but another time into divers off-springs of Dungs without any memory of a Posthume Mercury or Sulphur In the next place that Paracelsus may find out his own cause for Diseases he for example doth oft-times define a Feaver to be an Earth-quake of the Microâ—osm which trembling of the earth he sometimes defines to be our Falling-fickness But elsewhere he attributes the trembling of the earth to tremblings sprung from burnt or smoaking Mercury In another place again he defineth a Feaver to be a Disease of Sulphur and Nitre boasting that the Cause and also the Remedy are in that his essential definition For truly under an ulcerared Imposthume the whole Body being in it self fat is made as it were a Sceleton neither doth it expel any thing besides corruptions So through the force of loosening Medicines the whole habit of the Body doth oftentimes suddenly melt into putrefaction The which is brought to pass by the Art of Physitians but this other in a Flux through a defect But at leastwise the same poyson on both sides is only applyed and co-tempered after a different manner A Dropsical man indeed hath a girdle of eight foot but by an Emperick in one day that by a drink he is loosed from his Dropsie and the water weighed perhaps 40. pound but verily his belly even presently again swelled up into its antient bigness and after few hours ne dyed Indeed the remainder beats a resemblance before it of nothing but skin and bones because his flesh and blood had presently at once wandred into the salt water of the Dropsie And that wonder I saw in this Man That to day his belly had plainly asswaged and that the morrow it again returned unto its former pitch of swelling extension and hardness and then he dyed If therefore that brine of salt had been one of the three beginnings of necessity likewise 40. pound of Sulphur had remained beholdable An ulcerous Oak weeps continual salt water and waxeth lean with rottenness but if that salt were one of the three beginnings of the Oak surely the Oak should wax fat like the heart of the Pine Tree neither should it wax lean as being unjuicy rotten and almost divorced from the Kitchins Therefore diseasie destructions do not testifie to these beginnings but that the whole body is diversly affected doth melt and is made to putrifie according
effect is supposed and likewise a cause thereof neither is it doubted what that effect or what the cause thereof may be but the knitting of them both is only sought for To wit after what sort the effect proceeds from the cause or on the other hand after what manner and by what means such a cause may produce its effect The knowledge I say of the Tree and its Fruit is presupposed The which if we compose them for healing for if the whole world be for man also the whole physical knowledge of nature shall therefore be subservient to man the knowledges of ones self shall be first to be presupposed To wit that a true Physitian doth know the Tree of the whole nature of man and the fruit thereof to wit health Likewise also the tree of vitiated health and the very rank or order of health depraved as the Fruit of that Which proper knowledges of the thingliness or essence together with its adjacents are required Therefore that we may know the Tree in its root and properties that ought to be done by the Fruits wherefore also the Fruits are first to be known But the Fruits as well of entire as of vitiated health seeing they are the Scopes whereunto the properties of occult Remedies are referred have themselves in manner of a Tree and Trunk whereinto the young budding slips and seeds of things ought to be ingrafted as it were the Fruits of the same This indeed the ordination of Medicine requireth that Remedies although they have themselves in manner of a cause yet that they become fruits or effects in us as they do fructifie in our Tree and so they are not only the Fruits of their own native Tree whence in the nature of things they are derived but rather they are new Fruits from an ingrafting of a product and so are plainly promiscuous of a branch or Fruit of the Tree implanted and of the vital power of the stock whereinto it is ingrafted Such fruits indeed do bewray their own Tree And so as in every progress of nature a duality of Sex is required for the production of every Fruit it was no wonder that the rank and applications of occult Qualities or Remedies hath remained unknown if it hath hitherto stood neglected that a healthy and diseasie state is bred by the same Parent and so also they have referred the whole essence of a Disease into external occasional efficient and warring causes but not into the true and inward Tree of sicknesses Let us suppose therefore the Archeus to be provoked and almost furious the which being provoked by occasional causes doth pour forth its own blood and causeth the Bloody-Flux or likewise let us feign the Archeus grievously bearing the mark of pain conceived in some part serving to the last digestion and being as it were stung with fury to stir up an Erisipelas The question is of finding out a Remedy by the occult or hidden property The Schools therefore have considered to apply cooling things to the Erisipelas as to the fruit and they would not apply a Remedy to the vitiated tree But the Secretaries of natural things have attended to the aforesaid furies to be restrained by fear so that the fear is not to be incurred on the man but on the Archeus Therefore they have killed the most fearful creature to wit a Hare Not indeed with a weapon that he might dye by an unexpected death but by hunting that he might perish by the biting of Dogs whereby a doubled force of fear may be imprinted on his whole Body Therefore they have tinged a bloody Towel in the blood of the Hare and kept it being dryed And that they have administred by pieces in Wine and the Dysentery was cured And likewise they have put it dry on the Erisipelas and it was cured Yea the Germane Souldiers do give an Hare dryed in the smoak in drink and the Bloody-Flux or Dysentery is cured with an undeceiveable event From whence they have learned that cuttings of veins and purgings are vain whether thou respectest feigned humours or in the next place a diminishing of heat and strength together with the blood likewise that coolings are ridiculous because they are those things which endeavour to heal from the effect do never touch at the roots and for that cause do for the most part provoke nature into greater furies The Erisipelas therefore and Bloody-Flux have obtained some common point wherein they might agree And that is a certain Ideal poyson bred by the Archeus For truly in the Tree of man every exorbitant passion of the Archeus doth tinge its own Idea or likeness on the blood yea and on the excrements no less than in the Tree of a Dog through the exorbitancy of madness Fruits are bred in his spittle which do afterwards produce in us the Fruit of the transplanted madness Therefore the knowledge of hidden Remedies is badly sought into from the Fruit. For I have known that whatsoever things are made in the world are made from the necessity of the Seeds of every Archeus and so by means of an incorporeal and invisible Being But I have known that seminal Beings do arise from an imaginative sorce of soulified things or the Archeus of the same by a co-like perturbation And so that by a certain invisible Principle this visible world is continued But in things subjected or not soulified I have observed that they after a co-like manner have themselves by the same certain Analogical proportion But that every disjoynting or irregularity of the Archeus doth by its Idea's frame the Seeds to be poysons unto its own Body and so a sound Tree rusheth into a vitiated one I have considered that the poysons of some things which are bred with us do bear Seeds not those which by the exorbitancy of their of own Archeus but in respect of our Archeus might produce vitiated Idea's and to themselves natural to us mortal Idea's Whence indeed if Fruits or Branches be implanted into the Tree of our entire health it happens that from both as it were from a promiscuous Sex vitiated or poysonous Fruits do arise in us But the poysons are on both sides among the number of occult properties Let therefore suitable helps or Remedies have Idea's which are chiefly the extinguishers of the poysoned Idea's or those which by an eminent goodness may transchange as well the Archeus the producer of the poyson as the poyson it self produced whence I have very clearly learned that almost every poyson and its Antidote and so also the whole race of occult or formal properties do seminally descend from the activity of a vital light For so the poysons of soulified creatures do arise from disturbances the which by how much the sharper they shall be by so much also the more cruel poysons they bring forth For so the poysons of Serpents are bred from anger envy sury pride and those being variously mixed with fear But the corrosive and putrifactive
that the Life is the immediate mansion of a Disease the inward subject yea and workman of the same But seeing Life is not essentially of the Body nor proper to the Body but that a Body without Life is a dead Carcass and a Disease is in the Life Of necessity also every matter or mansion and efficient Cause of a Disease doth not exceed the Limits of Life That is of necessity every Disease doth inhabite within the Case of the Archeus who is the alone immediate witness executer instrument as also the inne of Life but Apostemes Ulcers Filths Excrements c. Are only either the occasions of Death and Diseases or the latter products of the same raised up into a new scene or stage of the Tragedy Neither surely is it therefore a wonder that together with the Life all Diseases do depart into nothing if the Life be the immediate subject and mansion of Diseases But I long since admired that no Physitian hath hitherto known in what the essence of Diseases should shine But that they have wandred about Elementary qualities Humours Complexious Contrarieties and Dispositions Neither that indeed they have once observed that as filths are not Diseases so neither are Diseases in filths but that they live only in the Life it self and being included in the same do so arise grow and perish that seeing they are no where out of the Life they ought to be the intimate and domestick Thieves of the Life These things be spoken of the proper receptacle of Diseases Furthermore seeing a Disease is without controversie admitted to be a Being existing in us as in an inne and doth enjoy its own and singular properties and different Symptoms A Disease of necessity is not of the number of accidents because an accident is not of an accident combined with it and distinct from it self in the whole Species For truly sharpness or bitterness is not a property of whiteness blackness lightness or heat But every one of them do stand by themselves Wherefore if a Disease be a Being and not an accident if in the next place it produceth from it self not only alterations diverse dispositions weaknesses c. But moreover doth generate substances degenerating from the ordinary institution of their own nature of necessity also it ought to consist of matter and its own internal or seminal efficient Lastly seeing a Disease is internal as to the life it self it also follows of necessity that the matter of a Disease is Archeal and its efficient cause is vital And that I may speak more clearly every Disease is of necessity an Ideal efficient act of the vital power cloathing it self with a Garment of Archeal matter and attaining a vital and substantial form according to a difference of the slowness and swiftness of Ideal seeds which things indeed have been hitherto unknown by Mortals and those things which follow are as yet more largely supported with this position God made not Death and so far is he alwayes estranged from Death that he refuseth to be called the God of the Dead First of all also although Death doth sometimes invade without a Disease yet for the most part Death follows Diseases so that none doubteth but that that Death is the daughter of Diseases or the second Cause whereby and by means whereof the Life is extinguished That is Death is present but seeing God is not in any wise the Author of Death to wit by whom Death entred into Man who else was immortal and that no more or by a stronger right in the beginning of the World than at this day A Physitian must diligently enquire from whence Death doth causally invade from the beginning and even unto this day that it may from thence be manifest from whence a Disease hath drawn its integrity For truly although it be sufficiently apparent that Death doth contain as it were a privation or exstinction of Life so neither in it self or for its existence it doth not require any substantial form and much less a vital one But surely a Disease as such doth not bespeak a privation but a Being truly subsisting acting by an hurtful act of Life and ensnaring the Life So also it behoveth a Disease to consist in the form of its own thingliness which the Life can receive into it and be informed by it But seeing a Disease arose from the same Beginning as Death did neither is God ever the Author of Death It by all means follows that God is not the Author or Creator of Diseases neither therefore although a Disease hath a certain substantial form Yet it hath not Life nor a vital Light but what it hath borrowed from the Life it self to wit so far as it glistens in the Light of our Life or in that of Cattel But not that a Disease doth require or hath begged a vital Light from the Father of Lights for the being of its seed the which in it self is rather to be named a deadly or mortal thing and altogether estranged from the goodness of God the Creator Therefore although God alone doth create all the forms of all things and the Father of Lights doth give every essential form to wit a vital substantial form and so also the formal substance without any mutual competitor yet that hath not place in Diseases in the forming of which indeed man alone is chief Because the Life of Man alone containeth the second Causes of Diseases and Death Therefore because the Creator God denyeth that he made Death therefore also a Disease For a Disease standeth in the Life of Man and therefore all its quiddity or thingliness depends on the Life of man and that not only Seminally even as otherwise it is proper to all the seeds of any things whatsoever But besides also formally so that the Life of the Archeus or his Flesh and Blood are and do remain the whole formal Cause of Diseases or the effective Cause of the formes of a Disease For he who from the beginning refused to have effected Death or Diseases will never at length thence-forward be willing to have made Death nor Diseases For the Father of Lights will not give his Honour of Creating formal Lights unto any Creature except the Mortal formes of Diseases whereof as neither would he be called the God of the Dead Therefore Man remains the workman of his own Death who the day before was immortal as also of his own Diseases as if he were the Creator of Death So indeed that whereas God hath made vital Lights Man Createth Diseasie Obscure and deadly Idea's or Shapes and such an Idea doth as much differ from a vital Light as a black heat doth from Light Therefore the formal act of Death and Diseases sprang from the action of original Sin and shall so spring even unto the end of the World For the same Cause which in the beginning of the World made Death or the same second natural Cause which gave a natural entrance of Death into
while the same things are engraven by a stronger apprehension For things conceived do teach us that from passions or perturbations which are non-beings true real actual Images do arise no otherwise than as the thoughts of a Woman with Child do stamp a real Image how strange and forreign soever it be Wherefore thus indeed the Phantasie brings forth poysons which do kill its own Man and afflict him with diverse miseries So that as those Images do primarily proceed from the imaginative power whose immediate instruments the Archeus himself is So it is altogether necessary that he which toucheth Pitch should be defiled by it That is it behoveth the Archeus himself primarily and immediately to conceive and put on that new Image to be affected with the same and by virtue of a resembling mark or Symbole other things depending on him according to the properties of that hurtful Idea And that Ferment being once decyphered in that aire which maketh the assault is a Disease which forthwith diffuseth it self into the venal Blood the liquor that is to be immediately assimilated and next into the similar parts and into the very Superfluities of the Body according to the property even of that its own Idea for from hence the Diseases of distributions and digestions What if Idea's are formed in the implanted Spirit of the Braine or inne of the Spleen by imagining which also in Bruits are the principal Blas and Organ of all Motions It nothing hinders but that the Archeus himself implanted in the parts may frame singular and now and then exorbitant Idea's not unlike to the imaginative power for so the Spittle of a mad Dog Tarantula or Serpent and likewise the juice of Wolfesbane Monkshood or Nightshade do communicate their Image of fury on us against our wills Wherefore likewise nothing hinders the chief or primary instrument of imagination from forming in-mate seminal fermental poysonous c. Images unto it self Whatsoever doth of its own Nature by it self and immediately afflict the vital powers ought for that very Cause to be of the race and condition of those Powers For otherwise they should not have a Symbole Passage Agreement Virtues or Piercing into each other as neither by consequence an application and activity For seeing the powers or faculties are the invisible and untangible seals of the Archeus who is himself invisible and untangible those powers cannot be reached and much less pierced or vanquished by the Body because those powers however vital they are yet they want extremities whereby they may be touched whence it follows which hath been hitherto unknown that every Disease for it glistens in the Life because it is of the disposition of the vital powers it ought immediately to be stamped and to arise from a Being which was bred to produce seminal Idea's And seeing nothing among constituted things is made of it self originally of necessity the powers as well of Diseasie as vital things do depend either on the Idea's of the generater himself whence hereditary Diseases or of the generated Archeus But that that thing may the more clearly appear in the seed of Bruites and Man there is a power formative after the similitude of the generater Because it is that which seeing it is dispositive and distributive of the whole government in figuring its activity is contested by none The seed therefore hath a knowledge infused by the generater fitted for the ends to be performed by it self for the seed which in its own substance is otherwise barren is made fruitful by an Image stirred up in the lust To wit the imaginative power of the generater doth first bring forth an Idea which at its beginning is wholly a non-being but by arraying it self with the cloathing of the Archeus it becomes a real and seminal Being And that as well in Plants as in sensible Creatures For in vegetables a seed proceeds from an invisible Beginning for truly there is a virtue given to a plant of fructifying by a seed and so it hath an analogical or proportionable conception which formeth a seminal Idea in propagating borrows its fruitfulness and principles of Life from it but not Life it self even as elswhere concerning Formes therefore a seed borrows knowledge gifts roots and dispositions of the matter espoused unto it for Life from a seminal Idea to wit the cause of all fruitfulness And they who a little smelt out that thing in times past have said that every generation doth draw its original from an invisible World The thrice glorious Almighty by the naked and pure command of his own cogitation and conceived Word Fiat or let it be done made the whole Creature of nothing and put seminal virtues into it durable throughout ages But the Creature afterwards propagates its gift received not indeed of nothing as neither by its own command but it hath received a power of Creating its own seminal Image from God of tranferring or decyphering the same on its own Archeus This indeed is the seminal virtue of Man Bruits and Plants But not this beast-like conception is in plants nor is stirred up from lust for it is sufficient that it happen after an analogical manner whereby the Antients have agreed all things to be in all which manner by a similitude drawn from us the Sympathy and Antipathy of things do shew for they feel a mutual presence and are presently stirred up by that sense unto the unfolding of their natural endowments Because they are those things which else would remain unmoved but a sense or feeling cannot but after some sort have an equal force with an imaginative virtue The which I have elsewhere profesly treated more at large concerning the Plague But now my aim is not to Phylosophize concerning Plants but only of Diseases It sufficeth therefore that the imagination it self so called from the forming of an Image doth stampe an Idea for whose sake every seed is fruitful And seeing that in us that imaginative power is as it were brutal earthly and devillish according to the Apostle therefore it is subject unto its own Diseases and can stampe an Image in the Archeus it s own immediate instrument Hence it happens unto us that every Disease is materially and efficiently in us For whatsoever is bred or made that wholly happens through the necessity of a certain seed and every seed hath its this something from an Idea put into its spirit but a Disease is a real Being and is made in a live Creature only Whence it follows that although a Disease doth oppose the Life as the forerunner of Death yet it is bred from a vital Beginning and the same in the Life to wit from the flesh of Sin Notwithstanding Death and all dead things do want rootes whereby they may produce And so seeing Death bespeaks a destruction or privation it wants a seminal Image wherein it is distinguished from Diseases Life indeed is from the Soul and therefore also the premised character of the first constitution
of a Disease and its immediate Essence may be manifest First indeed I have taught elsewhere that there is a certain unbridled imaginative force of the first motions not reduced into the power of the will being infolded in the Spleen And that the Almighty hath entertained a faculty of so great moment even in meer Membranes and almost un-bloody purses so that as well the Orifice of the Stomack as the womb it self may be of right and desert equalized to the heart To wit by reason of a notable Crasis or constitution of acting and likewise obedience performed unto it by the other Bowels From the prerogative of which power the spleen is scituated almost in the middle place between them both yet it is inclined a little more demissly or downwards because it hath undertaken the place of an entire root For it toucheth at the Stomack with its largeness in respect whereof a Duumvirate subsisteth But it reacheth the Womb with its other extream or end to wit being by its Ligaments annexed to the Loins And then I have said that although at first that which is imagined is nothing but a meer Being of Reason yet it doth not remain such for truly the Phantasie is a sealifying virtue and in this respect is called imaginative because it formeth the Images or likenesses or Idea's of things conceived and doth characterize them in its own vital spirit And therefore that Idea is made a spiritual or seminal and powerful Being to perform things of great moment which thing it helpeth to have shewn by the example of a woman with child For a woman with child if by her imaginative virtue she with great desire hath conceived a cherry she imprinteth the Idea thereof on the young even as of the plague elsewhere an Idea I say which is seminal sealing and of its own accord un-obliterable Because the Idea whereof waxeth green becomes yellow and lookes red every Year in the flesh at the same Stations of the Year wherein these Cherries do otherwise give the tokens of their successive change in the tree But why the Idea of a Cherry or Mouse is imprinted not on the mother but on the young and doth now presently wander from the imagining woman into another subject the which also hath oft-times began to live in its own quarter the cause is an uncessant nor that a feigned affection of the Mother whereby she naturally watcheth more for her Young than for her self Therefore the inward natural and unexcuseable carefulness of the Mother laying as it were continually on the Young directs the Idea bred from passions by one beam unto her Young And because the hand is the principal Instrument of activities therefore the carefulness descending unto the hand as it were for the defence of her Young receiveth the conceived Idea and proceedeth with it further on her Young But seeing Idea's are certain seminal Lights therefore they mutually pierce each other without the adultery of Union Therefore the conceived Idea of the Cherry through a supervening or sudden coming Idea of the Mothers care is directed unto the part of the Young where the hand hath touched the Body of the Mother For indeed there is alwaies a certain care for the end whereunto the hand doth operate The Hand therefore as the executive instrument of the Will deciphers the Idea of the Cherry conceived on that patt whereto the Mother hath moved her hand Whence it is even in the enterance manifest after what manner a cogitation which is a meer non-being may be made a real and qualified Being And then it is from hence manifest that the Spirit is primarily seasoned or besmeared with that Image and being once seasoned with some one kind of Idea it afterwards becomes unfit for the execution of other offices because the Idea being once conceived it is a Seal onely to perform things determined Therefore that Character of the seminal Image being once imprinted in some part of the Archeus causeth that it is thenceforth uncapable of other Offices For by reason of the skiey or airy simplicity of that Spirit the Idea's do so marry themselves unto it that the matter and its efficient Cause are not for the future separated from each other as long as there shall be an Identity or Sameliness of the supposed Character seeing the Idea it self is the seed in that Spirit which therefore cannot be spoiled of that Idea without its own dissolution For neither doth it just so happen to the Archeus as to Mettals which by melting return into their former State and do loose onely the labour of the Artificer It is alike as while a Woman with Child is affrighted by a Duck or a Drake For at that very moment the imaginative faculty imprints the Idea of the Being whereby she is affrighted on the Spirit So that that Idea is there made seminal and so indeed it doth not onely destroy the Embryo now formed but transformeth this Embryo into a Duck or a Drake Whence likewise is manifest not onely the Power and Authority of the imaginative but also that Idea hath drawn from the imagination a figurative Faculty and hath a seminal and figurative Power yea and a Power of Metamorphizing or Transforming And it follows from what hath been said before that a man of much imagination is of necessity also weakened in his Strength Because he is no otherways wearied than he who hath spent the day in tiresome Labour and should wholly fail aswell in Mind as Body unless he were refreshed with an acceptable Discourse a sociable Walking a pleasant Conversation and the more pure Wine According to that saying Wine moderately taken sharpens the Wit Neither is that moderateness to be delivered by ounces under the harsh Crisis of the Physitian while as by the Wise Man it is left free to every one according to his capacity Wine he saith was made for Mirth but not for Drunkennesse Sorrowful persons therefore being wearied exhausted and oppressed must be succoured with Wine even unto a chearfulness Therefore Idea's as it were formal Lights do pierce each other and imprint their own Images on that part of the Archeus whose Image and Seed they are Therefore the Idea's of inclinations do first pierce the Idea of the fructifying seed to wit for Manners Sciences Affections Diseases and Defects For therefore the Idea's of Women great with Child are easily co-knit unto constituting Idea's the which as they do oft-times corrupt manners otherwise good yea and also sometimes beget foolish ones so also they do not seldom amend other manners from the Womb Else for the most part Valiant Men are begotten by Valiant and Good Men For a Child by a rigid or tender Education begins to decline from his native Inclinations Then at length when he is endowed with some kind of Discretion by Exercises and Companies he falls into diverse Idea's of Affections the which he is constrained for the most part to obey for Life because they are implanted from
water to dry up the brook In the mean time seeing the Archeus proceedeth in an unknown path in his own fabricks of Images I am constrained in the explication of Diseases to keep the Antient Names and to follow their Sir-names That in the beaten path of occasional Causes we may descend unto the knowledge of hidden Diseasie Essences But it is sufficient for me to have shewn in this by-work that seminal Idea's in the whole Systeme of the World are the beginning principle of every Blas of seeds generations successive changes and storms Yet before that I attempt the Scheme of Diseases seeing it is as yet to scanty that Idea's are formed by the Archeus no less than by the imaginative power it shall be profitable to shew that thing unto the Young Beginner by one argument For the dead Carcass of a man which is dead through a voluntary Flux exceeds all Ice in coldness not indeed that in very truth it is more cold than the dead Carcass of a Cow which dyed of her own accord for I distinguishing that thing by the Organ of qualities and the degrees of the encompassing air it is clearly demonstrated although notwithstanding that thing be thus judged by our touching for that happens through the fear of the Archeus alone which greatly dreadeth at the co-touching of Death in the dead Carcass 1. He feels Death the which perhaps the imagination is as yet ignorant of 2. He greatly dreadeth 3. The inflowing Spirit retires 4. But that which is implanted in the hand is troubled and fails for fear and so conceives a beginning of Death unto himself from the trembling fear Therefore the Holy Scriptures do not incongrously say That he that should touch the dead is reckoned impure and half dead Which Image of Death the Archeus will he nill he doth conceive and doth so stiffly retain it for some good while as long as that Idea of fear is surviving that it scarce becomes hot again at the hearth within an hours space Therefore the Idea of trembling fear is really there for truly it works its effect and is formed by the Archeus and not by the imaginative power of the Man Therefore if the Archeus runs away trembling for fear by a like reason also he shall be sorrowful angry shall be stirred up through fury and other passions and is in a conflict through the Idea's of any perturbations whatsoever becomes troublesome and hurtful to himself according to the pleasure of Idea's which he hath formed unto himself by his own force and liberty CHAP. LXXII The passage unto the Buttery of the Bowels is stopped up 1. The difficulty of curing a Disease is concluded from the very seat of the Soul 2. An example of a quartane Ague 3. A remarkable thing concerning Remedies hitherto used against a Quartane 4. Wherein purging Medicines have hitherto decieved the unwary 5. Purging things have sometimes cured by accident and have remained through this deciet 6. A reckoning up of incurable Diseases 7. Distillation brings forth new generated things 8. Singularities in things produced by the fire 9. Deccocted things differ from distilled things 10. What was the scope of the Author in times past 11. Some Remedies have decieved the Author 12. An examination of Remedies 13. An examination of Digestions 14. An examination of Water-remedies 15. The abilities of the Stomach 16. Whence the chief variety of conditions is AFter I had discerned that the Stomach was the root of the tree or the root as well of a universal Digestion as of all particular ones whatsoever I had alike seriously known that the Mortal or sensitive Soul the Mistris of all kind of actions whatsoever in us and the Dispenseress of Life throughout the whole Body did inhabit there That indeed also the Frameress of the first conceptions was there scituated likewise the shop of sleep no less than of watchings and madnesses I held it consonant to reason that the immortal mind or Image of God could be no where more decently infolded or co-knit than in the aforesaid formal and vital Light to wit in a spiritual principle for that reason also most near because akin unto it And when as the Monarchy of Life being thorowly searched into I saw and optically or clearly knew that every Disease did essentially consist in the Life and arise out of the same the causes of difficulties in curing Diseases offered themselves unto me especially those which are not silent of their own free accord or which do not hasten through their own violence unto the end of their period but do accompany the Life which they do bitterly molest Wherefore of the more lingring Diseases I saw a Quartane an Atrophia or Consumption for lack of nourishment a Cacochymia or state of bad juice likewise weaknesses and afterwards as well those which have chosen their bed in the outmost habit of the Body such as are the Leprosie Palsey Sciatica Convulsion or Cramp Gout c. as those which are fast tied to any of the Bowels as the Apoplexie Epilepsie Astma affect of the Stone Dropsie Madness c. were not cured not indeed through a defect of desire of curing but through want of a remedy alone but I long laboured in that remedy and I many times retreated until I knew that it should respect the very fountain of Life or sensitive Soul Wherefore first I took the Quartane Ague it self in hand because it was obvious most tiresome or tedious and plainly known and the which while it did despise the usual remedies of Physitians it rendred the hope of the same void First of all I was more assured by the same that wheresoever any material Diseasie product lay hid the application likewise of a convenient remedy was required or else it was to be feared that the effect raised up from that occasional Cause would remain surviving And therefore from the correlative of this proposition I found no remedies of Physitians hitherto however through their fame unstopping resolving cleansing or purging Medicines may be boasted of yet that the same do only come or are brought down at most even unto the entrance of the spleen alone which bewraies it self to be the inn of a Quartane Ague by a sensible testimony Therefore I being from hence certainly instructed have conjectured that that unstopping c. force of a remedy doth soon even in the Stomach perish wax mild is tamed or banished through the intestines if at least-wise it shall not first die But if any quality of remedies shall remain safe from their middle Life something broken and being recieved shall more fully or inwardly pierce as Mace or Terpentine do from the necessity of Magnum Oportet retain their Savour in the Urin but at leastwise the same offers it self so gelded and dismembred that it doth not effect any of those things to which end and for which things sake Medicines are swallowed Eggs indeed and the Fleshes of Beasts do represent the favours of the nourishment
utmost of Three Hundred Years because they are those which some living Creatures do daily of their own accord reach unto but man very seldom and that not but in some unwonted places But why Long Life may be extended with so great a largness it comes to pass because it is on both sides received after the manner of the Receiver For the Modern Tree of Life should now no longer render me capable of the least Dignity or term by reason of the light of my Life being depraved by many storms the thred whereof they have cut off while it was as yet in the Flax. He shall fullfil thy desire in good things and thy Youth shall be renewed as the Eagle For neither is it said as of the Eagle because the former Youth of an Eagle is not restored But the Eagle is renewed no otherwise than as the Serpent puts off his skin and the Stag his hornes although in the mean time they do not cease to wax old under that renovation So that the Eagle hastens into grey Feathers Therefore I thus speak of Long Life not indeed which may be extended even unto the last day according to the rashness of Paracelsus as neither do I speak of a sound Life which is plainly free from Diseases but of that which under some certain kind of Protection of the Faculties doth for some good while enlarge the bound of Life Which meanes if they are administred unto a Child and strong Infant are to bring the same unto the aforesaid term if he proceed to use the same What if at length certain Climates do protract the Life shall that thing be denied unto a Medicine unto which there is a natural endowment of Long Life For oft-times he which is constrained to use Spectacles in the fiftieth Year doth afterwards again of his own free accord see clearly in the eightieth Year of his Age. Why shall not that therefore be done totally by Art which happens in the Eyes from a voluntary vigour But I have alwayes supposed that whatsoever was once Natural to wit in Nestor doth not resist a possibility of Nature Neither also doth it move me that Arch-Physitians have found this place untouched and dumb and therefore also have left it Because the Schooles do long since despaire to be wise beyond Galen who notwithstanding like an Apothecary doth substitute one thing for another and indeed hath set forth ridiculous Books of Preserving Health as for Long Life For he encloseth this in straight crooked athwart and circular rubbings to wit he acting great motion and being a great Circulater in these things which are of his own Invention even as an ignorant transcriber of others For as oft as he faileth from whence he may copy out serious things he so discovereth the wonderful poverty of his wit that he hath seemed to have doated throughout some Books in a figural friction or rubbing And therefore none of his successors hath hitherto counted the Books of Galen of Defending Health worthy of a Commentary or hath attempted to lift them from the ground but rather by a successive Interpretation every one hath bound that Doctrine of Galen unto the obedience of the huckstery of the Kitchin and Diet. For so through the craft of the Devil Long Life hath wandered into defending of Health and from thence into the Kitchins The Art therefore of some Years is Short and the Life Long if we must have respect unto the Hope of Life which the loose Doctrine of the Heathens hath neglected CHAP. XCII The Enterance of Death into Humane Nature is the Grace of Virgins The Index of the Contents 1. Why it is Treated of Death before of Life 2. A final Cause is not in Natural Things as neither is it the first of Causes 3. Some Absurdities of Aristotle 4. The Author prostrates this Treatise to the Censure of the Church 5. God indeed made Death for bruit Beasts but not for Man 6. What may be denoted by the Etymology of Death 7. The Devil could not make Death for Man 8. Man prepared Death effectively for himself 9. Of what sort the Immortality of our first Parents was 10. By what means Immortallity did stand in Man 11. Why the Mind is not capable of Suffering 12. The necessity of the sensitive Soul 13. The eating of the Apple did contain in it the second Causes for a necessity of Death 14. The inward Properties of that Apple 15. Man before the Fall wanted a sensitive Soul 16. The Mind Imprints its Image in the Seed 17. A chain flowing from the eating of the Apple 18. To what end the Author hath written this Treatise LIfe was indeed before that Death could be therefore although Life be before Death in Nature and Duration yet for this Treatise the Enterance of Death into Man's Life doth precede Life because I might not treat of Immortal Life such as it was from the intention of the Creator before the Sin of our first Parent but onely of the Length of Life or of the prolonging of Life whose end because it is closed terminated and defined or limitted by Death Death ought to be first determined of by its Causes as the remover of the bound of Life Truly I have not studied to imitate Aristotle in this thing who teacheth That the End is the first of Causes For I have elsewhere plentifully demonstrated that Aristotle was plainly ignorant of whole Nature Wherefore that his Maxime as well within as out of Nature is false Because if we speak of God the First Mover the Arch-type of all things and of the invisible World be it certain that with him there is not any Priority of Causes but that they all do co-unite into Unity with whom all things are onely one Likewise seeing whatsoever is made or generated in Nature is made or generated from a necessity of the Seeds and so that Seeds are in this respect the original Principles and natural Causes of things and do act for ends not indeed known to themselves but unto God alone From a necessity of Christian Phylosophy a Final Cause hath no place in Nature but onely in artificial things And therefore also from hence is verified what I have elsewhere sufficiently proved That Aristotle hath understood nothing less than natural things and that he hath deceived his Schools by artificial things And he is wholly impertinent in this place because he hath reduced artificial things under the catalogue of natural Causes Yea in more fully looking into the matter Aristotle remaines alike ridiculous For truly a builder before the bound or figure of Houses made out of Paper doth presuppose a knowledge of the Place an attainment of Meanes in the next place of Lime Bricks Stones Wooden and Iron materials a computation of which Meanes doth go before a Figure of the Houses And so neither also is the Final Cause if there be any the first of Artificial Causes in the Mind of the Author Therefore it is a
proper unto no nourishment which was unto that Apple so that it not only begat Seed in our first Parents a few hours after but also Dispositions to obtain by request a sensitive Soul from the Creator And that which otherwise happens in the Young in set Terms of Dayes and is perfected by certain degrees of Digestions that was presently compleated in the very vital Archeus of our first Parents And the Text doth insinuate that peculiar thing to be in the Apple because In the same day wherein he should eate of the Apple he should die the Death Because the Apple although it should anticipate or forestal the term of Dayes yet it should require a certaine term of Motion that after it should be turned into vital Blood it should also be endowed with a sensitive Soul For they who in the very point of Creation were formed into a Man and a Woman and not into Children in a short space also grew old or decayed on the same day into the maturity of Seeds and every necessity of Death and properties of second Causes For in a straight way all this falls perpendicularly or point blank on the post of the foundation of my Position on which the giddy or unconstant businesse of our Mortality is whirled about even unto this Day But at least-wise seeing Eve was made of the Rib of the Man that very thing doth insinuate a mark of Chastity and forbidden Copulation of the Flesh Because it is that which besides Whoredom contained Incest which thing was not hid from Adam Of which notwithstanding the Almighty after the fall of sin seemed to dispense withal granting Matrimony Therefore through occasion hereof it remaines diligently to search into whether the Act of Lust were compleated in Paradise Many will have Paradise to be free from filthiness because the Text saith Chap. 4. But Adam knew Eve his Wife who conceived and brought forth Cain saying I have possessed a Man by God But let these men pardon me For the contrary appeareth from the very Text. First of all The Text cited doth convince of nothing but that the ravishment of true Virginity because it is bloody doth not admit of Conception as a Companion And therefore Cain was not Conceived at the first turn but out of Paradise For otherwise 1. On the same day ye shall dye the death according to the truth of the Position denoteth that in the same place the filthiness was committed 2. The Woman is not called the Wife of Adam before the Fall as she is immediately after But the name of a Wife is not given not indeed unto Matrimony confirmed but onely unto it being finished 3. It was said onely to the Man Thou mayest not eat of this Tree Therefore it is read concerning the banishment of the Man to be made in the singular number Not indeed but that both Sexes sinned but because the Man had singularly deserved to be banished for his Whoredom 4. Therefore it is said Lest he stretch forth his hand unto the Tree of Life do eat of it and live for ever But it is not said least the Husband and Wife do eat 5. Adam at the first sight of the Beasts knew their Essences and Properties and also put right Names upon them But the Woman being seen he at first called her Wo-man because she was taken from Man But after the Fall he called her Hevah or The Mother of all living Because he at the first sight of her as yet knew not neither as yet had she that property from the Man and she learned it because she put it not on and stirred it not up but by sin For why had he changed the Essential Name of the Woman if she had not also changed her whole Nature 6. And next He with-drew her unto the Shrubs rather to commit his filthiness than for a cover of his shame For truly he might have covered his shame with Fig-leaves and have neglected his hiding through the Shrubs if he had not also had the signes of chastity corrupted 7. For truly if my Position be true That Death was caused onely through the Luxury of the Flesh His banishment followed not but after the act of filthiness 8. For he who but presently before knew not that he was naked After what manner did he presently know his Wife to be the Mother of all living unless he had committed something And Lastly The Text which saith unto the Serpent I will put enmities between the Seed of the Woman and thy Seed doth clearly denote that the Woman that before wanted Seed and altogether all the tickling thereof had now Seed However it is at least-wise I cannot but remarkeably admire the excellency of the Text which hath no where made even any deaf mention of the Concupiscence of the flesh but it every where covers the fowlness of the Flesh with the greatest silence by the obtained knowledge of the shame and involves an induced necessity of Death and a necessary requirance of Regeneration in the highest Mystery Determining that at length the fullness of dayes being compleated evil shall be spread out of the North over all the Inhabitants of the Earth The which I will by and by manifest Finally Nature being now degenerate it hath pleased the Almighty to raise up the Fall of Adam by Regeneration or a being born again And although he hath not restored unto us the antient clearness of Understanding and exquisite speculative knowledge of the Mind yet hath he raised up our dignity far higher For truly the Understanding being reduced by Grace into the obedience of Faith proceedeth in a humble resignation unto the victorious reward of Love whereby we are supported and constrained And the least abiding of that Love is far more glorious than the whole unoccupied life of Adam in Paradise For before the Fall Faith was unknown the race of Virtues especially also the superexcellency of Divine Love and they lived onely in the happiness of the purity of Innocency And therefore God by the permission of his fore-knowledge and ordination hath bound the unequality of blessednesse issuing or springing up from the new Birth with a certain excellency of Riches Because the Tribulations of his Life are not worthy to be compared unto the great or vast things which the goodness of God hath prepared for us that are renewed For I had rather know those things which God hath revealed by his onely begotten Son the Saviour of the World than to have known the faculties of Living Creatures and Herbs with a clear Understanding It being abundantly sufficient for me to have an Humanity in God whereby he hath adopted us for the Sons of God and made us far more like himself than Adam was in his greatest felicity CHAP. XCIII The Position is Demonstrated 1. A first Prooof of the Position 2. A second 3. The Divine manner of generating cannot be conceived by man 4. A conjecture from a like thing 5. A Repetition of Demonstrations 6.
proper unto him from a Curse but from his being made creeping and that thing was sufficiently manifest to Adam For herein the Curse seized not so much on the Serpent as on the evil Spirit because the lying Impostor had hid himself in the most vile of creeping things on whose head therefore and not on the head of any creeping thing the Woman trod upon But because all Bruits which do generate by a long continued copulation were in times past reckoned impure and also forbidden from Man's use in Kitchins among which creeping Animals are not in the last place c. It containeth and likewise confirmeth the mystery of our Position To wit That the impurity of our Nature draws its rise from the Concupiscence of the Flesh And therefore the copulation in Beasts seemeth to be taken notice of in Beasts by God which was distinct and defiled with impurity In the next place also in the Law a Menstruous Woman and the person touching her were accounted to bring an impurity on every thing The which otherwise being now turned into a second and natural Cause ought to be plainly guiltless unlesse the Menstrues should by a Natural course derive it self from the same Causes from whence Death happened unto us And therefore also for this Cause it being plainly impure in the Law was reckoned a horrid thing with God But for that Woman alone doth suffer Menstrues before Bruits surely it doth not attest any Prerogative of our kind but rather every way a defect to wit that it is reckoned for a punishment of frustrated Chastity and referred into second Causes plainly from a notable Mystery of our Position neither doth it hinder these things that chast Virgins obey the Menstrues and that she is Monstrous who an opportunity being given is not Menstruous because Adamical Generation its self is constrained to carry no less the importunities of its own Nature than Death it self Yea seeing Chastity doth not excuse a Virgin from the Menstrues it is for a token that the Menstrues is not from a Curse nor from the punishment of Sin but altogether from Natural Causes no otherwise than as Death it self began from second Causes inserted in the disswaded Apple although hitherto unknown nor thorowly weighed The Menstrues therefore onely in Woman alone but not in Bruits doth accuse that the Transgression of the despised fatherly Admonition happened in the very privy parts therefore branded as it were with an unclean bloody Seal for a perpetual sign The which surely should not have place if a Sexual Copulation for the Propagation of man had not inverted the intention of the Creator rather than in Bruit-Beasts In this place a Paradox and impertinent consideration doth occur being interlaced as it were by a Parenthesis that Adam seeing he was created in the possession of Immortality God intended not that Man should be an Animal or Sensitive creature nor should be born conceive or live as an Animal for truly he was created into a living Soul and that he might be the immediate Image of God Therefore he as far differed from the Nature of an Animal as an Immortal being from a Mortal and as a God-like Creature from a Bruit The which is indeed more than in the whole Predicament And it is exceedingly to be admired and deservedly unworthy to be endured that the Schools of Christ do believe and confess these things and yet that even until now they draw the Essence of a Man Essentially from an Animal Nature because although Man afterwards procured Death unto himself and therefore may seem to be made nearer unto the Nature of Animal Creatures yet it stood not in his Power to be able to pervert the Species of the Divine Image Even as neither was the Evil Spirit of a Spirit made an Animal although he became nearer unto an Animal by hatred and brutal vices Therefore Man remained in his own Species wherein he was created For as oft as man is called an Animal or Sensitive living Creature and is in earnest thought to be such so many times the Text is falsified which saith But also the Serpent was more crafty than all the living Creatures of the Earth which the Lord God had made Because he speaks of the Natural craftiness of that Creeping Creature Again if the Position be true Man was not directed into the Propagation of Seed or Flesh neither therefore did he Aspire into a Sensitive Soul And therefore the Sensitive Soul of Adamical Generation is not of a brutal Species because it was raised up by a Seed which wanted the Original Ordination and Limitation of any Species And so that as the Sensitive Soul in Man arose besides the intent of the Creator and Nature So it is of no brutal Species neither can it subsist unless it be continually tyed to the Mind from whence it is supported in its Life Wherefore while Man is of no Brutal Species he cannot be an Animal in respect of his Mind and much less in respect of his Soul which is of no Species For a woman great with Child while by reason of sudden fear she changeth the Humane Young into a certain Bruit the mind indeed doth not wander into a brutal Soul but the mind departs and a Sensitive Soul begged of the Creator is substituted in its stead And seeing that it is promoted onely by the Idea of the Woman great with Child without an Original appointment therefore such kind of generated Creatures do most speedily die And the off-springs of Adam had likewise presently perished unless God had granted Matrimony unto him Wherefore in the Birth of Cain she truly said I possesse a Man from the Lord. Far be it therefore to have placed Man among Sensitive living Creatures Truly we must indulge Pagans who know not that thing but not equally Christians who too much adore Paganish Doctrine At least wise the Schools confesse that there is an ordinary Progress of Nature from not a sensible Creature into a sensible Animal but that the Life and Sense of Men is immediately iufsed by the hand of the Almighty They confesse in the next place that the Conditions of being living and feeling or perceiving in Man differ in their whole Condition from an Animal Nature because it follows the Faculty of the rational Form or Immortal mind But they shamefully believe that a Man aswel of the first Constitution as being now Divinely Regenerated by the Sacraments is an Essential Animal Fie let it shame man not to know that the Evil Spirit and whole Nature also are not able by any means or any way to change the Essence given unto him from the foreknowledge of the Creator but that he should continually remain such as he was created although in the mean time he hath cloathed himself with strange properties as Natural unto him from the vice of his own will For as it wants not an absurdity to reckonman glorified among Animals because he is not without a sense or feeling So
something concerning the first Intent of God in Man At length in the last place the Sophistical Atheists do oppose themselves by the Text of Genesis That God overthrew the World by a Deluge Because the Sons of God had chosen and taken Wives of the Daughters of Men which were fair and because these had generated Gyants being strong and famous Men in their Age And that thing is there reckoned for much Wickedness the which notwithstanding literally is seen to be none in the Words of the Text after that Matrimony was now established and lawful Yea especially because Concubine-ship was a good while after dissembled in the Law the which by reason of that Impurity especially they named the Mosaical Law but not the Law of God For truly the Text doth not mention the Sin of David but in the Death of Uriah the Adultery of Bathsheba and the proud numbring of the People Wherefore they are wont to refer this Text of Genesis unto the religious Sons of God and the free Daughters of Men. But it hath seemed a vain thing to me to have fled unto a single Life and monastick Vows and Evangelical Counsels while as a plurality of men was required from the Command Increase ye and be ye Multiplyed and Replenish the Earth which Words indeed did excuse Concubine-ship Then in the next place seeing Virgins are far more prone unto a single Life Bashfulness likewise unto Chastity and Monastick Vows than Men The Floud had rather happened from the Sex being inverted or turned on the opposite Part and it hath been Written because the Daughters of God had taken the Sons of Men for their Husbands And moreover neither can there be any thought or project of keeping Chastity probably taught which had then separated the Sons of God from Virgins nor any Apostasie in those Ages which had provoked the Indignation of God unto Floud Yet if that be so the which I can in no wise through a Dream perswade my self of at least-wise it is from thence proved in behalf of my Position that Chastity alone doth distinguish the Sons of God from the Daughters of Men and that therefore the deflowring of Virginity hath procreated Original Sin But seeing that before the Floud there was no promise of a single Life or Chastity and that a Monastick or Monkish Life came not as yet into their Mind so long as Multiplying stood in a Command and Blessing I have conjectured under a humble censure of the Church that the Sons of God were the Posterity and begotten of a Man and a Woman having the true Image of God but that the Daughters of Men were Daughters procreated by the Sons of Adam and Nymphs the Satanical-birth whereof God alwayes very much abhorred But there was an incredible Multitude of these in the Desart one whereof was sent unto B. Anthony Also in the Dayes of Constantine a live Satyr was carried about to be shewn and afterwards was shewn being seasoned with Salt So once there were also diverse Monsters drawn out from the Ocean which spake were instructed in divers Arts and therefore rational they also lived among our Country-men Indeed rational living Creatures were conceived as well in the Waters as in Wildernesses from a detestable Copulation Seeing therefore the first Monsters had begotten Off-springs by the Sons of Adam of the Female Sex they distinguished the Sons of Adam by the name of the Sons of God and these kind of Monsters they name the Daughters of men And these Nymphs Heathenism thence-forward after the Floud named Dryades Nereides Naides c. The which seeing they were fair to look upon and men had taken them to be their Wives God from so great a Filthiness and destruction of the humane kind which the Text cals much Wickednesse in every Season or Age abhorring them determined to wash away the World with a Deluge From that Copulation of Monsters and Nymphs they generated strong Gyants and those famous men of their Age and the which therefore Heathenism long worshipped as Gods and Heroes For otherwise there seem to be frivolous reasons of the Floud according to the Letter To wit because men were married with women and these had generated Gyants that were strong and famous men of their Age. Therefore the Text ought to contain the Indignation of God and a suitable Cause of the Floud The monstrousness is not only in the Figure and Forming of their Body even as in the beginning of Degenerations but their Deformity being by degrees withdrawn and diminished the monstrousness stood in the sensitive Soul the which an immortal Mind did not accompany however outwardly they were Animals using Reason At least-wise it is manifest from the aforesaid Text that the true Posterity of Adam were not Gyants but of the Stature of Christ the Lord and framed by the same Statuary But the Copulation of diverse Species hath alwayes been execrable in the sight of the Lord least Man should follow it by imitation The Law therefore forbad that many Seeds should not be sown in the same Field nor that Webs of Linnen and Wollen should be combined To wit it being mindful of that most Ample and much Wickedness for which God ought to destroy the World But the co-mixture of those Men before the Floud with Nymphs was so usual and ordinary and likewise the copulation of Faunes with Maids that a few only being excepted and saved into the Ark the whole Stock of Adam was defiled and therefore passed by in silent Therefore God decreed to destroy every living Creature that he might likewise extinguish the guilty rational Monster For besides a few which the Ark shut up there was not he who had not contracted a consanguinity with that devilish Progeny For the B. Prophetess Hildegard writeth for she is the Prophetess of this Book which was canonized in the Synod of Trevirum or Triers unto the Clergy of Triers For very many People arose from the Sons of Adam who had a forgetfulnesse of God so that they would not know themselves to be Men From whence they by shamefully Sinning lived according to the manners of Beasts except the Sons of God who separated themselves from those same Men and their Loves of whom Noah was born These things she who acknowledgeth the Sons of God in both Sexes and clearly approveth of my Interpretation of this Text. For Satan had tried by this Mean to overthrow Mankinde and to hinder the immortal Soul that there might not be He from whence the Son of God should be born Therefore there was need of the Floud not only for the Correction of Sins but for the Salvation of the whole humane kind For otherwise Cham had not been saved by the Ark for he was now wholly perverse from Atheism Wherefore I interpret the Text yet under the humble Censure of the Church to wit that the Sons of God who did bear the Image of God in their immortal Soul and in their Body Took the Daughters of Men which
Desire or Love of which I here speak is not a function of the appetitive power nor the very qualitative power of desiring it self but it is a substantial part of the mind or rather the Mind it self flowing from Understanding and Will Because those three are undividably conjoyned by the Creator under Unity in as great a simplicity as may be Yet in live persons or mortal men it is separated from Understanding and Will in its Functions by reason of the condition of the Organ and Nature of the sensitive Soul For truly now we desire oftentimes those things which the Understanding judgeth not to be desirable and which the Will could wish were not desired But it must needs be that things whose operations are different or dis-joyned that the same things are dis-joyned in their root according to the manner whereby all particular things are separated In the Soul indeed onely by a relative supposionality but in the Body according to a corporeal and qualitative Nature And therefore that substantial Desire or Love is an intimate Essence of the Soul being consubstantial and co-equal in age with the same So that although in Heaven there be a full satiety of desirable things and a perpetual enjoymens thereof yet that desire in the Soul doth not therefore cease the which is a study or â—â—â—eavour of complacency Neither doth it therefore infer a passion of the Soul any more than Charity it self because they are conjoyned in their root as one and the same thing For an amarous desire ceasing of necessity either a fullness or glutting or an unsensibleness of fruition or enjoyment should presently arise which in the heavenly Wights would be a shameful thing That desire therefore of Love is the fewel of an unterminable or endless delight under which consideration the Mind resembles the Spirit the Comforter For the unutterable Creator hath placed Man in the liberty of his own Desire that he might live in the Spirit after the Image of God in a holy Desire and perfect Charity It is manifest therefore that Operations are distinct from the root of Faculties while we understand those things which we do not desire but while we desire those things which we do not plainly know and which we would not desire In the next place we will as while a man goes willingly to Punishment those things which we do not desire and desire those things which we would not as while any one commands his Leg to be cut off And likewise the Desire doth afterward some-sometimes overcome the Will or the Will doth oft-times compell the Desire and they by turns draw each other under mutual Commands but wholly in Mortals because the sensitive Soul draws the Understanding and the Body the sensitive Soul into a manifold disorder of division For so impossible things happen to be desired and things past are wished for as present For unlesse that Desire were from the root of the Mind he should not sin who should see a Woman to lust after her before the consent of a full Will Therefore very many things are desired whose Causes are not willed and many things whose Effects are refused by the Will and Judgement The Desire also doth operate in one manner and the Will in another Also in the motion of the Day or in duration the Desire doth oftentimes go before and sometimes followes the Will and one overcomes the other by course that it may restrain something that is distinct from it self And that wholly in mortal Bodies But in Eternity where Love or Amorous Desire ariseth as the substance of the Soul nothing is Desired which is not Willed and that as well in respect of Act as Substance and Essence Because by reason of the simplicity of Substance they are collected into Unity Although in the Root they have diverse Suppositions which plainly exceed the manner â—f Understanding in mortal Men. In the next place the Kingdom of God in man is unutterable that is God himself by whose perpetual splendour all things are gathered together into Truth Therefore the Primary or chief Image of God is in his immortal Soul because the very Essence whereof it self is also the veriest Image of God which Image can neither be expressed by words as neither thought by the heart in this Life because it resembles a certain similitude of God But in the husk of the Mind or in the sensitive Soul and vital Form there is the same Image re-shining yet received after the manner of an inferior nature and defiled through transgressions or Death from whence at length the Body also borroweth not indeed the Image of God but the Figure of him But the Soul is devolved into utter darkness even as it hath separated it self from the uncreated Light and from the virtue of the Image and therefore it hath by reason of appropriation so lost its native Light as if it were proper unto it as beseeming it that thenceforth it understands wills or loves nothing besides it self and for it self For the damned shall rise not changed because their Body rising again shall receive its limitations from their Soul The which seeing now it is with all depraved affections reflexed onely on it self after a corporeal manner It shall not in rising again delineate the Image of God which is as it were choaked in it in the Body but after a corporeal manner That is by way of figure Lastly It being deprived through the flood-gate of death of the helps of Imagination Memory and Free-Will It afterwards understands wills loves all things from a blind apprehension as being onely addicted to it self For it knows its Immortality but feels Damnation and complaines of it as that Injustice is done unto it Because the love of it self is onely to excuse its excuses in sins as being committed in dayes of ignorance and innocency with much frailty of Nature lyings in wait of Enemies and want of sufficient Grace As neither that an eternal punishment is deservedly due for a momentary transgression For then it begins to be mad and persists in hating of God Chiefly because it knows the unviolable arrest of its loss and an eternal impossibility of escaping It being therefore cut off in its hope passeth even from the very beginning of its entrance into the utmost desperation in a place where no piety compassion refreshment or recantation is entertained It happens also that seeing the Understanding doth naturally transform it self into the Idea of the thing understood and therefore into the similitude of evil Spirits its Objects Therefore there is alwaies a present hatred of God despair cursing damnation and the furious torments of Hell The Almighty of his goodness vouchsafe to break the snares that are extended for us in our passage Amen CHAP. CIII The Property of External Things THe spiritual beginning of Life being now finished before I descend unto corporeal and sensible Organs and other supports of Life I will propose something concerning Places First of all therefore
in the Womb It is false therefore that Nature is every where circular Because she is that which would every where give satisfaction to his ends who is cloathed by the glorious Work-man of Nature and not by Nature For neither after another manner is there a re-bent Reflexion put into the seminal erected Spirit by the Generater but it proceeds from the Finger of him who disposeth of all things sweetely from end even to end Therefore the Seed being conceived the Womb forthwith shuts its neather Gate least any forreign thing should rush into it which might disturb its Conception In the next place the Vessels of the Womb which are subject unto its command as if a Door-keeper were added are also shut above because then a new Common-wealth ariseth in the Womb as a new family-administration of a future Young and therefore also a singular Kitchin is erected in the confining Vessels Even so that the Embryo is a good while nourished and increaseth not by the venal Blood of the Liver but by pure and fined arterial Blood But presently after as soon as this Kitchin is furnished for the Embryo which is about to live in his own proper Orbe the Womb prepars venal Blood which it may hand-forth unto the Embryo and therefore whatsoever less profitable thing it meets withal it is brushed out So that in that whole Motion the Mother for the most part is ill at ease For truly seeing Filths can no longer be expurged through the emunctory of the Womb and the which neither are able to expect the Maturity of Delivery the Filths go backward into the Veins they obtain the condition of an Excrement and are thrust forth by Vomit and other Sinks That which is not equally done in Bruits seeing they want Menstrues and do not admit of an unseasonable Copulation Again the Conception of Men was not from the first intention of the Creator after the manner whereby we are conceived in Sins At length also because for Bruit-beasts pure arterial Blood was not equally required for Nourishment Therefore the teeming Woman alone shall pay for the Itch of one Copulation through a cruel expiation of many Punishments beyond Bruits The Embryo therefore or imperfect Young is at first nourished by arterial Blood prepared in the neighbour Kitchins of the Womb until that after the first fourty dayes he obtaining a living Soul lives of his own right But the preparatory Kitckin is exercised in the spleen-form Flesh whereby the secundine cleaveth to the Womb Therefore Succours for the Young are slow and oftentimes void and also those that are administred to the Mother by way of the Mouth because that before their entrance unto the Embryo all things are recocted And again in the Young it self before they can augment the same But the Infant being born before he is fit for bearing of the more hard Meats he is accustomed to the more gentle ones For so he is a good while fed with arterial Blood which leaves no Dungs be-hinde it For those things which fall from a little Infant that is born presently after his first Cry are the Reliques of the Blood of the Liver the which for the most part is not first admitted into the aforesaid Kitchins but after the third forty dayes And these indeed are the Excrements which do ripen and provoke the necessity of travail or delivery But moreover the Spirit that was once implanted in the Seed being sunk into the Seeds doth presently if not fore-know the necessities of the Body at least-wise perfectly learn them and afterwards draws unto it self a Consanguineal or nearly allyed Spirit or Nourishment by a certain Harmony of Affinity At length the Womb feeling the Maturity of the Young by co-wrinckling contracteth it self which the Antients have called Striving to expel the Young or Off-springs For I have oft-times with-held Abortion threatned and begun But sometimes I could not But I have known that I have detained it as oft as the abortion should be caused from a Symptomatical animosity without a fore-ripe expulsive Faculty to wit from the digression of the Womb And the Remedy did operate by restraining and sleepifying appeasing and pacifying the aforesaid Furies of the Womb But I could not prevent Abortion or miscarying as oft as there was a fall of the Mother from an high Place and much disturbance of Affrighting Grief Anger c. they being inordinate things And likewise if the Young had a remarkable Monstrousness which adds no slugguish Spur unto Expulsion Or if the Young die or pines away or failes through a notable Weakness And likewise if the Mother being strongly smitten with astonishment before the Young could live in its own Quarter hath with-drawn the Arterial Spirit unto her self The which if it shall straightway return from thence yet it finds the same Young as it were in a sound whereunto as unto a Plant so tender Life is scarce re-connexed By this means the semi-vital Conception is now and then wont to miscarry into a hard lump of Flesh or a foolish Branch But that thing scarce happens through a defect of the Fathers Seed because that a barren or foolish Seed is either not attracted and so neither is it conceived or if it be attracted it through a foolish Lust of the Womb soon fals out again and frustrates Conception But the Seed degenerates into a hard Lump of Flesh by reason of external Incidencies lighting upon the Seed whereby Hippocrates saith That Seeds are withdrawn whither they would not Therefore a hard Lump or Moale is made while as the Spirit is funk into the Body of the Seed and is spoiled of a humane Figure yet retaining its former growing Faculty The drowning or sinking therefore alone is able to command the Figure out of the forming Spirit if being to long sleepifyed within it becomes fast asleep But although the dreaming Vision did scarce fill up the space of halfe a quarter of an hour yet it at once represented all the successive Periods of Generation as it were in a Glass of the Thing To wit its Moments Fluxes Motions Aspects Diversities of interchanges and also its Errours stood collected into Unity But I being awaked alass how I sighed at the likeness of our modern propagation with that of Bruit-beasts And therefore Adam not undeservedly bewailed the Death of Abel for the space of an Age He grieving the while at the hateful bruitish Generation and knew not his Wife in all that time As well weighing that Nature being now defiled in its Root was to suffer original and of necessity durable Miseries CHAP. CVIII A Lunar Tribute SEing Woman onely among living Creatures the Ape perhaps excepted suffers Menstrues or monthly Issues and seemeth for this cause to have experience of the operations of the Moon-star but since the Schools do prattle of very many things concerning the Menstrues as if it were the ordinary nourishment of the Young Surely it hath behoved me to discover their boastings in the Treatise
Meats Yea which is more The Blood which is avoided in or presently after delivery is not Menstruous through the defect of its condition because it is not superfluous from a fore-going course of the Moon And then also because it is not heaped up fleshy not aluminous or tart not staining linnen Cloathes nor separated from the whole nor banished unto the places of the Womb for expulsion For that bloud which is plentifully voided in time and after delivery and the which being retained a doating Fever doth soon after threaten death is indeed venal blood yet not the Menstrues of the Mother For it is left by the Young who seeing from his quickening he lived in his own Orbe had a kitchin out of himself in the Vessels of the Womb. Wherefore it hath taken to it self another property than that of the Mother and than that of the Menstrues For that guest hath indeed the shape of Menstruous Blood Yet being an adoptive of another Family and become a forreigner to the Mother it is seriously to be expelled surely no otherwise than as the Secundines themselves But being omitted and left behind it is corrupted and brings on death But seeing that in a Woman great with Child there is no Menstrues at all by consequence neither is that Young nourished but with the pure arterial blood of the Mother and afterwards with pure venal blood being also first refined in its kitchins Therefore the Schools are deceived who teach That the small Pox or Measels are due almost to every mortal man by reason of the tribute of Menstruous nourishment For they observed that there was seldom any smitten twice with that Disease and perhaps seldom excused from it Wherefore they searching into the common Cause from whence the Young should be nourished in the beginning have referred the Effect on the Menstrues But in all things they without the knowledge of things have mutually subscribed to each other and have slidden into Fables and Conjectures For first of all they have not considered that it is almost impossible for any one to be made free from that Disease if all are alike indifferently nourished with Menstrues And then because they should be afflicted as it were at one certain and appointed term of the Crisis I confess indeed that the Measels do spring from a Poyson and draw a Poyson with them infect the blood with their ferment and defile others that stand by but especially Children and that the internal essence of Poysons is not demonstrable by a former Cause and therefore we measure the Property of a Poyson by the Effects even as a Tree by his Fruits 1. Therefore The Poyson of the Measels is proper onely to humane kind 2. That Nature is prone to the framing of that Poyson 3. But that it is kindled about the Stomack and so in the Center of the Body 4. That the parts being once besieged with this Poyson do most swiftly repulse that Poyson from themselves towards the superficies of the Body 5. That the shops of that Poyson after that they have once felt the tyranny thereof being afterwards thorowly instructed with a hostile averseness and horror do with great fore-caution prevent or hinder the generation thereof even from the very beginning least they should even at first unwarily fall thereinto Therefore the Poyson is made in Man but not co-bred in him from the Menstrues But of what quality that Poyson may be cannot be described by name because it hath not a proper name out of its effects It is sufficient in this place that the Menstrues cannot be drawn into a Cause for the Distempers aforesaid At first therefore The Menstrues offends in its matter by reason of its abounding alone And then it undergoes a degree that the first may be wherein that blood is superfluous from the foregoing course of the Moon But a Second degree is as soon as it is separated from the rest of blood But a Third degree is while as designed it hath resided about the Vessels of the Womb. A Fourth is that which hath stuck some good while in the same place and hath entered into the way of death At length the last degree is while as it now hath slidden forth as a dead Carcass and into the Air. Therefore the Schooles offend while as by cutting of a Vein they are busied in succouring of Virgins who in respect of their Menstrues do feel an heart-beating or trembling without distinction For although the Menstrues of the first degree appeaseth heart-beatings or pantings by a revulsive blood-letting yet in the third degree of the Menstrues I have fore-told it to our chief Physitians to be a destructive Remedy Because that the Veines of the Arme or Hams being emptied I have observed the Menstrues to be drawn backwards from the neighbouring places into the Veins And truly those Veins which do not remain emptied but which are filled again by a communion of continuation So also after great heart-beatings and pauses of intermitted pulses or after most sharp paines of the sides following from the Womb to wit by reason of an aluminous Poyson of the third degree Virgins have suddenly died by reason of Phlebotomy by me instituted at unawares In the first degree indeed the abundance of venal blood is taken away But it is the less evil although a part of the barren blood be left surviving Truly I had rather to help Nature in her sequestration and expulsion than by drawing of undistinct blood to have weakened Nature Moreover that is to be noted That although I have distinguished Diseases by the Ranks of Digestions yet I have scarce made mention of the Menstrues Because the Menstrues is neither digested nor is it a superfluity of Digestion and so is of another condition For at first it offends with a good abundance and then with a burdensom superfluity presently after it is deprived of Life and becomes a Poyson yet it cures Swine which are inclining into the Leprosie even as Horses straightway which were contracted or convulsive from unseasonable Drink if they drink up but a small quantity of Menstrues And likewise the poysonsom and true Menstrues of another Woman being administred in a few drops hath presently strangled a Woman labouring with a Flux of the Womb. But the blood which is at length avoided in plenty in Fluxes of the Womb being drunk in a few drops stayeth those Fluxes Furthermore because Woman only the Ape perhaps excepted doth suffer Menstrues and although the Menstrues do accuse of an abundance alone yet that the Cow her Dug being dried suffers not Menstrues otherwise she flowes down with very much Milk denoting that the abounding of venal blood is indeed the material Cause but not therefore the final and the which therefore I have not reduced among natural Causes For that the Almighty alone encloseth all the final Causes of all things within himself who sweetly disposeth of all things according to the unsearchable Abysse of his own Judgements
cannot cause the Plague 119. Why the blood of a Bull is mortally venemous 120. Why the fat of a Bull is in the Sympathetical Unguent to wit that it may be made an Oyntment of Weapons 121. Why Satan cannot concurre unto the Unguent 122. The Basis or Foundation of Magick 123. From whence Vanities are accounted for Magick 124. A good Magick in the holy Scriptures 125. What may be called true Magick 126. The cause of the Idolatry of Witches 127. The Sirrers up of Magick 128. Satan excites it imperfectly 129. From whence beasts also are Magical 130. The Kingdom of Spirits nourisheth strife and love 131. Why man is a Microcosm or little World 132. The mind generates real Entities 133. That Entity or Beingness is of a middle nature between a Body and a Spirit 134. The descending of the Soul begets a conformed will 135. The cause of the fruitfulness of Seeds 136. Why Lust doth as it were estrange us from our Mind 137. A Father by the Spirit of his Seed generates out of himself in an Object presently absenting it self 138. What Spirit may be the Patron of Magnetism 139. The Will sends a Spirit unto the Object Unless the Will did produce some real thing the Devil could not know of or acknowledge it and unless it did dismiss it out of it self the Devil being absent could not be provoked thereby Where therefore the Treasure is thither doth the Magical spirit of man tend 140. Magnetism is made by sensation 141. That there are many perceivances in one onely subject 142. From the superiour Phantasie commanding it 143. Why Glasse-makers use the Load-stone 144. The Phantasie of attracting things is changed 145. Inanimate things have their Phantasie 146. Why some things by eating of them induce madness 147. Why a mad Dog by biting of a Man introduceth madness 148. The Tarantula by his stroke or sting causeth a madness 149. Why other bruit beasts do not defend themselves against a mad Dog 150. The Sympathy betwixt Objects at a distance is made by means of a certain Spirit of the world which Spirit also governing the Sun and the Sunny Stars is of a potent sense or feeling 151. The Imagination in Creatures endowed with choice is various at pleasure but in others it is alwayes of a limited identity 152. The first degree of power dwelleth Magically in the forms of the three Principles 153. The second degree is by the phantasies of the Forms of the mixt Body the which to wit being destroyed the Principles do as yet remain 154. The Third degree ariseth from the Phantasie or Imagination of the Soul 155. What Bruits are Magical and do act out of themselves by beck alone 156. The fourth degree of Magical Power is from the Understanding of Men being stirred up 157. The word Magick is a proportionable answering of many things unto some one third thing 158. Every Magical power or faculty rejoyceth in a stirring up 159. What may be called a subject capable of Magnetism 160. How Magnetism differs from other formal Properties 161. Humours and Filths or Exâ—rements have their Phantasie 162. Why the Scripture attributes Life to the Blood rather than to any other juyces of the Body 163. The seed possesseth the Phantasie of the Father by traduction or derivation from whence nobility ariseth 164. The skins of the Wolf and Sheep have retained through impression an hostile Imagination of their former Life 165. What the Phantasie of the Blood being freshly brought into the Unguent can effect The manner of the Magnetism or attraction in the Ointment 166. The difference between a Magnetical Cure which is done by the Unguent and that which is done by a rotten Egg. 167. The notable Mystery of humane imagination is the foundation of natural Magick 168. The Understanding imprinteth the Beingnesse which was procreated or produced on the outward object and there it really continues 169. How efficacious Seals or Impressions may be made 170. The Imagination holds fast the Spirit of a Witch by a nail as it were a Medium 171. If Satan doth naturally move a Body without a corporeal touch or extreamity why not also the more inward Man and why not rather also the Spirit of the Witch 172. The virtue of the Oyntment is not from the Imagination of the compounder but from the Simples co-united into one 173. The Author makes a profession of his Faith IN the eighth year of this Age there was brought unto me an Oration Declamatory made at Marpurg of the Catti wherein Rodolph Goclenius to whom the profession of Phylosophy was lately comitted paying his first-fruits endeavours to shew That the curing of Wounds by the Sympathetical and Armary or Weapon Unguent invented by Paracelsus is meerly natural Which Oration I wholly read and I sighed within my self that the Histories of natural things had lighted into the hands of so weak a Patron The Author nevertheless highly pleased himself with that Argument of Writing and with a continued barrenness of proof in the year 1613. published the same work with some enlargement There was very lately brought me a succinct Anatomy of the aforesaid Book composed by a certain Divine rather in the form of a fine or jocond censure than of a disputation my judgement therefore however it should be was desired at least-wise in that respect that the thing found out by Paracelsus concerned himself and me his follower I shall therefore declare what I think of the Physitian Goclenius and what of the Divine the Censurer First of all the Physitian proposeth and boasts that he will prove the magnetick or attractive cure of Wounds to be natural But I found the Promiser to be unfit for so great a business Because that he no where or at least but slenderly makes good his Title or Promises He collecting many patcheries here and there whereby he thinks he hath sufficiently proved that there are certain formal virtues in the nature of Things which they call Sympathy and Antipathy and that from the granting of those the Magnetical Cure is natural Many things I say out of the Aegyptians Chaldeans Persians Conjurers and Jugling Impostors he gathers into one whereby he might prove or evince the Magnetism which himself was ignorant of Partly that by delighting mindes that are greedy of novelties of things he may seduce them from the mark and partly that they may admire the Author that he had rub'd over not onely trivial Writers but also any other the more rare ones Wherefore the Physitian doth rashly confound Sympathy which he after divers manners and fabulously often alledgeth with Magnetism and from that concludes this to be natural For I have seen also that Vulnerary Oyntment to cure not onely Men but also Horses between whom and us certainly there is not so great affinity unless we are Asses that therefore the Sympathetical Unguent should deserve to be called common to Us and Horses In like manner the Physitian badly confounds Sympathy or Co-suffering with Witchcraft
but it puts it not on but by the Will except in Women with Child Whether therefore we call Sin a nothing or a something at least-wise there is never made a Consent to Evil without a real Procreation of this certain kind of Entity and the assuming and putting on thereof This hath been the Cause of the Fruitfulness of Seeds for the Phantasie or Imagination being much moved by Lust produceth a slender Entity the which if the Soul puts on through the Will as the action of the Mind being imprisoned in the Body doth alwayes tend downwards and outwards it disperseth this same Entity into the Liquor of the Seed which otherwise would not be but barren Which Action is made as it were by an estranging of the Mind to wit the Will through the true Magick of the more outward Man departing into a certain Ecstasie in which there is made a communicating of a certain Light of the Mind upon the Entity descending into the Body of the Seed As oft soever therefore as the Cogitation or Thought drawes the Sense and Will into a consent so often a filthy Skin is bred and put on being a bastardly Ideal Entity by which birth the Will is said to be confirmed Also that Ideal Entity whithersoever it is directed by the Will thither it goes by this meanes the Will moves sometimes the Arm sometimes the Foot c. Furthermore when the said Entity is spread upon the vital Spirit for to love help or hurt any thing it wants only a light Excitement whether made from the asistance of God of the Cabalistick Art or of Satan that indeed the small Portion of the Spirit which hath now put on that Entity departs far off and perform its Office enjoyned it by the Will So the Male layes aside his Seed out of himself which through the Entity which it hath drawn is very fruitful and performes its Office without the Trunck of its own Body Truly Bodies scarce make up a moyity or halfe part of the World But Spirits even by themselves have or possess their moyity and indeed the whole World Therefore in this whole Context or Composure of our Discourse I call Spirits the Patrons of Magnetism not those which are sent down from Heaven and much less is our Speech of infernal ones but of those which are made in Man himself for as Fire is struck out of a Flint so from the Will of Man some small Portion of the inflowing vital Spirit is extracted and that very thing or portion assumes an Ideal Entity as it were its Form and Compleating Which Perfection being obtained the Spirit which before was purer than the Aetheâ—eal Air is subâ—ilized or rarified like Light and assumes a middle Condition between Bodies and not Bodies But it is sent thither whither the Will directs it or at least whither the inbred infallible Knowledge of the Spirits sends the same according to the scopes of things to be done The Ideal Entity therefore being now readily prepared for its journey becomes after some sort a Light and as if it were no longer a Body is tied up to no commands of Places Times or Dimensions neither is that Entity a Devil nor any Effect thereof nor any Conspiracy of his but it is a certain spiritual Action thereof plainly natural and proper unto us He who well receiveth this Wisdom shall easily understand that the Material World is on all sides governed and restrained by the Immaterial and Invisible But that all other created Corporeal Beings are put under the Feet of Men for indeed this is the Cause why also the Mummy Fat Mosse and Blood of Man to wit the Phantasie existing in them in the Unguent overswayes the Blood of a Dog of a Horse c. being conveighed by a Stick into the Box of the Unguent There hath not been yet said enough concerning the Magnetism of the Unguent I will therefore resume what I spake of before namely that the Magnetisms of the Load-stone and of inanimate things are made by a natural Sensation or Feeling which is the Author of all Sympathy is a certain Truth For if the Load-stone directs it self to the Pole it ought of necessity to have known the fame if it be not to commit an Errour in its Direction And how I pray shall it have that Knowledge if it be not sensible where it is Likewise if it self to Iron placed aloof off the Pole being neglected it must needs have first been sensible of the Iron Therefore one single Load-stone hath diverse Senses and Images Neither also-shall it be sufficient that it hath Sense unless we add the Spurs of Friendship and Self-love and so that it is endowed with a certain natural Phantasie and by reason of the Impression whereof all Magnetisms are forged For it is directed by another manner of Phantasie toward the Iron than toward the Polo â—or then its Virtue is dispersed only through a neighbouring Space It s Phantasie is changed when it restraines the abortive Young Catarrhs or Rheumes or the Bowel in a Rupture Also by another Phantasie doth the Load-stone draw any thing out of Glasse throughly boyled or melted by Fire for a very small Fragmen thereof being cast into a Mass or good quantity of Glaâ—s while it is in boyling of Green or Yellow makes it White For although the Load-stone it self be filled with a red Colour and be consumed by the Fire that dissolves the Glass Yet in the mean timâ— while it hath Life it aâ—â—racteth and consumeth the tinged Liquor out of the Fiery Glass and so its attraction is not only to Iron but moreover unto that aiery Part which would with difficulty depart out of the Glass and for this Cause it is of common use with Glass-makeâ—s The Phantasie of Amber drawes Chaffs and Moates by an attraction indeed slow enough but yet with a sufficient perfect Signature of attraction for it being married to our Mummy is also stronger than our attractive Faculty drawes in opposition thereunto and becomes a Zenexton or preservatory Amulâ—t against pestilential Contagions But Amber being mixed with Gumms its imagination being now transplanted draws the Poyson and Bullet out of a Wound indeed its pleasure and desire of drawing being on both sides varied But what Wonder shall it be unless with those who being ignorant of all things do also admire all things that inanimate things are strong in Phantasie When as he who is wholly the Life creates all things and hath therefore promised that nothing is to be expected as dead out of his Hand Also no one thing at all shall come to our view wherein himself also may not clarely appear as present The Spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole Globe of the Earth Yea this Expression That he containeth or comprehendeth all things carries the force of the World Do we not believe that there was much Knowledge in the Apple and that through the eating thereof our first Parents both are it up and together
of the Disease of the STONE And likewise of sence or feeling Sensation pain unsensibility benummednesse motion unmoveablenesse Even as of Diseases of this sort the Leprosie Falling-Evil Apoplexy Palsie Convulsion Coma c. All things being new and paradoxal hitherto A Treatise profitable as well for a natural Philosopher and Physitian as for an Alchymist but most profitable for the Sick John Baptista van Helmont of Bruxels being the Author A TREATISE Of the Disease of the STONE PETRIFICATION Or the Making of a STONE CHAP. I. 1. THe Schooles of Medicine did already doubt before Paracelsus 2. The opininion of the Antients concerning the causes of making of a Stone 3. A sounder doctrine of Paracelsus 4 The flux of seeds for a Stone 5. The disposition of Minerals from the Creation of the World 6. What the Trival-line is 7. What the Flinty Mountain is 8. From whence the diversity of Stones is 9. The powder of the Adamant is alwayes yellow 10. Great or rocky stones and small stones how they differ 11. The seed of a stone wherein it exceeds a vegetable seed 12. Stonifying in a man and why a stone growes to the Tooth 13. Some remarkable things 14. Why some Insects do not become a stone but the more perfect Animals sometimes altogether 15. That the form is not introduced from the power of the matter 16. After what manner a man is made a stone 17. Nothing of a rocky stone is common with the stone in a man 18. The Duelech of Paracelsus 19. The praise of wild Carrot-seed c. THe more refined Physitians of the late past age were silently astonished at the Doctrine of the Schooles concerning the Elements Temperaments and Humours which was so unfortunate and un-obedient to their own positions For neither could they satisfie themselves with a quaternary of humours for all Diseases Wherefore it was most exceeding easie for Paracelsus who by a most excelling testimony of Medicines had drawn all Germany into the admiration of himself to perswade those that already doubted of the fiction of his Tartar that Tartar traiteroufly entring out of meates and drinkes was the true cause of any disease whatsoever which thought of his begat Credit and hath now fixed so stable a Root that there is not almost any one who doth not flee unto the Tartar of Parabelsus I did owe indeed a singular Treatise unto Tartar who was readily prepared for the History of the Stone but that I had abundantly written thereof among the Beginnings of Naturall Philosophy and therefore I had left that Volume maimed if I had from thence transferred the Treatise of Tartar hither For truly the Original integrity of Nature being there placed within the matter the Archeus and the Life or Form together with seminal Beginnings hitherto unheard of the Ferments also the Authors of any kind of transmutations whatsoever being newly discovered but the Elements Qualities Complexions and the fight strife contrarieties and victories of these being rejected Also the fictions of Humours and Catarrhs being banished out of Nature and Medicinal consideration At length Flatus's Tartars and the three first principles of the Chymists being excepted out of the place of exercise of Diseases and then I by degrees declining from things Speculative unto Discourses handling Affects have explained the defects and successive alterations of Nature and have pithily manifested to the World the true cause of Diseases hitherto unheard of Therefore the Stone being as a Monster bred at home in our own House I have named this Book as it were on Outlaw and now the errour of Tartar borrowed from Paracelsus being forsaken I now come unto Petrification or the making of a Stone unknown to the Schooles For indeed the Antients giving vp their Names to Aristotle do according to the principles of this man as yet think that all Stones and Minerals without distinction are made most especially of earth by the mediation of heat and cold as external workmen yet with some additament of the three other Elements Notwithstanding since the weight of the rocky Stone exceeded the weight of Water they from thence conjectured that the Earth might be the proper matter of all Minerals And although they doubted in the weight of Gold and knew neverthelesse that a Mathematical demonstration which is stronger than any Syllogism was to be fetcht from its weight yet in the mean time they could not believe having neglected their own dimensions that Gold was Earth many times piercing it self And now they distrusted their owne positions much more seeing they determined Gold to be composed not of Earth alone which is more ponderous than the other three Elements but of the other more light ones being mixed in a just or equal measure and proportion Therefore as destitute of counsel they hung the diligent search of its weight upon the nail and Controversies being laid aside they being as it were oppressed with drowsinesse were content with saying that mettals being as it were frozen with cold because they did again flow through the torture of the fire and the superfluity of water being dryed up but the ayr and fire being well nigh excluded remained as it were withered Thus the dry Phylosophy of Aristotle hath reported hereof But they proved their position as I have said For Mettals as they imagine flow all abroad through a contrary heat As if indeed a frozen work could not melt but by the service of the Bellows Or that earth should be capable of melting by fire And again at its pleasure could require the countenance of earth as oft as it should feel cold Are the Schooles so unmindfull of themselves in that they not so long since said that the Element of water is of it self vehemently cold and slackly moist and so that Mettals ought to be congealed not from earth but from Water But that the earth of it self is vehemently dry and slackly cold and so ignorant of congealing so that from hence it followes if Mettals in their chief part are earth they shall never be able to flow or be frozen up seeing that they shall be able to be at the most but remisly cold Neither by a heightned heat shall earth be ever able to be converted into water or a watery substance while it melted in the mettal For truly they grant unto the earth an intense or heightned dryth which cannot but be fortified by the fire but not destroyed thereby In like manner neither can the remiss or slack cold of the most strong earth convert this earth while by the force of the fire it should be dissolved into water again into earth Because they believe the remiss qualities of the Elements not to have so much activity as that they can break the intense qualities of another Element For with the same foot of stupidity wherewith they began they proceed to say that great and small stones are earth hardned and as it were withered with heat The which they prove by Potters earth which
Earth may be without and besides minerals I have demonstrated in my Treatises of Natural Philosophy But the most rich seed of this Store-house and Treasury seemes to be profesly neglected by Moses least Israel by attributing divine and immortal Powers to Fountains and Mountains should sacrifice unto them But besides the sand or earth being on every side con-tinual to its self having received a seed arose into Hills and Rocks and divided the Pavements of Stones For as the Rise of things began from a Miracle so now it adhereth to its second Causes that the invisible Archeus's of things and the hidden seeds thereof may testifie that they are likewise Governed by the intelligible World For from hence it is that the waters have remained gotten with Child through the desire of the seeds and the Almighty hath disposed the Idea's of his pleasure or Precept through the Water Yet these seminal desires of the water do not fructifie through a successive propagation of one thing by another after the manner of plants but a seminal vertue lurking in the Treasures of the water doth peculiarly stir up its own Of-springs from it self and successively perfect them For a seed or seminal and mineral Idea is included in the water which never goes out of it but locks up and incloseth it self in that matter until at length under the maturity of dayes that be made thereof which was born to be made of it The operative Image therefore in the waters doth receive a sensible and presently a fermentaceous odour from the flinty Mountain But the flinty Mountain is a Plantafle Pavement or space of earth wherein great stones small stones and all minerals draw their original out of the water even as elsewhere concerning the original of Fountains And moreover that Odour is the Ferment from whence a complete mineral seed doth at length issue From thence also is every Rocky stone But this seed is not in minerals by way of a Metaphor a certain Equivocal thing or proportionable resemblance under the licentious allusion of Similitude For new flints and stones do grow in Fountains and Rivers But whatsoever is made and so long as it is in making neither is as yet in its perfection intended by the Archeus hath a seed in it self so as that I may understand an Univocal or simple Nature to be in its own constituted parts For the water being purely clear having in it the seed and Ferment of a stone becomes the Crystal of all Gemes But if besides the pure colour of a certain mettal or Fire-stone shall concur it is made a Gemme following the hardnesse and properties of its owne coagulated Body For just even as Tinne which affords to Painters a yellow colour which they call Masticot makes every mettall its lead being taken away brickle So also it tingeth the hardnesse of Gemmes or precious Stones Therefore the Adamant or Diamond alone affords a yellow powder or dust and the powder of other Gemmes is white But if water not being purely transparent doth incorporate it self with a mettalick colour there is made a thick or dark stone a Jasper Agate Flint red Marble Marble c. and that according to the rerequirance of the mixed seed In the mean time Rocky stones are more easily dissolved than small flinty-stones and do again of their own accord or by Art return into water who converteth Rocks into pooles of waters But I say that Rocky stones are convertible into a lime and they sometimes perish of their own accord into the nourishing juyce of Fields and into Corny Beings or substances In Quarries of stones also a nitrous salt doth oftentimes voluntarily drop with a perpetual distillation to wit that Rocky stones may return into their first matter Even as on the other hand through a Rocky odour of the Ferment the whole water passeth into a Rocky stone or at least as to a part thereof wherein that odour radically grew together in it And that as well in time of flowing as of standing still in a pool But it was not as yet sufficient for the Divine Bounty to have made from the Beginning Rocks great stones and small stones and to have conferred a seed for propagating a new Of-spring whereby small or flinty and rocky stones should afterwards be made of waters But moreover he would have it that a stonifying seed should in many things exceed their own vegetables and should testifie that those seeds were more powerfull in these than themselves For neither doth the seed stonifie only with the water subjected unto it but moreover through the odour of the stonifying seed it makes the Body that co-toucheth with it become a rocky stone onely by touching upon it For so the Glove of Frederick the Emperour was stonified in one part thereof to wit in that part which he had for some time moistened beneath the water but in the other half or moity being fenced by a graven Impression it remained leather So that not onely Herbs Woods Breads Iron Egges Fishes Birds and four-footed Beasts are by a wonderfull Metamorphosis made a Rocky stone But also as Ambrose Pareus witnesseth there was at Paris a humane Young cut out of the Womb of a mature bignesse that was turned into a Rocky stone His Toe was broken and the Tendons and joynts of his Bones appeared within And likewise his Gum being broken for he was of a gaping and as it were howling mouth shewed a Tooth underneath in the sheath of the Cheek-bone The which a Friend testified to me who for the sharpening of Instruments in preparing Instruments designed for Mathematical demonstration is wont oftentimes to make a Whetstone in the back of this Young So likewise Histories makes mention that in Vaults nigh the City Pergamum now called Pergamo or Bargamo there were some dead Carcasses found to wit of those whom the fear of War had forced into hidden places that they were I say stonified from their superficies even to their Center From whence many particulars worthy of note do arise 1. That rocky stones are generated of their owne and proper seed and that they afterwards consist also of another stonifying seed that is such kind of seeds do not onely transchange the water as it were their proper and immediate Object but and also other strange Bodies which have drawn in the aforesaid seed onely in way of an Odour 2. And that therefore those strange Bodies ought at the least to bear a co-resemblance in something even in their remote matter Seeing they have nothing common at all besides that principating matter which in rocky stones is meer water For neither otherwise could the Fruits of divers Elements differing at least in the whole kind light together into one 3. But that rocky stones are not composed of a coagulable Tartar as of their proper and near matter but that they arise from a proper seed which was bred to stonifie any thing even of a matter not disposed unto a rocky stone 4. That
enumeration of Causes surely through miserable stupidities they brought Catarrhs or Rheumes so ridiculous a thing into the Bladder But others while they durst not implore vain Accusations on the healthy Brain and are in great doubt corrupt matter they denounce the Ulcers of the Reines to be the Fountaines of so great a Glut. So that without a foregoing Aposteme that mucky snivel doth oft-times divide the half part with the urine in the Urinal yet thy suppose that from the Kidney being without pain so much snotty pus doth daily showre down First of all I have taken notice that many have been cured at the Spaw whom the shamefull debates of Physitians about the purulent Ulcer Comsumption of the Kidneys and Catarrhs had banished thither to dye Who when as they had beyond the hope of those Physitians returned sound they boasted that those sick were cured by them from the profitable Councell of Travelling thither But why hath my urine that was healthy applyed a sand unto the Urinal in the cold but not being detained so long within in heat I have said That urine was from an inbred Balsame alike easily preserved both from stonifying and from putrifying And then that the Urinal was a vessel fit for affixing of that sand but not the Bladder And lastly that the earth is volatilized by putrefaction It is also a doubt why of Twins that are nourished by the same milk the one of them onely is sometimes diseased with the stone In which doubt the Schooles Women Idiots and rustical persons think that by one alike Answer they have sufficiently satisfied themselves if they have named the cause thereof an evil distemper or inclination of indisposition and have alleadged humours Which inclination Astrologers although they distinguish not in the Conception or Quickning yet they put a difference betwixt it in the birth and in this respect they confound Twins into divers Conditions But at leastwise the Etymologie of an inclination unto the stone doth even in the entrance render Paracelsus suspected concerning his Tartar Yea and thus far Galen's own Schooles have have forsaken him without light Who being contented with an unequal distemperature in Seminal although Homogeneal Constituters yet so it were now turned into nature he thinks that he hath abundantly satisfied the question and he prosecutes it with desperation that for this Cause that unequal distemperature is unseparable from him that is born He takes away indeed the common name of Inclination but the former if not more gross Darknesses remain While as he resolves a Controversie by a Controversie and with desperation cuts off the endeavour of enquiring It is certain in the mean time that the duplicity of the question is not to be drawn but from a disorder of the matter The which seeing it is not found under so simple an Homogeniety of the seed it must of necessity be limited in the Magnum Oportet or necessary remainder of the middle Life of the place or Climate of the Womb. For the sides of Women do so differ that we are every one of us as it were a pair of men distinguished side-wayes and our other inward Bowels do border side-wayes upon the Womb. For from the first Constituting parts there are indeed hereditary defilements drawn which are equally distempered on the whole Conception if they were derived from the Parent the Begetter but those blemishes which are found in the place are adjacent unto those places and invade us as more immediate unto us A Wonder it is to consider How easily our most tender Beginnings do hearken unto forreign impressions and how easily things once received do wax ripe and finally how stubbornly they persevere Also those Seminaries of Diseases which are soon gotten by a proper errour of Living how friendlily they are entertained in and do bear sway over the same powers wherein and over which the hereditaries of Diseases are entertained and bear Rule And by so much the more powerfully they enter and are the more insolently imprinted or stamped on us by how much their wedlock doth defile the Archeus in us being as yet the more young For as long as we receive an increase the seeds of Diseases although they are drawn in in manner of an Odour they are also incorporated in our radical Beginnings and in some one such Beginning do the stony perfect acts of seeds wax ripe with us The which also even by the Odour being drawn in the Ferments of the seeds have more largely constituted elsewhere For from an entire nature every man ought to be healthy and of one inclination but that by reason of the properties of the middle Life nourishments perturbations and Climates disorders had crept into the Sons of Adam But those disorders which do privily enter with the Mothers blood and Nurses milk do as Houshold Thieves possesse the Treasures of Life neither do they easily depart but under the aydes of Renovation But I coming nearer to the Knot do say That in the Kidney there is a dungy ferment being a putrefactive of the urine the which wandring and the mark of its going astray being once imprinted the urine doth from thenceforth proceede by a voluntary flux and by degrees tendeth unto the utmost putrefaction of it self under which lurketh a power of making the earth volatile Since therefore there is in the Kidney this power of fermenting The question Why one of the Twins hath his Kidneys the more strong in a dungy Ferment is resolved by the Chapter of the unequal strength of the parts To wit so as the stomach of one hath an aversness and another more strong stomach not so For so the Kidney that is the more rich in a putrifying Ferment is more prone to the framing of the stone The Begetter also if in time of generating he hath his Bladder filled with urine is wont to raise up an off-spring subject to the calamity of Duelech Because the fermental putrefaction of his urine being the longer detained doth fermentally increase it self in the neighbouring seed sliding thorow Galen indeed erres by so much the more ridiculously as that he will have something of urine to be naturally in every seed and to be alwayes added thereto by reason of the tickling As being ignorant To wit that not so much as a forreign hair is mixed with the Beginnings of Generation without a total destruction thereof But how the afore-tasted particulars do serve our intention take notice That an unequal strength of the parts is as it were necessary to the most intimate nature For neither shalt thou draw a thred of Homogeneal Gold which may not be sooner broken in one part of it than another And so that it is weaker than it self Disorder unlikenesse or inequality and diversity of kind are onely from the innermost essence of things although unto their essences they are altogether Forreigners For from hence it is That Twins which sprang from one onely and a single seed cannot escape an Heterogeniety or diversity of
the most part only of one side and a defect invades as it were with the one only stroak of a dart But the swistness of the unexpected chance produceth a terrour in the brain and marrows that is in the spirit the inhabitant of these and the Author of that act of feeling Therefore by reason of its Terrour the weaker side of the marrow is contracted but surely the Palsey is the Product of the Contracture And in all one side is always weaker than the other Therefore women who as they are for the most part of a timorous mind they by terrour do frequently rush also into a Palsey without an Apoplexie For Terrour or Affrightment hath that Property that it straightway closeth the pores if it shall be sudden And the hairs hath stood an end and the voice hath cleaved to the Jawes Because it is natural for the gate to be shut against an approaching enemy For in a stroak of the Scul the side placed under it is resolved and the opposite side is contracted To wit the Supposite one is resolved because it is more terrified and the Opposite one is drawn together because provoked And indeed the Vulgar are wont to sore-divine an Apoplexie from the shortness of the neck For the shortness of the neck doth not argue the fewer turning joynts to be but a less depth of every one of them But what hath that Common with Phlegm or with a sometimes future stoppage of the fourth bosome of the Brain To wit that one ought to be casualy presaged by the other For the shortness of the neck containeth not a naked sign or prediction of Physiognomy But besides a certain ocasional cause For oft-times after yesterdayes gluttony or drunkenness a giddiness of the head a dizzie dimness of sight vomiting astonishment of the fingers c. do happen the which threaten and presage an Apoplexy not indeed through occasion of a fit Organ as concerning the shortness of the neck but because they have their beginning from an Apopoplexy differing only in degree and intensness If therefore that giddinesse and astonishment after â—urfeiting be from the Midriffes as the occasional matter is as yet nourished by the Archeus in an inferiour degree Therefore wheresoever that Anodynous or stupifying poyson is carried up into a degree it causeth an Apoplexy natively arising from the same seats where through an errour of the sixth digestion that Anodynous poyson is made of the nourishment from whence at length there also is occasionally a Palsey The shortness therefore of the neck affordeth a brevity and readiness of passage from the Midriffes into the head requisite for an Apoplexy that is a more ready aptness of the Organ And also the Schools affirm that in little and threatned Apoplexies instituted rubbings of the utmost parts have sometimes profited and they from thence conjecturing a revulsion of Phlegm and Vapours of out the head do command frictions or rubbings even unto a cruel pilling off of the skin and sharp Clysters To wit they excoriate the skin that Sense or Feelâ—ng may not fail in the same place They being in the mean time forgetful of their own rule that Sense depends wholly on the Brain and that it is in vain to pill the legs that they may revulse Phlegm out of the fourth bosome of the Brain For they know not whither they may pull it back whether they ought to allure it out of the bosome of the Cerebellum into the fundament by Clysters or indeed whether they may by rubbing require the same out of the bosome of the Cerebellum through the skin All being ridiculous because themselves also are ridiculous In the mean time let those that stand by me testifie whether they can detract rather the skin than vapours Yet I certainly know that though any one be wholly flead the Apoplexy or true Palsey is notwithstanding never in anywise to be removed Neither do I see after what manner they can defend their own Theoreme To wit that Phlegm in the fourth bosome of the brain is the containing and adquate cause of both these evils For I confidently deliver that frictions have little profited where that stupefactive and deadly poyson was only in the habit of the body but what will those cruel frictions do if that Anodynous poyson be primarily seated in the Midriffs and after what manner do they prove that by rubbings Phlegm is drawn out of the bosome of the Cerebellum I know therefore that frictions as they were instituted without the discerning and knowledge of causes and distinguishing of places so also that they have been and will be alwayes in vain For it is a ridiculous and cruel thing to have rubbed the skin unto a fleaing thereof and to have assigned the cause to be a stoppage in the middle of the thorny marrow Because how much rubbing soever there shal be if there were any Phlegm in the world and that slidden into the aforesaid bosome of the little Brain it shall never take that phlegm away in one only grain But rather those superstitions being granted it should continually increase the same Because Revulsion if there be any truth in it shall draw the matter rather downwards and dash it into the pipe of the thorny marrow in what part it is alwayes made narrower than it self and so much the rather because there is ordinarly a dispensing of the greater vessels into the inferiour and lesser branches of them Then also because that Phlegm being sequestred from the rest of the blood should be a meer excrement nor therefore discussable without a dead head or residence far harder And therefore rubbing if it do draw and revulse after any kind of manner it shall feel also that ordinary endeavour of nature that that stopping Phlegm should be drawn not from the hinder and lower bosome upwards to the brain by a retrograde motion but unto the more straight and lower trunks of the Nucha or marrow of the back Especially while as in the Palsey the sensitive spirits flow down sparingly or plainly nothing at all the which might otherwise be able to drive that Phlegm forth Rubbing therefore as it exhausts it shall rather encrease a want of the sensitive spirits But the Anodynous poyson of an Apoplexy is generated after the manner of other natural ones to wit a certain excrement occasionally growes in the proper Conduit of the matter But the Archeus perceiving that excrement and abhorting it flees from it and conceiving the deadly Idea of the Excrement impertinently imprints it on himself From whence an Apoplexy is forthwith stirred up as it were with the stroke of a dart But some previous dispositions do for the most part go before the nativity of this stupifying poyson The which therefore if it should happen in the Brain the place should cease from complaint to wit because the Apoplexy is made in an instant wherefore we call it Den Schlag or a stroak indeed because it suddenly comes as at unawares after the
From hence it is that Fevers do about their end provoke voluntary sweats And a Crisis or judicial sign which is terminated by sweats is most exceeding wholesome and by consequence also sudoriferous Remedies But they fled together unto Putrefaction that they might find the cause from whence they might confirm first cold and presently afterwards heat They therefore assume that Horse-dung which is actually cold doth voluntarily wax hot by reason of putrefaction But how blockishly do they on both sides deceive the credulous world For Cowes-dung of the same nourishments hath better putrified and been digested than Horse-dung yet it waxeth not hot Also the dung of an Horse which is fed with grass or Fetches waxeth not hot even as while he is fed with grain yet that hath putrefied no less than this They have not known therefore that heat follows the eaten grain but not the nature of Putrefaction Therefore they foolishly transfer a feverish heat unto humours putrified in a Fever from the heat of the dung not yet putrefying The Schools thefore have not known that by how much the nearer Horse-dung is unto a beginning-putrefaction by so much the more it is deprived of all heat And neither therefore shall the same dung ever putrifie if it be spread broad But only while as be ing moist it is contracted into an heap no otherwise than as Hay or Flowers if they are pressed together being moist are inflamed before putrefaction They have been ignorant I say that dung waxeth hot by its own spirits of salt being pressed together Again although dung do wax hot in the making of Putrefaction yet all heat ceaseth before the Putrefaction begun is in its being made And so the heat of the dung squares not with a feverish matter if the putrefied matter as they say layes hid long before in Receptacles and indeed in a Quartane always and very long Yea neither is the degree of the heat of dung suitable that it may be dispersed from its putrefied center even unto the soals of the feet but that it should first burn up the center of the body where that putrefied humour should overflow Therefore the example of dung is plainly impertinent to Fevers and so much the rather because they do not teach that Cold is before Heat in time And moreover in nature Putrefaction no where causeth heat and much less in vital things For in a putrefying body Cold must needs be if it be spoyled of life which life in us is the fountain of heat For in the interposing dayes of intermitting Fevers we complain not of heat or Cold molests us when as notwithstanding they suppose the humours to be putrefied Therefore if Heat and Cold do causally succeed in that which is putrefied and Cold be always before Heat in the comming of Fevers Cold is more native to a putrefied matter than Heat For therefore we measure the long continuance of the Disease by the duration of cold in an Ague or Fever but not by heat At length I have shewn that all feverish heat is wholly from the Archeus and therefore that it ceaseth before death when as notwithstanding Cold and Putrefaction do the more prevail It implies also that the heat of a Fever should be from a putrefied matter and that it should be first kindled in the heart it self from whence the Putrefaction is banished In the next place Heat is not kindled in dung from the Putrefaction it self For if it be daily be-sprinkled with the new urine of a horse it will not so much as wax hot in a years time But it is certain that urine doth not preserve from putrefaction but more truly that it should increase it For they should more truly have drawn heats out of Baths or Lime But they were rather ignorant of the Causes of these Heats Wherefore they have judged it a more easie matter to have accused the putrefaction of one horse-dung Neither was there any reason why they should horrow the essence of a Fever rather from heat than from cold and other symptomes Seeing they are the alike and fellow accidents of Fevers Therefore they have alwayes endeavoured to beat down the accidents of the Product because they have been ignorant of the roots But since it is now manifest that material things are the matter it self after what manner will they cure who convert the whole hinge of healing only unto heats At leastwise the similitude of horse-dung and of a feverish heat ascribed unto putrefaction hath fallen For dung when it begins never so little to putrifie it puts off heat And as long as it can be hot Artificers extract Salt-peter from thence But if it shall wax cold they leave it to Countrey Folks as unprofitable for themselves But the Schools accuse the Putrefaction or Corruption of Humours and indeed of one and the same Humour as well for Cold as for Heat and both in a heightned degree And by consequence that one and the same thing should immediately effect two Opposites out of it self Therefore it must needs be that either of these two is by it self but the other by accident If therefore Cold be the Off-spring of Putrefaction by it self it cannot in any wise essentially include heat but only by accident But if Heat be the son of Putrefaction by it self verily neither then should a Fever begin from Cold. Nevertheless it is clear enough from the aforesaid particulars that the Schools do suppose Putrefaction to be the essence of Fevers But Heat and Cold to be accidents accompanying the Putrefaction Wherefore Galen saith When blood putrifies Choler is made which Text if they shall admit of that Choler shall be putrified in its own birth or not If putrified it should cause a Tertian but not a Sunochus or putrified burning Fever Let the Schools therefore know that the blood is never putrified in the veins but that the vein it self also putrifies as in a Gangrene and in Mortifications And so they beg the principle who let forth the blood lest it should putrifie in the veins Like-wise they who affirm a Sunochus to arise from the blood of the veins being putrified And also they who say that the blood while it purrifies is turned into Choler The which particulars I thus prove The veins retain their blood fluid even in a dead carcase by the consent of all Anatomy but the blood being chased out of the veins straightway grows together into a clot But the coagulation of the blood is only a beginning of Corruption and way of separation of the whole Therefore if a vein preserves its blood from corruption in a dead carcase much more doth it do that in live bodies It being an argument from the less to the greater Forreign excrements indeed putrifie in the veins to wit they being the Retents as well of their own as of another digestion as concerning digestions elsewhere but the blood never Because it is that which according to the Scriptures is the seat and
out of the veines be not putrified truly now Nature is mad and outragious because she rather dissolves the Bloud that she may have that which may putrifie for the continuation of a future Fever But the Schooles of Galen confess that Choler to be putrified and that a putrified humour is poured out through the veines at every fit and brought into the slender extremities of the veines and that is the cause of the trembling of the fit and great cold To wit the putrefaction of which humour when it is the more intense or heightened in the same place that it straightway after causeth so great a heat I have accounted these Doctrines to be dry stubbles unworthy Fables miserable old Wives Fictious and ignorances most pernicious unto mankind But surely Fernelius first discovered this Ignorance of the Schooles Wherefore Rondeletius and the followers of Galen inveigh against Fernelius as a forsaker of and an Apostate from the School of Medicine Fernelius therefore first smelt out the Nest of intermitting Fevers to be about the stomach Duodenum and Crow and indeed he fixed the seat of continual Fevers about the heart but he durst not to decline from the ancient Rule of curing Feuers For he had begun openly to dispute against the foregoing Schooles for the Nest of Fevers but afterwards he hid himself among retired places for he not being able to rid himself of the strawy Bonds of putrified Humours suffered the essence and knowledge of Fevers to be snatched away from him But Paracelsus being affrighted with the Rigour of Fevers perswading himself that he held the knowledge of a Fever by the eares and pleasing himself with his own Allegorical invention of a Microcosme defines a Fever to be a Disease of Sulphur and Niter and elsewhere again to be the Earth-quake of the Microcosme As if Sulphur and Nitre were made far more cold than themselves while they are separated from the mud or Limbus as he saith of the Microcosme and moreover after some hours were of their own accord inflamed with the fire of Aetna For as Galen every where stumbled in the searching into Causes and so therein bewrayed himself not to be a Physitian the Name of whom he saith is the Finder out of the occasion So Paracelsus by a wonderfull Liberty slid into the Similitudes or Allusions of a Microcosme or little World unworthy a Physitian Because that was a hard Law which had violently thrust man into the miserable necessities of all Diseases nakedly that he might resemble the Microcosme or great World I certainly gratifie my Soul that I shew forth the Figure of the living God but nor of the World This good man was deceived because he knew not that fire doth no where kindle unless it be first inflamed neither however he hath feigned that there is a Flint and Steel in us and also a Smiter in the point of rubbing of the Flint Surely there was no need of these things as neither of Gun-pouder for a feverish heat unless we are burnt at the first stroak and cleave asunder in the middle An actuall matter therefore of Sulphur and Salt-peter is wanting in us a connexion of them both is wanting an actual fire is wanting And lastly a Body is wanting which may undergo that kindling at one onely moment Therefore let the Causes and originals of Fevers in the Schooles be Trifles and Fables CHAP. IV. Phlebotomy or Bloud-letting in Fevers is examined 1. One onely reason against humours others elsewhere 2. A universal proposition for Bloud-letting Galen being the Author 3. A Syllogisme against the same Galen 4. A Logistical or rational proof 5. That a Plethora or abounding fulnesse of good bloud is impossible 6. That corrupted bloud doth never subsist in the veines 7. That there cannot be said to be a Plethora in a neutral state of the bloud 8. That cutting of a vein is never betokened by the Positions of the Schooles 9. What a Cachochymia or state of bad juyce in the veines may properly be 10. That co-indications instead of a proper indication and those opposite to a contrary indication or betokening do square amisse 11. A proposition of the Author against cutting of a veine in a Fever 12. The Schooles disgrace their own laxative Medicines by their tryals of the cutting of a veine 13. The ends of co-betokenings 14. A fore-warning of the Author 15. After what manner the letting out of bloud cooleth 16. A miserable History of a Cardinal Infanto 17. We must take special notice against Physitians that are greedy of bloud 18. A guilty mind is a thousand witnesses 19. An argument drawn from thence 20. The essential state of Fevers 21. An explaining of the foregoing argument concerning cooling and the privy shifts of the Schooles 22. That there is not a proceeding from one extream unto another is badly drawn from Science Mathematical into Medicine 23. It is a faulty argument in healing 24. The argument from the position of the Schooles is opposed 25. The false paint of the Schooles from stubborn ignorance 26. The faculties obtain the chiefdom of betokening 27. Hippocrates concerning great Wrestlers or Champions is opposed but being badly understood 28. The differences of emptyings 29. A Fever hurts lesse than the cutting of a veine 30. The obligement of Physitians 31. A general intention in Fevers and the cutting of a veine opposite thereunto 32. Science Mathematical proveth that cutting of a veine doth alwayes hurt 33. The uncertainty of Physitians proves a defect of Principles 34. Cutting of a veine cannot diminish the cause of Fevers 35. An argument from a sufficient enumeration 36. Another from the quality of the bloud 37. Whither the Schooles are driven 38. Vain hope in the changes of bloud let out 39. That the co-indication of Phlebotomy for Revulsion is vain as well in a Fever as in the menstrues 40. Derivation in local Diseases is sometimes profitable but in Fevers impertinent 41. Cutting of a vein is hurtfull in a Pleurisie 42. The Schooles may learn from the Country Folk that their Maximes are false 43. Revulsion a Rule in Fevers 44. What Physitians ought to learn by this Chapter BEfore I proceed unto further Scopes I ought to repeat what things I have elsewhere demonstrated in a large Treatise To wit That there are not two Cholers and phlegme in Nature as the constitutive parts of the venal blood but that the Treatise of Fevers required me to be more brief especially because those very things do of themselves go to ruine in this place where there is no mention made of Humours except putrified ones since an Animal or living Creature that is putrified is no longer an Animal I will therefore examine onely the two universal Succours To wit Bloud-letting and Purging as the two pillars of Medicine and the which being dashed in pieces the whole Edifice falls down of its own accord as it were into Rubbish and these Succours being taken away Physitians may forsake the sick they not
to the bottome which is a demonstration of the deed First therefore the pearles of the shops are not true ones but a certain abortion of those sowed within through the middle substance of the Pearle Secondly the powder of Pearles or Corrals dissolved although it may delude the eyes yet it is not truly solved it remayning the powder which it was before Thirdly instead of comforting remedies they substitute nothing but the acide salt of the things dissolving Fourthly that powder being thus solved cannot be made bloud and therefore neither can it enter into the veines Fifthly what if it had entred unto the Liver hollow veine and so by the power of digestion that sharp salt adhering thereunto had at length been wasted into a transmutation What other thing should such Comfortatives performe besides to besmeare the veines within with a forreign powder And at length to load an un-obliterable malady with aâ— forreign guest This is the harvest that is to be exspected from Gems It is an alike doating monstrous thing which they promise concerning the broath of an old Cock being joyned with herbs For first of all there is more of life and strength in the more young birds than in decrepite ones Let the judgment be brought unto Hens And also medicinal broaths are ungratefull and troublesome to the stomack and so they are easily dismissed unto excrements Therefore after this manner under a changed maske they again dissemble their Apozemes under the broath of an old Cock Last of all there is the Antidote Alkermes which although as it consisteth of the Syrupe of the grain that dieth Scarlet I wish it were not adulterated by roses it be laudable neverthelesse inasmuch as it being scorched and roasted is impregnated with the more crude silk untill that it can be powdered the whole power of the dying grain is vitiated which silk being thus roasted is nothing else but the wool of silke wormes depraved or vitiated by burning For the invention of some covetous old man brought up that thing as thinking that nature is exhilarated or rejoyced with things that delight the eyes Far be it for neither Gold gems not pretious stones as such shall refresh the vital spirits and much lesse crude silk roasted and that if it were tinged with a Purple Colour unlesse the vitall spirits shall well perceive restaurations to themselves by the additions of strength But moreover vaine are comforting and cordiall things which are wished for the fewel of Fevers remayning and the blood and strength being diminished For if a Fever prostrateth a strong person and one that is in good health how shall it suffer him to be strengthened being now dejected Especially by things which are forreigners in the whole general kinde nor agreeing with the spirits in the union of co-resemblance How shall a Citizen fortifie himself who hath received an houshold enemy stronger than himself into his possession The wan therefore and vain promises of Physitians concerning fortifiers and strengtheners are full of deceite For he that exhausteth the strength or faculties together with the blood and withdrawes them by evacuating medicines but forbids wine and things that do immediately restore the strength also who continually prosecures after cooling things as enemies to the vitall heat how shall he procure strength by such electuaries CHAP. IX The true cause of Rigour or the shaking fit in Fevers 1. Rigour or extreame cold and trembling is from the spirit making the assault but not efficiently from the diseasifying cause 2. Why he intends Rigours 3. Why he stirs up cold and heat 4. Why he begins with cold 5. The Authour runs not back unto the lawes of the microcosme 6. There are intermittences almost in all agents 7. The manner of making cold 8. The manner and cause of rigour 9. A marke of ignorance in Galen concerning the tossing of a member 10. The burning cause of a Fever 11. That every motion as well an healthy as a sick one is made efficiently by the Archeus 12. How the Authour learned that thing 13. The turbulency of the Archeus disturbs the urine 14. The ordinary office of the Gaule is troubled and makes the Chyle bitter 15. VVherefore also the bitter vomitings thereof diminisheth nothing of a Fever 16. VVhence is burning heat and sweat in a Fever 17. VVhat sweat may betoken 18. Sharpnesse increaseth cold the which an Erisipelas proveth 19. A Gangrene how it may undoubtedly be stopped 20. VVhy the beginning of a continval Fever is from horrour 21. Paracelsus is noted 22. The errours of Galen especially concerning the putrefaction of the blood and spirit 23. The true seat of a diary and hectick Fever 24. The fabulous similitude of Galen for the parching heat of an hectick Fever 25. VVhy lime is enflamed by water 26. A mechanical proof 27. The blockish cause of gaping 28. The true cause and the organ of the same 29. Sleep the drowsie evil giddinesse of the head Apoplexy c. are from the mouth of the stomach 30. Gaping is not in the muscles of the cheekes or jaw HIppocrates first put a name on the Spirit of life to wit that it is that which maketh the assault and the guider of all things which happen in us which prerogative surely none hath at length called into question In the mean time the Schooles that succeeded being as it were giddy with the vice of whirling about have wrested aside the causes of trembling into old wives fictions The Spirit therefore being the Prince of the world in us hath alone obtained a motive beginning in us as well local as alterative to wit conteyning the cause of Rigour or extremity of cold as well in respect of locall motion as of the alterations of cold and succeeding heat For the Archeus intends by trembling rigours to shake of the excrement adhering to the similar part Even so as a spider also shakes her cobwebs and joggs them with rigour that she may shake of a forreigne thing which lighteth into them But the Aroheus taking notice that he can little profit by rigours or shaking extremityes stirs up an alterative Blas All which I have elsewhere taught to consist naturally in Winter and Summer cold I say and heat To wit through the successive interchange whereof all sublunary things do decay in the coursary number of dayes From Winter therefore in the very universe it self the beginning of the year proceedeth through a spring and Summer into Autumne wherein the fruites are at length ripened For whatsoever things are made by nature undergo this beginning increase state and declining So the Archeus himself as all seeds and vital things do imitate the nature of general ones stirs up feverish rigours colds and heats But not the offensive matter of the Fever even as hath already been sufficiently and over-proved at the beginning For so also in disjoynting of the bones the teeth presently shake and rigours spring up And likewise while a woman with child untimely expels the not
and receives an image or Idea of indignation the which is clearly expressed in a woman great with Child fearing or desiring any thing while she conveighs the seal of the thing desired on her young and whatsoever of the Archeus is defiled by that forreign Idea this ought to have been rooted out by the fit so that that is the cause of wearisomness in Fevers because the spirit being marked with a forreign likeness or hateful image as unapt for the performance of the wonted Offices of its government totally vanisheth For so those that profoundly contemplate are tired with much weariness For the Archeus if he hath an image brought into him is unfit for governing of the body For therefore persons void of care the more healthy more strong ones and those of a longer life do slowly wax grey The endeavour therefore of a Physitian is not to direct unto the effect or unto the alterations naturally received in the Archeus For as I have said in Diseases all things depend on the occasional cause implanted into the field of Life because Diseases have not in them an essential root of permanency and stability as other Beings have which consist and subsist by their own seeds Because in very deed all do immediatly consist in the life therefore in a dead Carcase there is no disease and therefore all the destruction and cessation of these depends on the removal of the occasional cause The Scope therefore of healing cannot turn it self unto the cooling of heat or to the' stupefying of alterative motions as neither unto the expectation of Concomitant accidents and produced effects For the Physitian shall labour in vain shall loose his labour time and occasions as long as he shall not be intent on the withdrawing of the occasional cause yea by how much the more he shall do that by so much the more delightfully and acceptably there will be help In all Fevers there is one only inflaming or indignation of the Archeus whence also they agree in the Essence and name of a Fever being distinguished only by their occasional cause Indeed the Matter and Inne distinguisheth Fevers yea it is of no great moment with a good Physitian to have curiously searched into the diversities of Fevers according to the properties of the matter and places since it is neither granted him to have prevented them neither can it be said to a remedy Go thou unto such a vein or unto that place For it is sufficient to have known what things I have already before in general concluded And let the whole study of a Physitian be to have found out remedies with whom all Fevers are of the same value and weight as I shall presently declare CHAP. XIV A perfect Curing of all Fevers 1. The property of the occasional cause 2. Why it becomes not putrified 3. Vomitory and laxative Medicines cure only by accident 4. The Schools why they have not had meet remedies 5. None cured of Fevers by the Physitians 6. The Authors excuse 7. Of what sort the Remedy of a Fever is 8. The successfulness and unadvisedness of Paracelsus are noted 9. The Description of an Vniversal Remedy 10. A Remedy purging Fevers and the sick but not the healthy is described 11. The most rare property of the Liquor Alkahest 12. Particular Remedies of Fevers THerefore it is now manifest and be it sufficient that the occasional matter of a Fever is to be vanquished and that that matter if it be not food corrupted as in a Diary at least that it is an excrement not indeed a putrified one unless in malignat Fevers wherein putrefaction is as yet in its making but a strange forreign one not vital being deteined against nature and so brought into anothers harvest And by this title altogether hostile to the Archeus For if it were putrified it should not be tough neither should it adhere as stubborn for by putrefaction the stedfast Fibers decay and so neither should it afford daily Fevers but it should presently make to putrifie and mortifie the vessel containing it together with it self whence death would be necessitated The occasional matter of Fevers therefore is detained besides the desires of nature in undue places wherein there is not any sink of the body therefore vomitory and laxative remedies if ever they have performed any profitable thing another prone neighbouring matter is thrust out together with it for otherwise the occasional matter of Fevers doth ordinarily reside in the hollow of the stomack or bowels because they are sinks and places appropriated for expulsion unless perhaps in a Diary Fever the disease called Choler the Flux bloody Flux and other Fevers of these pipes stirred up from a matter adhering unto them For I speak especially of the primary or chief Fevers First of all the Schools could not seek meet remedies for Fevers they being seasoned with First of all the Schools could not seek meet remedies for Fevers they being seasoned with bad and false Principles But they not seeking after remedies neither also could they find them Therefore Physitians being hitherto destitute of a true remedy have endeavoured to cure Fevers going into a Circle But if any have been cured under them that hath been by accident Let them give God thanks who hath bestowed strength on the sick whereby they have tesisted the Fever and their succours Physitians therefore instead of curing Fevers have neglected them by exhaustings of the strength and blood Far be envy from what is spoken for not boasting or the vain desire of a little glory I call God the Judge to witness but mans necessity and the compassion of Mortals hath constrained me to write and make manifest these things I have bestowed my Talent let him believe me and follow me that will It shall no longer lay upon me if Mortals being rash of belief perish by Fevers Indeed the occasional cause of Fevers is cut off by one only hook That remedy is sudoriferous or a causer of sweat which cuts extenuates dissolves melts shaves off and also cleanseth away the occasional cause in whatsoever place it at length shall exist And it is a Universal Medicine of Fevers Diaphoretical or transpirative indeed causing the aforesaid effects unsensibly and without sweat For indeed Paracelsus although he had Arcanum's or Secret Medicines whereby at one only draught he alike successively cured the Quartane Ague and all Fevers yet the knowledge of their causes was not granted unto him He being contented to have introduced into us all the particular Creatures of the Microcosm and so under a rashness of belief to have applied the Species Numbers and Properties of all Simples and Stars unto the Medicinal Art and that not indeed by similitudes but he would have them to be so precisely known by a simple identity under the penalty of convicted Idiotism Therefore I distinguish not a Fever if there be the greatest goodness of a remedy For that remedy is the Diaphoretick Precipitate of Paracelsus
Anthonies fire c although the mouth might sometimes be bitter yet the liquour issuing from an Erisipelas is not bitter but plainly of sharp is become salt That Humour I say of whose burning heat the Schools complain in an Erisipelas is called a most sharp one when as in the mean time it bears neither any sharpnesse nor bitternesse before it And they are unconstant in this when as notwithstanding the sharpness of Humours ought to differ as much from their bitterness as Pepper doth from Coloquintida or from wild Cucumber And so the Schools have treated thus carelessely and unconstantly concerning the properties of their own Choler Because in Law a varying witness is unworthy of any credit he is accounted for an unsavoury or foolish or false witnesse and he is constrained to restitution by how much hurt he hath brought unto another by his testimony But come on then let us suppose but not believe that the liquour swimming on the blood is Gauly Choler and of the natural composition thereof At leastwise that blood on which that Choler now swims should be no longer blood if one of its four constitutive parts hath failed it and there be made a seperation of the Marriage bed to wit a real seperation of things composing for Cheese from which the Wheyinesse is withdrawn is no longer Milk For neither do I deny that the whole entire body subsisteth from an union of Heterogeneal parts but the integrity of the former composed body ceaseth assoon as one of its constitutive parts hath retired The Schools indeed suppose a permanency and co-knitting of four Humours for the constitution of the blood Yea besides this simple and vain supposition nothing hath been hitherto proved by the Schools which may not be more worthy of pity than credit Therefore I deny their blockish supposition not proved to proceed unto the false derivations of Choler and embassages of these into the diverse parts and passions of the body If they shall not first make it manifest concerning the question whether there be any Choler requisite for the constitution of the blood Therefore Choler hath not place in the constitution of the blood although a uriny wheyishnesse swim upon blood let out of the veines For that whyishnesse is unto the blood by accident which thing the blood of those who have drunk little and laboured and sweat much doth sufficiently prove For oft-times the blood of such being taken away by Phlebotomy wholly wants all Wheyishnesse And by consequence it should be deprived of Choler And likewise neither doth that blood cease to be blood the which doth not admit of Wheyishnesse but by accident The which I have in the Chap. of the Liquour Latex hitherto unknown to the Schools concerning the rise of medicine elsewhere demonstrated For the Latex is left in the blood for its own ends the ignorance whereof therefore hath hitherto secluded Physitians from the signification of the urine and the knowledge of many diseases I will therefore re-sume by supposing That yellow Choler is naturally a watery liquor swimming on the blood Let the Schooles therefore at least reach if Choler be an Humour most fiery representing fire and conteining it in substance and properties how fire can glister in a meer salt water How is it that it is not stifled in that water After what manner do fire and water co-suffer with each other under the famlinesse of unity as also the air immediately under Phlegm What have they any where found in nature which may constraine fire to conjoyn in salt water They will finde at length that they are driven to believe these trifles by reason of a Quaternary of Elements and a necessity of mixed bodies Both which after they have been oppressed by demonstrations propter quid or for what cause the world will Sue for my writings The very Schools themselves and all posterity will laugh at the blockishnesses of Ancestours which have hitherto been so stubornly defended they being so pernicious in healing and false in instructing Because will they nill they they ought to swallow two Maxims of mine elsewhere demonstrated One whereof is That there is no Element of fire and that kitchin or artificial fire is not a substance And consequently that if more things than one should concurre unto the composition of the blood at least wise that four Elements could not flow together thereunto And therefore that the fiction of four Humours doth badly square for our blood for mixture tempering strife and likewise for the truth existence actuality diversity and healing of diseases and cures But the other of my Maxims is elsewhere sufficiently proved That every sublunary visible Body is not materially composed of four as neither of three co-mixed Elements They must therefore seriously repent Because the fire is neither an Element as neither a substance neither is a salt watery liquour to be called into the composition of us for the feigned comparison of a Microcosme or little world that it may represent the form of fire Again I by way of connivance suppose That nature scarce makes enough blood of all the food dayly even as in the book of the unheard of doctrine of Fevers At least wise nature approves of that since she hath hitherto appoynted no place of entertainment for superabounding blood Yet she alwayes prepares out of all food both Cholers abundantly and super-fluously which the Schools prove by the tincture of the urine and filths of the belly therefore at least wise the nature of the Liver daily erreth and is founded in errour and offends also in abstinent persons fishes and Nations that are satisfied with the drinking of water only Because indeed it generates the least of a super-abounding fiery and earthy humour and yet more than it hath need of for its own nourishments Why therefore doth not nature offend rather in quality even as she daily without distinction offends in quantity Why also in the place of blood to wit the fourth ordinary Humour doth she not likewise in offending produce a certain abortive excrementitious blood to be sent away into banishment as she daily actually banisheth the two excessive Cholers out of the composition of the blood and fellowship of life Why also doth she daily bring forth more of malignant humours and those to be expelled out of good and much juicy meats moderately taken than out of the best blood Since as Galen is witnesse in hot natures hony which otherwise in temperate and therefore in Sanguine persons is totally turned into blood is wholly turned into yellow Choler To wit it s other three companional Humours being excluded Whence it followes That the framing of Humours proceeds not from the complexion of the food but altogether from the condition of the Liver From whence consequently if more of both Cholers than is meet be daily made that all that is to be attributed unto the offence and vice of nature And therefore that every naturall complexion of the Liver is vitious