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1162 NOTES TO VOLUME II.
of the Royal House in 1783, in which capacity he made himself
popular at first by ordering the release of several prisoners of state,
and by introducing sundry improvements in Paris. Very soon,
however, he developed into one of the most zealous defenders of
absolute power, so that he created many enemies, and in 1787 was
compelled to retire from office. After the downfall of Necker he
became minister again for a short time. But when Louis XVI
rejected his advice to retire with the troops to Compiègne, he left
France and settled in Soleure in Swizerland where he received from
the King plenary power to labour among the courts of the north
of Europe for the re-establishment of the royal power in France.
For this he was indicted by the Convention. Forgotten of all parties,
Breteuil retired to Hamburg, where he lived from 1792, until he
received permission in 1802 to return to France, where he died
in 1807.
NOTE 214.
PARACELSUS.
In his letter to Swedenborg (Document 256, p. 473) Cuno referred
to Paracelsus in these words : "This great investigator of nature, and
finally of the mysteries of religion, was a real ornament of his age
and a paragon of learning. His contemporaries admired in him
the great physician and chemist ; and posterity will still admire
these qualities in him. Yet the church and Christendom abhor him
as a mystic, and as a man who would judge of Divine things from
natural things." And again on p. 478 he says, "In the whole history
of the world I have found no other scholar with whom I could
compare him [ Swedenborg] but the great physician and chemist
Theophrastus Paracelsus."
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, was
born in 1493 in Maria-Einsiedeln in Switzerland, where his father
was physician and chemist. Through him he obtained instruction
in these departments, and afterwards was sent to Trithemius, Abbot
of Sponheim, and to Sigismund Fugger, by whom he was initiated
into alchemy. Dissatisfied with alchemy he left his teachers, and
travelled through a great part of Europe in quest of knowledge,
curing diseases. In 1526 he received a call to the chair of medicine
at Basel, where he remained for two years. While there he burned
in public the works of Galen and Avicenna, whom he declared to
be perverters of science. In 1528 the magistrates of Basel decided
against him in a certain case, when he suddenly left his profes
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