Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/81

Rh find various ingenious men, soon after the period in question, employed in prosecuting experimental inquiries; a species of study to which nothing analogous occurs in the history of ancient science. The boldest and most successful of this new school was the celebrated Paracelsus; born in 1498, and consequently only ten years younger than Luther. “It is impossible to doubt,” says Le Clere, in his History of Physic, “that he possessed an extensive of knowledge of what is called the Materia Medica, and that he had employed much time in working on the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral substances of which it is composed. He seems, besides, to have tried an immense number of experiments in chemistry; but he has this great defect, that he studiously conceals or disguises the results of his long experience.” The same author quotes from Paracelsus a remarkable expression, in which he calls the philosophy of Aristotle a wooden foundation. “He ought to have attempted,” continues Le Clere, “to have laid a better; but if he has not done it, he has at least, by discovering its weakness, invited his successors to look out for a firmer basis.”

Lord Bacon himself, while he censures the moral frailties of Paracelsus, and the blind empiricism of his followers, indirectly acknowledges the extent of his experimental information: “The ancient sophists may be said to have hid; but Paracelsus extinguished the light of nature. The sophists were only deserters of experience, but Paracelsus has betrayed it. At the same time, he is so far from understanding the right method of conducting experiments, or of recording their results, that he has added to the trouble and tediousness of experimenting. By wandering through the wilds of experience, his disciples sometimes stumble upon useful discoveries, not by reason, but by accident;—whence rashly proceeding to form theories, they carry the smoke and tarnish of their art along with them; and, like childish operators at the furnace, attempt to raise a structure of philosophy with a few experiments of distillation.”

Two other circumstances, of a nature widely different from those hitherto enumerated, although, probably, in no small degree to be accounted for on the same principles, seconded, with an incalculable accession of power, the sudden impulse which the human mind had just received. The same century which the invention of printing, and the revival of letters have made for ever memorable, was also illustrated by the discovery of the New World, and of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope;—events which may be justly re-