Paracelsus used to boast that he would not die till he thought proper so to do, thus wishing it to be understood that he had discovered the Elixir of life. He died suddenly, and at a time when he seemed to be in full health; and hence arose a report, that he had made a compact with the Devil, who enabled him to perform all his cures, but came for him as soon as the term of their agreement was up.
Wherefore indeed should he have died by any natural means who so well understood the mysteries of life and of death. What, says he, is life? Nihil meherclè vita est aliud, nisi Mumia quædam Balsamita conservans mortale corpus à mortalibus vermibus, et eschara cum impressâ liquoris salium commisturâ. What is Death? Nihil certe aliud quam Balsami dominium, Mumiæ interitus, salium ultima materia. Do you understand this, Reader? If you do, I do not.
But he is intelligible when he tells us that Life may be likened to Fire, and that all we want is to discover the fuel for keeping it up,—the true Lignum Vitæ. It is not against nature, he contends, that we should live till the renovation of all things; it is only against our knowledge, and beyond it. But there are medicaments for prolonging life; and none but the foolish or the ignorant would ask why then is it that Princes and Kings who can afford to purchase them, die nevertheless like other people. The reason says the great Bombast von Hohenheim is that their physicians know less about medicine than the very boors, and moreover that Princes and Kings lead dissolute lives. And if it be asked why no one except Hermes Trismegistus has used such medicaments; he replies that others have used them, but have not let it be known.
Van Helmont was once of opinion that no metallic preparation could contain in itself the blessing of the Tree of Life, though that the Philosopher's stone had been discovered was a fact that consisted with his own sure knowledge. This opinion however was in part changed, in consequence of some experiments made with an aurific powder, given him by a stranger after a single evening's acquaintance; (vir peregrinus, unius vesperi amicus:) these experiments convinced him that the stone partook of what he calls Zoophyte life, as distinguished both from vegetative and sensitive. But the true secret he thought, must be derived from the vegetable world, and he sought for it in the Cedar, induced, as it seems, by the frequent mention of that tree in the Old Testament. He says much concerning the cedar,—among other things, that when all other plants were destroyed by the Deluge, and their kinds preserved only in their seed, the Cedars of Lebanon remained uninjured under the waters. However when he comes to the main point, he makes a full stop, saying, Cætera autem quæ de Cedro sunt, mecum sepelientur: nam mundus non capax est. It is not unlikely that if his mysticism had been expressed in the language of intelligible speculation, it might have been found to accord with some of Berkeley's theories in the Siris. But for his reticence upon this subject, as if the world were not worthy of his discoveries, he ought to have been deprived of his two remaining talents. Five he tells us he had received for his portion, but because instead of improving them, he had shown himself unworthy of so large a trust, he by whom they were given had taken from him three. “Ago illi gratias, quod cum contulisset in me quinque talenta, fecissemque me indignum, et hactenus repudium coram eo factus essem, placuit divinæ bonitati, auferre à me tria, et relinquere adhuc bina, ut me sic ad meliorem frugem exspectaret. Maluit, inquam, me depauperare et tolerare, ut non essem utilis plurimis, modò me salvaret ab hujus mundi periculis. Sit ipsi æterna sanctificatio.”
He has however informed posterity of the means by which he prolonged the life of a man to extreme old age. This person whose name was Jan Mass, was in the service of Martin Rythovius, the first Bishop of Ypres, when that prelate, by desire of the illustrious sufferers, assisted at the execution of Counts Egmond and Horn. Mass was then in the twenty-fifth year of his age. When he was fifty-eight, being poor, and having a large family of young children, he came to Van Helmont, and entreated him to prolong his life if he could, for the sake of these children, who would be left destitute in case of his death, and must have to beg their bread from door to door. Van Helmont, then a young man, was moved by such an application, and considering what might be the likeliest means of sustaining life in its decay, he called to mind the fact that wine is preserved from corruption by the fumes of burnt brimstone; it then occurred to him that the acid liquor of sulphur, acidum sulfuris stagma, (it is better so to translate his words than to call it the sulphuric acid,) must of necessity contain the fumes and odour of sulphur, being, according to his chemistry, nothing but those fumes of sulphur, combined with, or imbibed in, its mercurial salt. The next step in his reasoning was to regard the blood as the wine of life; if this could be kept sound, though longevity might not be the necessary consequence, life would at least be preserved from the many maladies which arose from its corruption, and the sanity, and immunity from such diseases, and from the sufferings consequent thereon, must certainly tend to its prolongation. He gave Mass therefore a stone bottle of the distilled liquor of sulphur, and taught him also how to prepare this oil from burnt sulphur. And he ordered him at every meal to take two drops of it in his first draught of beer; and not lightly to exceed that; two drops, he thought, contained enough of the fumes for a sufficient dose. This was in the year 1600; and now, says Helmont, in 1641, the old man still walks about the streets of Brussels. And what is still better, (quodque augustius est,) in all these forty years, he has never been confined by any illness, except that by a fall upon the ice he once broke his leg near the knee; and he has constantly been free from fever, remaining a slender and lean man, and always poor.
Jan Mass had nearly reached his hundredth year when this was written, and it is no wonder that Van Helmont, who upon a fantastic analogy had really prescribed an efficient tonic, should have accounted by the virtue of his prescription for the health and vigour, which a strong constitution had retained to that extraordinary age. There is no reason for doubting the truth of his statement; but if Van Helmont relied upon his theory, he must have made further experiments; it is probable therefore that he either distrusted his own hypothesis, or found upon subsequent trials that the result disappointed him.
Van Helmont's works were collected and edited by his son Francis Mercurius, who styles himself Philosophus per Unum in quo Omnia Eremita peregrinans, and who dedicated the collection as a holocaust to the ineffable Hebrew Name. The Vita Authoris which he prefixed to it relates to his own life, not to his father's, and little can be learnt from it, except that he is the more mystical and least intelligible of the two. The most curious circumstances concerning the father are what he has himself communicated in the treatise entitled his Confession, into which the writer of his life in Aikin's Biography seems not to have looked, nor indeed into any of his works, the articles in that as in our other Biographies, being generally compiled from compilations, so as to present the most superficial information, with the least possible trouble to the writer and the least possible profit to the reader,—skimming for him not the cream of knowledge, but the scum.
Dr. Dove used to say that whoever wrote the life of an author without carefully perusing his works acted as iniquitously as a Judge who should pronounce sentence in a cause without hearing the evidence; nay he maintained, the case was even worse, because there was an even chance that the Judge might deliver a right sentence, but it was impossible that a life so composed should be otherwise than grievously imperfect, if not grossly erroneous. For all the ordinary business of the medical profession he thought it sufficient that a practitioner should thoroughly understand the practice of his art, and proceed empirically: God help the patients, he would say, if it were not so! and indeed without God's help they would fare badly at the best. But he was of opinion that no one could take a lively and at the same time a worthy interest in any art or science without as it were identifying himself with it, and seeking to make himself well acquainted with its history: a Physician therefore, according to his way of thinking ought to be as curious concerning the writings of his more eminent predecessors, and as well read in the most illustrious of them, as a general in the wars of Hannibal, Cæsar, the Black Prince, the Prince of Parma, Gustavus Adolphus, and Marlborough. How carefully he had perused Van Helmont was shown by the little landmarks whereby after an interval of—alas how many years,—I have followed him through the volume,—haud passibus æquis.