In his book about Winkelmann, Goethe has described the relation of man to Nature in the following beautiful sentence: “When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole; when he feels himself as one with a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole; when the sense of harmonious well-being gives him a pure and free delight; then would the Universe, if it could be conscious of its own feeling, burst forth in joy at having attained its goal, and contemplate with wondering admiration the summit of its own becoming and being.” With a feeling such as finds expression in these sentences, Paracelsus is simply saturated. From out of its depths the riddle of humanity takes shape for him. Let us watch how this happens in Paracelsus’s sense. At the outset, the road by which Nature has travelled to attain her loftiest altitude is hidden from man’s power of comprehension. She has climbed, indeed, to the summit; but the summit does not proclaim: I feel myself as the whole of Nature; it proclaims, on the contrary: I feel myself as this single, separated human being. That which in reality is an achievement of the whole universe, feels itself as a separated, isolated being, standing alone by itself. This indeed is the true being of man, _viz._, that he must needs feel himself to be something quite different from what, in ultimate analysis, he really is. And if that be a contradiction, then must man be called a contradiction come to life. Man is the universe in his own particular way; he regards his oneness with the universe as a duality: he is the very same that the universe is; but he is the universe as a repetition, as a single being. This is the contrast which Paracelsus feels as the Microcosm (Man) and the Macrocosm (Universe). Man, for him, is the universe in miniature. That which makes man regard his relationship to the world in this way, that is his spirit. This spirit appears as if bound to a single being, to a single organism: and this organism belongs, by the very nature of its whole being, to the mighty stream of the universe. It is one member, one link in that whole, having its very existence only in relation with all the other links or members thereof. But spirit appears as an outcome of this single, separated organism, and sees itself at the outset as bound up only with that organism. It tears loose this organism from the mother earth out of which it has grown. So, for Paracelsus, a deep-seated connection between man and the universe lies hidden in the basic foundations of being, a connection which is hidden through the presence of “spirit.” That spirit which leads us to higher insight by making knowledge possible, and leads on this knowledge to a new birth on a higher level--this has, as its first result for us men, to veil from us our own oneness with the whole.