[Footnote 1: Pletho died at an advanced age in 1450. His chief work, the
[Greek: Nomoi], was given to the flames by his Aristotelian opponent,
Georgius Scholarius, surnamed Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople.
Portions of it only, which had previously become known, have been
preserved. On Pletho's life and teachings, cf. Fritz Schultze, _G.G.
Plethon_, Jena, 1874.]

A similar romantic figure was Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast
Paracelsus[1] von Hohenheim (1493-1541), a traveled Swiss, who endeavored
to reform medicine from the standpoint of chemistry. Philosophy for
Paracelsus is knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought
must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the
paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living
whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of
the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course.
Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the
God-created _prima materia_, as though inclosed in a germ, whence the
manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation.
The development then proceeds in such a way that in each genus that is
perfected which is posited therein, and does not cease until, at the last
day, all that is possible in nature and history shall have fulfilled
itself. But the one indwelling life of nature lives in all the manifold
forms; the same laws rule in the human body as in the universe; that which
works secretly in the former lies open to the view in the latter, and the
world gives the clew to the knowledge of man. Natural becoming is brought
about by the chemical separation and coming together of substances; the
ultimate constituents revealed by analysis are the three fundamental
substances or primitive essences, quicksilver, sulphur, and salt, by which,
however, something more principiant is understood than the empirical