Many to whom the name of Paracelsus is familiar are accustomed to look upon him as little more than a singularly successful quack who revived the traditions of an earlier school of Occultism in defiance of the more scientific methods of his own time. As a matter of fact, the doctors of his day were, in the vast majority of cases, merely theorists with little real practical experience, but with a fair store of book-learning of a very indifferent kind. It was Paracelsus whose medical knowledge was derived from experiment and experience, and who had acquired the greater part of his medical and surgical skill from wide and varied travelling and visiting more countries and more different nationalities than any other medical expert of his day, and who had learnt by actual association with all sorts and conditions of men in different climes, far more than any book-learning had ever taught him. The period of Paracelsus’s career coincided with the Reformation of Luther, and with the wider and more general Renaissance movement. This latter development had brought back in its train the study of classical learning and classical ideals which had fallen into discredit about the period of the first triumph of Christianity and its establishment as a world-religion. The attitude of the earlier Christians, who looked upon the Pagan deities as devils, and Greek and Roman classical writers as apologists for devil-worship, had passed away; and the highest dignitaries of the Church were now often noted for their classical erudition and ripe scholarship. With the return of classical ideals came back also into favour in a number of unexpected quarters the doctrines of Neoplatonism. When Hypatia perished at Alexandria, orthodox Christianity set its foot on Plotinus and all his works. The struggle at the end had been one rather between Christianity and the later Greek philosophers with their Neoplatonic conceptions than between Christianity and Pagan Rome. The gods of Rome were dead already. Pan was dead past resurrecting. The danger that threatened Christianity was the triumph of such Emperors as Julian the Apostate—Julian, whose master was Plotinus, and whose religion was Neoplatonism merely dressed in an old Roman garb. To the thinkers and philosophers of that time the triumph of Christianity seemed like the victory of exoteric religion over the inner esoteric truths. Back, now, with all that was best of the scholarship and art of Greece and Rome, came the mystic doctrines of the Alexandrian philosophers—back, not in triumph, but daring once more to reassert themselves in the face of a hostile world that had long even forgotten their existence. A thousand years separated Hypatia from Cornelius Agrippa—a thousand years which, in the realm of thought, might well be characterised as the Dark Ages. Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was born at Cologne in 1486. Seven years later, on 10th November 1493, at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, a son was born to Dr Wilhelm Bombast von