The embattled forces of conservative orthodoxy are so strong that one is sometimes tempted to wonder how it is that the world ever goes round at all; how it is that the forward movement of progress succeeds, as it apparently does, in getting the better of so many retrograde tendencies, so much prejudice, so strong a clinging to the stereotyped conditions of the day. After all, the more one thinks about it, the more one becomes convinced that the whole progress of the world is the work of the very, very few; that the positive and progressive intellect is the rare exception, and that if democratic conditions really prevailed (as of course they never do) all civilisation would go backwards and gradually revert once more to chaos. What a mockery, after all, Democracy is! And how hopelessly the modern world is deluded in thinking that anywhere or at any time Democracy has in reality held sway! As a matter of fact, the many have never ruled, have never wished to rule; they have merely asked for some strong man to lead them. Where was ever the flock of sheep that did not follow the bell-wether? Here and there we meet with a master mind that—for good or evil—leads the multitude—or, if he does not lead, at least points the way where others will eventually follow. Side by side with him we see the multitude either drifting or being led. “Work!” said Voltaire, that most popular of writers, “work for the little public!” Voltaire knew, as all great leaders have known, before and after, that it is the “little public” that ever dominates the situation. It is the “little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.” “It is a sight beloved of the gods,” says the old saying, “to see a good man struggling against adversity.” But is it not a finer sight still, to see a strong man battling with the forces of orthodoxy, and refusing to yield his ground? A man of such a mould was Philip Bombast of Hohenheim, better known by his assumed name of Paracelsus. Never was there any one to whom Shelley’s celebrated line The sun comes out and many reptiles spawn, was more absolutely appropriate. The hostility and venomous antagonism of his own profession, with a few notable exceptions, followed and persecuted him throughout his entire medical career. The boldness and independence of his medical attitude galled the leaders as well as the rank and file of the profession. But what was still more galling to them than his lack of orthodoxy, was the fact that his novel methods, as they must have appeared to the doctors of that day, were so immeasurably more successful than their own. Paracelsus, indeed, never gave nor asked for quarter. John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees who came to him as “a generation of vipers” was no bad parallel to Paracelsus’s stinging invective on the ignorance and tradition-loving proclivities of his own profession. [Illustration: Paracelsus (aged 24).]