Other influences which gave direction to Bruno's genius belong rather to physical science and pseudo-science than to philosophical theory. Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487-1535), the scholarly adventurer, the Faust who acquired all the knowledge and most of the arts of his time, wrote a compendium and justification (from Neoplatonist philosophy) of magical practices,[237] and at the close of his life the great declamation "on the uncertainty and vanity of all sciences and arts,"[238]--a plea for the simple life and the simple gospel. The _De occulta philosophia_ is the chief source from which Bruno drew the fantastical lore of the _De Monade_.[239] The satires upon Asinity, as the chief human virtue, in the _Spaccio_ and the _Cabala_, directed as they are against blind faith without works or wisdom, found their occasion at least in Agrippa's praise of the Ass (in the _De Vanitate_) as the mouthpiece of God in the story of Balaam, and the bearer of Christ in the New Testament history. [Sidenote: Paracelsus.] [Sidenote: Cardanus.] [Sidenote: Telesio.] _Paracelsus_[240] proposed a reform of medicine on Neoplatonist principles, attacking the Galenian doctrine of the Four Humours, which was based on the four elements of the Aristotelians (the warm and the cold, the moist and the dry). His own more "natural" theory made salt, sulphur, and mercury the (chemical) elements of all things--those which in living organisms were vivified and directed by an inner spirit (_e.g._ the _Archaeus_ in man), a direct emanation from the soul of the universe. Through their common constitution, and the spirit that infused all things alike, there was a subtle, mysterious sympathy between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the individual body and the universe, and it was by the study of the relations (magical, astrological, and the rest) between the stars and the things of earth, between the different metals and the body of man, that Paracelsus proposed to reform the art of medicine. Bruno, in the _Causa_,[241] praises Paracelsus for his "philosophical" treatment of medicine, that he did not rest content with the three chemical principles alone for explanation of the different vital phenomena, but sought the true principle of life everywhere in a spirit or soul. He is one of the builders of the temple of wisdom,--_ad miraculum medicus_.[242] In his magical writings and in the _De Monade_, Bruno is largely indebted for materials to Paracelsus. The same general tendency, the desire for a return to nature and to sense-observation as opposed to the authority of Aristotle, and to the cult of logical or grammatical subtleties, is found also in Cardan.[243] In his work there is the same mixture of mathematics and physical science with theology, magic, and Neoplatonism, and to him Bruno owes many of his superstitions. The more profound Telesio also (who before Bruno "made honourable war upon Aristotle")[244] attempted, independently of all authority, from