Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/254

 23G PAR P A unfettered by any speculative generalizations, and so shrewd an observer as Paracelsus was must have often felt that his philosophy and his experience did not agree with one another. It was doubt less a very great ideal of medicine which Paracelsus raised ; but when it came to realizing it in every-day life he could hardly do else than fail. During the three hundred years which have elapsed since his time knowledge both of the macrocosm and of the microcosm has increased far beyond what Paracelsus could have understood, even had it been all foretold him ; the healing art has advanced also, though perhaps scarcely at the same rate, but it would be as hard for us as for him to apply any cosmogony, however rational, to curing disease. We are not one whit nearer the solution of the problems which puzzled Paracelsus than he was ; the mystery of the origin, continuance, and stoppage of life is, perhaps through the abundance of light shed on other phenomena, even darker than it may have seemed to Paracelsus. If this be so it is no matter for surprise, or blame, or ridicule that he missed constructing a theory of the universe which at the same time would be a never-failing guide to him in the practical work of alleviating the evils which a residence in this universe seems to entail. Some of his doctrines have been already alluded to in the article MEDICINE (q.v. ), and it would serve no purpose to give even a brief sketch of his views, seeing that their influence has passed entirely away, and that they are of interest only in their place in a general history of medicine and philosophy. Defective, however, as they may have been, and unfounded in fact, his kab- balistic doctrines led him to trace the dependence of the human body upon outer nature for its sustenance and cure. The doctrine of signatures, the supposed connexion of every part of the little world of man with a corresponding part of the great world of nature, was a fanciful and false exaggeration of this doctrine, but the idea carried in its train that of specifics. This led to the search for these, which were not to be found in the bewildering and untested mixtures of the Galenic prescriptions. Paracelsus had seen how bodies were purified and intensified by chemical operations, and he thought if plants and minerals could be made to yield their active principles it would surely be better to employ these than the crude and unpre pared originals. He had besides arrived by some kind of intuition at the conclusion that the operations in the body were of a chemical character, and that when disordered they were to be put right by counter operations of the same kind. It may be claimed for Paracelsus that he embraced within the idea of chemical action some thing more than the alchemists did. Whether or not he believed in the philosopher s elixir is of very little consequence. If he did, he was like the rest of his age ; but he troubled himself very little, if at all, about it. He did believe in the immediate use for thera peutics of the salts and other preparations which his practical skill enabled him to make. Technically he was not a chemist ; he did not concern himself either with the composition of his compounds or with an explanation of what occurred in their making. If he could g&amp;lt;?t potent drugs to cure disease he was content, and he worked very hard in an empirical way to make them. That he found out some new compounds is certain ; but not one great and marked dis covery can be ascribed to him. Probably therefore his positive services are to be summed up iu this wide application of chemical ideas to pharmacy and therapeutics ; his indirect and possibly greater services are to be found in the stimulus, the revolutionary stimulus, of his ideas about method and general theory. It is not difficult, however, to criticize Paracelsus and to represent him as so far below the level of his time as to be utterly contemptible. It is difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to raise Paracelsus to a place among the great spirits of mankind. It is most difficult of all to ascertain what his true character really was, to appreciate aright this man of fervid imagination, of powerful and persistent con victions, of unbated honesty and love of truth, of keen insight into the errors (as he thought them) of his time, of a merciless will to lay bare these errors and to reform the abuses to which they gave rise, who in an instant offends us by his boasting, his grossness, his want of self-respect. It is a problem how to reconcile his ignorance, his weakness, his superstition, his crude notions, his erroneous observations, his ridiculous inferences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives. A character full of contradictory elements cannot but have had contradictory judgments passed on it ; and after three hundred years the animus is as strong and the judgments are as diverse as (J. F.) PARADISE is an old Persian word (Pairidaeza in the Vcndidad) meaning an enclosure, a park. The Greeks use the word in the form IlapaoVuros of the parks of the Persian kings, and it was borrowed also by the Hebrews in the form DY|9 (Cant. iv. 13; Eccles. ii. 5; Neh. ii. 8; A. V., &quot;orchard,&quot; &quot;forest&quot;). The Septuagint chose the Greek form to translate the &quot;garden &quot; of Genesis ii. ; other Greek and Latin versions followed them, and thus &quot; paradise &quot; became the usual ecclesiastical name for the garden of Eden, which has been spoken of under EDEN. Now, as Paradise in this sense was the residence of man before he sinned, it was natural enough that theological speculation as to the dwelling-place of the righteous, after death, or in the future glory, should attach itself to the account given in Genesis of the original habitation of righteous Adam, and borrow not only the name but in some measure also the conception of paradise as there described. This took place in more than one way, as we see from the Jewish apocalyptic literature, and especially from the book of Enoch. Thus we find (1) the idea that the old Paradise still exists in a secret part of the earth, and that Enoch, Elijah, and other elect and righteous persons dwell there. This is the foundation of the doctrine of the earthly paradise, which passed into Christianity being supposed to find confirmation in the New Testament, especially in Luke xxiii. 43. The earthly paradise, as developed by Christian fancy, is the old garden of Eden, which lay in the far East beyond the stream of Ocean, raised so high on a triple terrace of mountain that the deluge did not touch it. It is the residence of certain departed saints, and the pictures drawn of it are coloured with classical reminiscences of Elysium and the Islands of the Blest. How these outlines were filled up at different periods may be learned from Ephraem Syrus s poem on Paradise (4th century), from Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century), from the Divina Commedia of Dante, and other mediaeval sources. A more ideal con ception is (2) that of the heavenly paradise. To the Hebrews ideal things represent themselves as the heavenly counterparts of earthly things ; ideals which God s people are to realize in the future are already existent in heaven; or even things which have once been lost, but which are necessary to man s true happiness, are preserved in heaven. Thus the heavenly paradise was either a mere figure for the good things, corresponding to those which Adam lost, which are reserved in heaven for the righteous, or it was the heavenly archetype of which the earthly paradise was a copy, or on a crasser way of thinking it was held that the paradise which Adam lost had been actually trans ported to heaven. The commonest form of the idea was perhaps that expressed in 4 Ezra and the Talmud, by saying that paradise was created before the earth. This paradise is not conceived as the place of the souls of all the righteous after death, but it is inhabited by certain select persons Enoch, Elijah, Moses, Ezra who enjoy in it the fellowship of the coming Messiah. After the last judgment, when the enemies of Israel are cast into Gehenna, the righteous are raised to paradise, and there behold the glory of God. Associated with such views as these, we find farther the idea (3) that in the future glory paradise, or the heavenly Jerusalem, which stood in paradise before the fall and was removed to heaven with it (Apoc. Baruch), will be brought down from heaven to earth, that the tree of life will be planted on Zion (Bk. Enoch, 4 Ezra). All these apocalyptic crudities, which it is not necessary to follow into details, are really mechanical developments of a legitimate, one may even say an inevitable, inference from the position that the garden of Gen. ii. represents a state of ideal human felicity lost through sin. For, if this be so, the future bliss of the redeemed must be conceived as somehow analogous to the life of Eden, and a literal un imaginative conception of this analogy, making no allowance for the difference between the happiness of childhood, prior to experience of the everyday world, and the happiness of a life which has conquered the world, must end in regarding the future home of the blest as a mere reproduction of Eden. But the use of the word paradise for the home of