He is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of his age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or the philosopher's stone. He especially disclaims such puerile schemes in the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his lifelong efforts have been. He stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. He has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first the secrets of life's laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about life's betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery of some magic secret by means of which life's laws might be overcome. Yet he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. The creed which spurs him to his quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul, but to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in outer nature must be found. An intuitive mind like Paracelsus's will recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds them; and these are what Paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek and find, sure he will "arrive." One illustration of the results so obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. The real Paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory. Though such methods are a long distance from those of the modern scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond to hypotheses born of intuition. Browning's presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by Paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most recent criticisms of this extraordinary man's life. According to these he fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent and scientific observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the side of scientific ways of working; and above all made the great step from a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of parallelisms between nature processes and human processes.