The will and the imagination of man acts principally by means of the spirit. Hence the reason of the efficacy of sorcery and magic. The _nævi materni_ are the impressions of these _vice-men_, and Paracelsus calls them _cocomica signa_. The _sideric_ body of man draws to him, by imagination, all that surrounds him, and particularly the stars, on which it acts like a magnet. In this manner, women with child, and during the regular period of monthly evacuation, having a diseased imagination, are not only capable of poisoning a mirror by their breath, but of injuring the infants in their wombs, and even also of poisoning the moon. But it seems needless to continue this disagreeable detail of the absurd and ridiculous opinions which Paracelsus has consigned to us in his different tracts. The Physiology of Paracelsus (if such a name can be applied to his reveries) is nothing else than an application of the laws of the Cabala to the explanation of the functions of the body. There exists, he assures us, an intimate connexion between the sun and the heart, the moon and the brain, Jupiter and the liver, Saturn and the spleen, Mercury and the lungs, Mars and the bile, Venus and the kidneys. In another part of his works, he informs us that the sun acts on the umbilicus and the middle parts of the abdomen, the moon on the spine, Mercury on the bowels, Venus on the organs of generation, Mars on the face, Jupiter on the head, and Saturn on the extremities. The pulse is nothing else than the measure of the temperature of the body, according to the space of the six places which are in relation to the planets. Two pulses under the sole of the feet belong to Saturn and Jupiter, two at the elbow to Mars and Venus, two in the temples to the moon and mercury. The pulse of the sun is found under the heart. The _macrocosm_ has also seven pulses, which are the revolutions of the seven planets, and the irregularity or intermittence of these pulses, is represented by the eclipses. The moon and Saturn are charged in the macrocosm with thickening the water, which causes it to congeal. In like manner the moon of the microcosm, that is to say the brain, coagulates the blood. Hence _melancholy persons_, whom Paracelsus calls _lunatics_, have a thick blood. We ought not to say of a man that he has such and such a complexion; but that it is Mars, Venus, &c., so that a physician ought to know the planets of the microcosm, the arctic and antarctic pole, the meridian, the zodiac, the east and the west, before trying to explain the functions or cure the diseases.[158] This knowledge is acquired by a continual comparison of the macrocosm with the microcosm. What must have been the state of medicine at the time when Paracelsus wrote, when the propagator of such opinions could be reckoned one of the greatest of its reformers?