Jan Baptist van Helmont

“ Jean Baptiste Van Helmont was born at Brussels in 1577. His parents, who belonged to the nobility, possessed ample financial means and were therefore able to give their son every opportunity to secure a liberal education. While still a lad he enrolled himself among the students of the University of Louvain, and advanced so rapidly in his studies that, already at the early age of seventeen, he had passed all the examinations required of applicants for the degree of Master of Philosophy. ”

“ Then he set forth on his travels, and in the course of them he met with a quack who cured him of his itch [259] by means of sulphur and mercury. After this he became a violent anti-Galenist. He studied the works of Paracelsus, and after some years came back to his native country full of ideas and phantasies.
By marrying a wealthy woman Van Helmont became independent, and his scientific career now commenced. He erected and fitted a laboratory at Vilvorde, and devoted his time and skill to the study of chemistry, medicine, and philosophy. ”

“ Van Helmont, Borrichius, Kirchen, Boerhaave, and a score of others, though not professed alchymists, were fond of the science, and countenanced its professors. Helvetius, the grandfather of the celebrated philosopher of the same name, asserts that he saw an inferior metal turned into gold by a stranger, at the Hague, in 1666. He says that, sitting one day in his study, a man, who was dressed as a respectable burgher of North Holland, and very modest and simple in his appearance, called upon him, with the intention of dispelling his doubts relative to the philosopher's stone. ”

“ And Van Helmont, the philosopher of Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely from the action of the intellect. "It is my greatest desire," he said, "that it might be granted unto atheists to have tasted, at least but one only moment, what it is intellectually to understand; whereby they may [Pg 304] feel the immortality of the mind, as it were, by touching." A farmer, a laborer, a mechanic, is driven by his work all day, but it ends at night; it has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer is also a scholar or thinker, his work has no end. ”

“ Yes, though he did not realize it, Otto van Helmont had married his wife for her face—a sweet apparition, bright and fresh among the home-flowers, a suggestion of the dear fatherland, a dream of wholesome Dutch girlhood. He had married for that most unsatisfactory of all reasons: “because he had fallen in love.” Not even a fortnight—be it remembered—had elapsed between his first sight of Ursula and their engagement. A man must either know his wife before he learns to love her, or else he must never need to love her, or else he will certainly never learn to know her. ”

“ She smiled confidently.
“No; the Jonker van Helmont is not for such as us, Ursula,” continued the old man. “So much the better. My child, you will marry if God pleases and whom he pleases; but I hope it will be in your own station of life. Not that we must judge any class as such. There is Otto, for instance. He is not a pleasure-seeker. We have seen much of him, my dear, in your absence. He most kindly came to comfort me. He has returned from the Indies as he went, the same pure lover of all that is good. Even in our day the Almighty leads some men untainted through the furnace.” ”

“ He pretended to find the elixir of life, and Louis expected by his means to have enjoyed the crown for a century. Van Helmont also pretended to have once performed with success the process of transmuting quicksilver, and was in consequence invited by the Emperor Rudolph II. to fix his residence at the court of Vienna. Glauber, the inventor of the salts which still bear his name, and who practised as a physician at Amsterdam about the middle of the seventeenth century, established a public school in that city for the study of alchymy, and gave lectures himself upon the science. ”

“ He sidled to the entrance, in wild yearning for his better half, who fortunately met him there, having gathered that something was wrong.
“My dear,” whispered the Judge, “Mynheer van Helmont has changed his mind about marrying Topsy. He isn’t going to.”
“Nonsense, Frederick!” ejaculated Mevrouw Elizabeth. “Tell him it’s all right. Tell him to go and ask her at once.”
The little Judge went back into the desolate refreshment-room. His substantial consort lingered near the door.
“Mynheer van Helmont,” said Frederick, “it’s all right. You had better go and ask her at once.” ”

“ I had hoped the glove was mine, but Gerard says it wasn’t. There, nurse has let Toddlums upset herself again. Come, Ursula; I can’t bear to hear the child scream like that.”
The two men remained on the steps. “You must know, Van Troyen,” said the Colonel, “that Helmont maintains there is no love-story connected with that glove at all; only it would be a pity to spoil your wife’s amusement. He says that the glove saved his life in a duel, through his adversary slipping on it, and that he wore it as a kind of talisman.” ”

“ Gerard, as we know, was not a diplomatist. “Did she ask you to come and tell me that?” he cried, with irritable irony.
“Ah, Monsieur van Helmont,” replied the Frenchwoman, softly, and her swarthy face seemed to lose its vigor, “it is always like that; you men, you knock at a woman’s heart until it opens, and then you cry out in scorn at the open door!” She hesitated for a moment, still plucking at the jet. “First the beautiful Ursula,” she said, “and then my own sweet Helena. ”

“ But an ingénue should die at nineteen. We women, my dear, are inverted butterflies, and marriage is our chrysalis, as your future mother-in-law said the other night. I can’t imagine where she gets her sayings from, I suppose she reads them somewhere. But neither she nor I would like to see a Baroness van Helmont who was ingénue.”
Helena paused in the doorway. “Would you like me,” she asked, “some day, to be Baroness van Helmont?”
“My dear, you might be a worse thing. Personally, if you ask me, I should certainly prefer Otto, little as I know of him, to Gerard. ”

“ That was hard to forgive Helwise, just as it was hard to forgive her the scars on his precious lawn, where her heavy niblick had taken greedy mouthfuls, and the insane bumble-puppy pole, rearing its unsightly length in the middle of the soft, green stretch. She had a summer-house, too, a Reckitt’s Blue wooden thing on wheels, with texts all over it, like a Church Army Van. All the texts were about food, strung together at random: “I washed my steps with butter.” “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink ... ”

“ Helaman himself was a righteous man: He did observe to keep the judgments, and the statutes, and the commandments of God; and he did do that which was right in the sight of God continually, and he did walk after ways of his father, insomuch that he did prosper in the land. So writes the historian of Helaman; what more can be said of any man?
Helaman had two sons to whom he gave the names of Nephi and Lehi, to remind them, when they heard their own names called, of the faith and goodness of their great ancestors, who, by God's direction, led their fathers to the promised land. ”

“ We refrain at this point from discussing how far a science which aspires to a spiritual understanding of nature, including material processes, needs a revival - in modern form - of the old conception of levity. In our present context it suffices to realize that we understand man's earlier view of nature, and with it the one still held by van Helmont, only by admitting levity equally with gravity into his world-picture. ”

“ The principle of the Anglo-Dutch Baptists, with the same exact difference between the Baptists and the rest of the Independents on the Toleration point, was imported into England. It is supposed that the person who had the chief hand in drawing up the Confession of the English Baptists of Amsterdam, after Smyth's death, was Smyth's successor in the Baptist ministry there, Thomas Helwisse (Vol. II. 540-544) . Now, this Helwisse, returning to England shortly after 1611, drew round him, as we saw, the first congregation of General or Arminian Baptists in London ”

“ About half a century after van Helmont's discovery a treatise called Contra Levitatem was published in Florence by the Accademia del Cimento. It declares that a science firmly based on observation has no right to speak of Levity as something claiming equal rank with, and opposite to, Gravity.
This attitude was in accord with the state into which human consciousness had entered at that time. For a consciousness which is itself of the quality 'cold', because it is based on the contracting forces of the body, is naturally not in a position to take into consideration its very opposite. ”

“ HELLEVOETSLUIS, or Helvoetsluis, a fortified seaport in the province of South Holland, the kingdom of Holland, on the south side of the island of Voorne-and-Putten, on the sea-arm known as the Haringvliet, 51⁄2 m. S. of Brielle. It has daily steamboat connexion with Rotterdam by the Voornsche canal. Pop. (1900) , 4152. Hellevoetsluis is an important naval station, and possesses a naval arsenal, dry and wet docks, wharves and a naval college for engineers. Among the public buildings are the communal chambers, a Reformed church (1661) , a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue. ”

“ But being asked of its savor, he said it was of a stinking and somewhat sweet one.... A noble little virgin, being very desirous of her salvation, eats her own dung, and was weak and sick. She was asked of what savor it was, and she answered it was of a stinking and a waterishly sweet one.” These examples Von Helmont says were personally known to him, as was that of the painter of Brussels who, going mad, subsisted for twenty-three days on his own excrements.— (See Von Helmont’s “Oritrika” (English translation) , London, 1662, pp. 211, 212. Von Helmont’s work is a folio of 1161 pages.) ”

“ Having once adopted the Goethean way of thinking-in-polarities, we may feel sure that there is somewhere in nature a phenomenon which represents the polar opposite of the levity-gravity relationship peculiar to the gaseous state. In this latter state we find ponderable matter so far brought under the sway of levity that its behaviour is of a kind which van Helmont, when he first observed it, could not help describing as 'paradoxical'. Where, we must now ask, do we find imponderable essence so much under the sway of gravity that it shows the correspondingly paradoxical features? ”

“ He preferred a quiet life to his honour and his philosophy. His wife had a nobler soul than he, as she wanted to sell all they had, and to take refuge in Holland rather than submit to the shame of a recantation. Perhaps Helvetius would have followed the noble advice of his wife if he had foreseen that this monstrous recantation would make his book into a fraud; for he had to confess that he had written without due reflection, that he was more in jest than earnest, and that his arguments were mere sophisms. ”

“ Laura dropped her head upon the window-sill, and the tears rushed into her eyes.
"I know—we all know—what you have done and sacrificed for the faith," said the younger man with emotion.
"You will not venture to make a merit of it," said Helbeck gravely. "For we serve the same ends—only you perceive them more clearly—and follow them more persistently than I."
"I have stronger aids—and shall have to answer for more!" said Williams, in a low voice. "And I owe it all to you—my friend and rescuer."
"You use a great deal too strong language," said Helbeck, smiling. ”

“ To-day, as truly as seventy-five years ago when Humboldt wrote, the mysterious and awful phenomena of life are commonly attributed to some controlling agent residing in the organism—to some independent presiding deity, holding it in absolute subjection. Such a notion it was which prompted Heraclitus to talk of a universal fire, Van Helmont to propose his Archæus, Hofmann his vital fluid, Hunter his materia vitæ diffusa, and Humboldt his vital force. ”

“ Nevertheless, during the time that Helbeck and Augustina were pacing the sands together, Fountain went through a good deal of uneasiness. One never knew how or where this damned poison in the blood might break out again. That young fanatic, a Jesuit already by the look of him, would of course try all their inherited Mumbo Jumbo upon her; and what woman is at bottom anything more than the prey of the last speaker? ”

“ Helgesen was indisputably the greatest master of style of his age in Denmark, and as a historian he also occupies a prominent position. He always endeavours to probe down to the very soul of things, though his passionate nature made it very difficult for him to be impartial. ”

“ Well, here are the despatches. And—by Jove! Helmont, I beg your pardon—here are your letters that Krayveld brought up with him. I quite forgot, thinking of other things. Well, I wish you joy, that’s all I can say.”
“Thanks. I suppose I had better be getting ready.”
“How many men will you take? Half a dozen?”
“A sergeant and six fusileers. I shall let the men volunteer. But I want a couple of natives for the sake of their ears and eyes.” Gerard went out and set to work at once, selecting the best men from among a swarm of candidates. ”

“ How is it that the Helvetian and the Hollander, whose countries are the very antipodes of each other—whose manners, customs, and pursuits are as different as Alps are from sand-hills, should yet present a more striking similarity in one moral feature, than the inhabitants of any other two countries? Of all the nations of Europe, the Helvetians and Hollanders, inhabiting the highest and the lowest grounds in the world, are most enthusiastically attached to their native soils, and experience the greatest degree of nostalgic yearning when separated from home. ”