One of the most ingenious fictions of those speculators who have endeavoured to explain the mysteries of our wonderful organization, was perhaps the Archeus of Van Helmont, a term derived from a???, origin, principle, authority, power. According to the doctrines of this physician, the archeus was an internal agent that commanded and regulated all the vital functions. I cannot better describe it than by partly borrowing the language of the founder of the doctrine.

The archeus and matter are the natural causes of all. The molecules of matter, essentially inert, receive from this principle their movements, their order, their distribution, their conformation: the archeus is the internal agent that penetrates them, the nucleus of their inspiration; it is the mould in which they are elaborated, brought into form by this plastic influence meeting in this material substance the requisite docility to realize its ideas of perfection. Thus the archeus is an active and an intelligent power, possessing the faculty of amalgamating and identifying itself with matter; penetrating its inmost recesses, it modifies and changes each particle of matter, producing that incomprehensible series of oscillations of spontaneousness and equilibrium, that catenation and marvellous automatism, that constitute the consciousness of our existence, and whence springs the only notion we can form of its causation. It is the archeus that presides over our sense of smelling, of tasting, and consequently the selection of our food; it is he that dissolves it in our digestive organs, liquefies it, and prepares it for due assimilation; it is he that imparts a conservative action to the blood, and converts this vital fluid into bone and muscle. Should any particle of our aliments have escaped from this transforming power, these substances become foreign bodies, irritating by their presence this sovereign power, calling forth his energies and his activity, and exciting his indignation and wrath by their repeated provocations. His just fury stimulates and accelerates the vital functions; but, instead of wreaking its vengeance on external matter, it overwhelms all internal obstacles, whether diffused in the system or concentrated on any given point. It is this tumultuous confusion that constitutes maladies, which arise from two evident causes,—an alteration in matter and a reaction of the archeus.

Of these two morbid elements, the first is susceptible of a thousand varieties both in nature and extent, and therefore produces as many modifications in the corrective power. Then does the archeus, threatened on different points in different manners, regulate his plans and operations both of defence and of attack, selecting his weapons according to the nature of his antagonists. In this mutual struggle our archeus wisely checks the impetuosity of his onset, husbands his forces, and merely detaches them from the main body according to the circumstances of the conflict; thus ever keeping a powerful reserve. It is this wisdom of conduct that ultimately restores tranquillity, and compels the rebellious molecules to submit to the laws of organization. For what constitutes the cure of a disease, whether obtained by nature or by art? Nothing more than the dignified repose of the mighty archeus, when the fire of his wrath has consumed his foes. Diseases, therefore, are simply the execution of vast and complex projects that inspire the archeus, and which he carries into execution as the statuary embodies on the marble the conceptions of his genius. When the morbid idea is in conformity with his plans, a favourable result will ensue; if, on the contrary, the archeus labours under a misconception, if he is thrown by erroneous impressions into disordinate steps, then may this power, excited without a just motive, or a determinate and proper object, turn its arms against itself, and destroy the ties that united it to matter. It is then that art, whose aim it is to meet the foe with his own weapons, must have recourse to medicine for the purpose of rousing the torpor of the archeus, reanimate his energies if he droops, overthrow him if he becomes unruly, and finally compel him to yield, by a salutary terror; forcibly bringing him back to that judicious equilibrium in action, when all the functions contribute in harmony and concert to the general welfare of the system.

Such were the truly poetical ideas of Van Helmont, who might have written an epic on the government, revolutions, and battles, in the archean state, similar to the Holy War of our ingenious Bunyan; for, like the cobler poet, our theorist divided and subdivided his legions and their officers. The archeus is merely the sovereign commander, whose head-quarters and throne were in the stomach; all the other viscera have distinct commandants, receiving their orders from their chief, who employed the nerves of his aides-de-camp. Nor was it an easy matter to keep all these captains in a proper state of discipline. Their irregularities occasioned constant tumults; for the court of the archeus, like all other courts, was most depraved and capricious in its practices, and intriguing in all its machinations, and the archeus had great trouble in keeping his subordinates in a proper state.

The most rebellious of his generals was the one who commanded the uterine district. There it was in vain that the articles of war were constantly read,—that solitary confinement and prison-diet were resorted to. Its constant mutinies not only demanded the utmost vigilance, but it was no easy matter to prevent its dangerous influence from contaminating the other branches of the service; and treasonable correspondences were not unfrequently discovered with the staff of the brain. This rebellious province, indeed, excited incessant apprehension, constantly agitated the entire commonwealth, and, on the plea of national welfare and liberty, it hoisted at times a standard of defiance, and precipitated the country in all the miseries of civil war; the more to be dreaded, as it always put forth the most specious pleas, destroying with words of peace.

This whimsical doctrine is not unlike the Platonic theories, and resembles the naturism or e????? of Hippocrates, and the autocracy of the soul, of Stahl. Van Helmont not only established his archei in animals, but in plants, and even in our food. The archeus of man he sometimes called ens seminale, ens spirituale, impetum faciens, aura vitalis. Well aware that the most powerful despot cannot reign without rival powers, Van Helmont admitted certain imperia in imperio: for instance, there was a troublesome minister in his own cabinet, whom the archeus frequently could not control,—one pylorus rector, or master of the ceremonies; then he had to apprehend the power of a secret faculty possessed by the stomach and spleen, which he called a duumvirate,—jus duumvirat’. The sensitive and immortal soul was another check on his sway; while the spirit of life residing in the blood was not easily managed. All these vexations occasioned frequent attacks of illness in the monarch, and Van Helmont has described these several affections; for, although he possessed the power of conceiving and executing plans of disease, like many physicians, he did not know how to cure himself.

When we consider that systems similar to this absurd doctrine, if not more extravagant, have ruled the medical schools for centuries with a despotic sway, can we marvel that medicine should have incurred the invectives of scepticism, or the scurrility of wits? In the very ratio of their absurdity have these flitting systems been maintained with scholastic fury; their proselytes would have vied in excesses with monastic persecutors, had they been able to assume a religious mask. It is painful to observe that unbelief and impious ridicule in theologic matters may be referred to the same causes as medical scepticism,—the vain and presumptuous endeavour of man to explain that which the Creator has most probably willed to remain inexplicable. Instead of wisely referring all that is mysterious to the Almighty Power that knows no limit, man has sought to explain and comment upon human principles, nay upon human motives; and when they could no longer attribute evil to God, they crossed the pons asinorum to call in the Devil. In like manner, when they proudly fancied that they had regulated all the functions of the animal economy in that harmonious manner that they were modest enough to call admirable and wondrous, they endeavoured to account for a derangement of this equilibrious condition, either by the introduction of some evil spirit, or the unmanageable rebellion of some organ, some principle, some agency, and for this purpose they gave individuality and specific vitality to those agents, each of the dramatis personÆ having a particular part to perform in bringing on a tragic catastrophe or a happy denouement of the drama of life.Let not the learned doctors of modern schools exclaim, that these were the errors of former days and of dark ages. They themselves are grovelling and groping in the dark whenever they pretend to fly from the trammels of empiricism, and, like our forefathers, account for what is unaccountable. But, above all, let them be meek and modest (if they can) in passing judgment upon others, and inscribe upon the doors of their splendid libraries the saying of the olden sage, “All that we know is our own ignorance.”