With these seven principles of human nature, Paracelsus aims at expressing nothing else than the facts of inner and outer experience. The fact remains unquestioned that, what for human experience subdivides itself into a multiplicity of seven factors, is in higher reality a unity. But the higher insight exists just for the very purpose of exhibiting the unity in all that appears as multiplicity to man, owing to his bodily and spiritual organisation. On the level of the highest insight, Paracelsus strives to the utmost to fuse the unitary Root-Being of the world with his own spirit. But he knows that man can only cognise Nature in its spirituality, when he enters into immediate intercourse with that Nature. Man does not grasp Nature by peopling it from within himself with arbitrarily assumed entities; but by accepting and valuing it as it is, as Nature. Paracelsus therefore does not seek for God or for spirit in Nature; but Nature, just as it comes before his eyes, is for him wholly, immediately divine. Must one then first ascribe to the plant a soul after the kind of a human soul, in order to find the spiritual? Hence Paracelsus explains to himself the development of things, so far as that is possible with the scientific means of his age, altogether in such wise that he conceives this development as a sensible-natural process. He makes all things to proceed from the root-matter, the root-water (Yliaster). And he regards as a further natural process the separation of the root-matter (which he also calls the great Limbus) into the four elements: Water, Earth, Fire and Air. When he says that the “Divine Word” called forth the multiplicity of beings from the root-matter, one must understand this also only in such wise as perhaps in more recent natural science one must understand the relationship of Force to Matter. A “Spirit,” in a matter-of-fact sense, is not yet present at this stage. This “Spirit” is no matter-of-fact basis of the natural process, but a matter-of-fact result of that process. This Spirit does not create Nature, but develops itself out of Nature. Not a few statements of Paracelsus might be interpreted in the opposite sense. Thus when he says: “There is nothing which does not possess and carry with it also a spirit hidden in it and that lives not withal. Also, not only has _that_ life, which stirs itself and moves, as men, animals, the worms in the earth, the birds in the sky and the fishes in water, but all bodily and actual things as well.” But in such sayings Paracelsus only aims at warning us against that superficial contemplation of Nature which fancies it can exhaust the being of a thing with a couple of “stuck-up” concepts, according to Goethe’s apt expression. He aims not at putting into things some imaginary being, but at setting in motion all the powers of man to bring out that which in actual fact lies in the thing.