To complain of the researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as digestible as our cabbages.

It is not only true that the mediaeval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is quite equally true that they never tried.

The Eden of the Middle Ages was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name.

The Eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden.
It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus.
Modern life accuses the mediaeval tradition of crushing the intellect; Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of over-glorifying it.

There is, however, another and even more important deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_.