The life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus : and the substance of his teachings concerning cosmology, anthropology, pneumatology, magic and sorcery, medicine, alchemy and astrology, philosophy and theosophy / extracted and translated from his rare and extensive works and from some unpublished manuscripts by Franz Hartmann.

Franz Hartmann

Date:: 1896

Credit: The life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus : and the substance of his teachings concerning cosmology, anthropology, pneumatology, magic and sorcery, medicine, alchemy and astrology, philosophy and theosophy / extracted and translated from his rare and extensive works and from some unpublished manuscripts by Franz Hartmann. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

9/336 page 5

PREFACE Eecent researches in the ethereal realms of Mysticism, Metaphysics, and transcendental Anthropology have proved beyond a doubt the existence of a great number of appa- rently mysterious and occult facts, whose causes cannot be explained by a science whose means for investigation are limited by the imperfections of sensual perception, and whose researches must necessarily come to a stop where physical instruments cease to be of any service. Invisible things cannot be seen, neither can that which is imponderable be weighed with scales; but invisible and imponderable things, such as the cosmic ether, the light- producing power of the sun, the vital power of plants and animals, thought, memory, imagination, will, psychological influences affecting the state of the mind or producing a sudden change of feeling, and other things too numerous to mention, are nevertheless facts, and exist in spite of the incapacity of teachers of anatomy or chemistry to explain them. If a reasonable sceptic says that such things do not exist, he can only mean to say that they do not exist relatively to his knowledge ; because, to deny the possibility of the existence of anything of which we know nothing would imply that we imagined ourselves to be in possession of all the knowledge that exists in the world, and believed that nothing could exist of which we did not know. A person who peremptorily denies the

Licence and re-use

Contents