Isis unveiled, Volume 1 (of 2), Science

[628] “Transactions of Medical Society, etc.,” p. 246.

[629] Fournié: “Physiologie du Système Nerveux, Cerebro-spinal,” Paris, 1872.

[630] Ibid.

[631] “Night-Side of Nature,” by Catherine Crowe, p. 434, et seq.

[632] Henry More: “Immortality of the Soul,” p. 399.

[633] By the word soul, neither Demokritus nor the other philosophers understood the nous or pneuma, the divine immaterial soul, but the psychè, or astral body; that which Plato always terms the second mortal soul.

[634] Balfour Stewart, LL.D., F.R.S.: “The Conservation of Energy,” p. 133.

[635] Fournié: “Physiologie du Système Nerveux,” p. 16.

[636] “A System of Logic.” Eighth ed., 1872, vol. ii., p. 165.

[637] Draper: “Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 22.

[638] Edward L. Youmans, M.D.; “A Class-book of Chemistry,” p. 4.

[639] Sprengel, in his “History of Medicine,” makes Van Helmont appear as if disgusted with the charlatanry and ignorant presumption of Paracelsus. “The works of this latter,” says Sprengel, “which he (Van Helmont) had attentively read, aroused in him the spirit of reformation; but they alone did not suffice for him, because his erudition and judgment were infinitely superior to those of that author, and he despised this made egoist, this ignorant and ridiculous vagabond, who often seemed to have fallen into insanity.” This assertion is perfectly false. We have the writings of Helmont himself to refute it. In the well-known dispute between two writers, Goclenius, a professor in Marburg, who supported the great efficacy of the sympathetic salve discovered by Paracelsus, for the cure of every wound, and Father Robert, a Jesuit, who condemned all these cures, as he attributed them to the Devil. Van Helmont undertook to settle the dispute. The reason he gave for interfering was that all such disputes “affected Paracelsus as their discoverer and himself as his disciple” (see “De Magnetica Vulner.,” and l. c., p. 705).

[640] Demokritus said that, as from nothing, nothing could be produced, so there was not anything that could ever be reduced to nothing.

[641] J. Le Conte: “Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces,” appendix.

[642] The date is incorrect; it should be 1784.

[643] Ecclesiastes i. 10.

[644] Ibid., i. 6.

[645] Ibid., i. 7.

[646] Siljeström: “Minnesfest öfver Berzelius,” p. 79.

[647] “Séance de l’Academie de Paris,” 13 Août, 1807.

[648] Mollien: “Voyage dans l’interieur de l’Afrique,” tome ii., p. 210.

[649] “The Popular Science Monthly,” May, 1876, p. 110.

[650] Malte-Brun, pp. 372, 373; Herodotus.

[651] “The Popular Science Monthly,” Dec., 1874, p. 252, New York.

[652] The “Periplus of Hanno.”

[653] The original was suspended in the temple of Saturn, at Carthage. Falconer gave two dissertations on it, and agrees with Bougainville in referring it to the sixth century before the Christian era. See Cory’s “Ancient Fragments.”

[654] Professor Jowett.

[655] “On the Atlantic Island (from Marcellus) Ethiopic History.”

[656] “Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy.”

[657] See “Revue Encyclopédique,” vol. xxxiii., p. 676.

[658] “Bulletin de la Soc. Geograph,” vol. vi., pp. 209-220.

[659] See “Revue Encyclopédique,” vols. xxxiii. and xxxiv., pp. 676-395.

[660] Porphyry: “Epistola ad Anebo., ap. Euseb. Præp. Evangel,” v. 10; Iamblichus: “De Mysteriis Ægypt.; “Porphyrii: “Epistola ad Anebonem Ægyptium.”

[661] “Porphyry,” says the “Classical Dictionary” of Lemprière, “was a man of universal information, and, according to the testimony of the ancients, he excelled his contemporaries in the knowledge of history, mathematics, music, and philosophy.”

[662] “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination.”

[663] Epes Sargent. See his pamphlet, “Does Matter do it All?”

[664] In his “Essay on Classification” (sect. xvii., pp. 97-99), Louis Agassiz, the great zoölogist, remarks: “Most of the arguments in favor of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings. May I not add that a future life in which man would be deprived of that great source of enjoyment and intellectual and moral improvement, which results from the contemplation of the harmonies of an organic world would involve a lamentable loss? And may we not look to a spiritual concert of the combined worlds and all their inhabitants in the presence of their creator as the highest conception of paradise?”

[665] “Diog. in Vita.”

[666] See the works of Robertus de Fluctibus; and the “Rosicrucians,” by Hargrave Jennings.

[667] Professor B. Stewart: “Conservation of Energy.”