Helmont

We find it in 1649 and 1650 in translations of and commentary on van Helmont, and in 1653 in a translation of and commentary on Descartes: in each case there is no equivalent in the original.

The first book to contain these four words, all used in their modern senses, along with ‘experiment’, also used in its modern sense, was, it would seem, Walter Charleton’s paraphrase of van Helmont, the Ternary of Paradoxes of 1649.

By 1654 Charleton, whom we earlier met translating van Helmont, had become one of the insolent sceptics.

Van Helmont, it is worth remarking, provoked the fury of the Jesuits, his co-religionists, by suggesting that the skull of a Jesuit would be ideal—he was hostile to the Jesuits because they had little difficulty persuading people to believe in their miracles, while his own scientific facts were met with scepticism.

Van Helmont, Charleton and Digby argued that this was no bar to an effective cure; they wanted to redescribe the weapon salve as ‘magnetical’ because the magnet provides a paradigm case of action over a distance.