What exists and acts according to the Will lives in the Spirit; what only according to the Reason lives against the Spirit.

For the Reason brings forth no spirit, only the Soul (_Seel_) is born of it--from Will comes the Spirit, the essence of which we describe and let the Soul be." In this grandly conceived but most carelessly written passage the author, in the beginning thereof, makes such confusion in expressing both Soul and Spirit with the one word, _Geist_, that his real meaning could not be intelligible to the reader who had not already mastered the theory.

But, in fact, the whole conception is marvelous, and closely agreeing with the latest discoveries in Science, while ignoring all the old psychological system.
Very significant is what PARACELSUS declares in his _Fragmenta Medicina de Morbis Somnii_, that so many evils beset us, "caused by the coarseness of our ignorance, because we know not what is born in us." That is to say, if we knew our mental power, or what we are capable of, we could cure or control all bodily infirmities.

And how to rule and form this power, and make it obey the _Geist_ or Will which PARACELSUS believed was born of the common conscious Soul--that is the question.
For PARACELSUS truly believed that out of this common Soul, the result of Sensation and Reflection, and all we pick up by Experience and Observation (and such as makes all that there is of Life for most people), there is born, or results, a perception of Ideas, of right and wrong, of mutual interests; a certain subtle, moral conscience or higher knowledge.

"The Souls may become inimical;" that is, the Conscience, or Spirit, may differ or disagree with the Soul, as a son may be at variance with his father.