What matters is not to let oneself be misled by the fact that Paracelsus expresses himself in the spirit of his time. It is far more important to recognise what things really hovered before his mind when, looking upon Nature, he expresses his ideas in the forms of expression proper to his age. He ascribes to man, for instance, a dual flesh, that is, a dual bodily constitution. “The flesh must also be understood, that it is of two kinds, namely the flesh that comes from Adam and the flesh which is not from Adam. The flesh from Adam is a gross flesh, for it is earthly and nothing besides flesh, that can be bound and grasped like wood and stone. The other flesh is not from Adam, it is a subtle flesh and cannot be bound or grasped, for it is not made of earth.” What is the flesh that is from Adam? It is everything that man has received through natural development, everything, therefore, that has passed on to him by heredity. To that is added, whatever man has acquired for himself in his intercourse with the world around him in the course of time. The modern scientific conceptions of inherited characteristics and those acquired by adaptation easily emerge from the above-cited thought of Paracelsus. The “more subtle flesh” that makes man capable of his intellectual activities, has not existed from the beginning in man. Man was “gross flesh” like the animal, a flesh that “can be bound and grasped like wood and stone.” In a scientific sense, therefore, the soul is also an acquired characteristic of the “gross flesh.” What the scientist of the nineteenth century has in his mind’s eye when he speaks of the factors inherited from the animal world, is just what Paracelsus has in view when he uses the expression, “the flesh that comes from Adam.” Naturally I have not the least intention of blurring the difference that exists between a scientist of the sixteenth and one of the nineteenth century. It was, indeed, this latter century which for the first time was able to see, in the full scientific sense, the phenomena of living beings in such a connection that their natural relationship and actual descent, right up to man, stood out clearly before one’s eyes. Science sees only a natural process where Linnæus in the eighteenth century saw a spiritual process and characterised it in the words: “There are counted as many species of living beings, as there were created different forms in the beginning.” While thus in Linnæus’s time, the Spirit had still to be transferred into the spacial world and have assigned to it the task of spiritually generating the forms of life, or “creating” them: the natural science of the nineteenth century could give to Nature what belonged to Nature, and to Spirit what belonged to Spirit. To Nature is even assigned the task of explaining her own creations; and the Spirit can plunge into itself there, where alone it is to be found, in the inner being of man.