Science Quote by Paracelsus

Paracelsus is doing something sly here: he smuggles a proto-scientific worldview through the language of alchemy and the marketplace. “Nature also forges man” turns humans into products of a workshop, not souls dropped into the world pre-stamped by God or aristocratic lineage. The verb “forges” matters. It implies heat, pressure, mixture, experiment - an active process where materials become types. In the 16th century, that’s a quiet revolt against scholastic certainties and inherited hierarchies: identity is fabricated by forces you can study, not merely decreed.

Then he swerves into the jarring inventory: gold, silver, fig, bean. Precious metals sit beside humble foodstuffs, collapsing the distance between the exalted and the ordinary. The subtext isn’t just that people vary; it’s that value is unstable and contingent. A “gold man” might signal excellence, authority, or rarity; a “bean man” suggests the everyday body, labor, digestion, survival. By making the list almost comic, Paracelsus punctures the idea that human worth has a single, noble scale.

Contextually, this is Paracelsus the medical insurgent, arguing that bodies aren’t abstract “humors” but specific substances in specific environments, influenced by diet, occupation, place, and chemistry. He’s also, implicitly, advertising his own method: if nature makes different kinds of people, medicine must diagnose the material recipe, not recite old doctrine. The line works because it’s both cosmology and insult - a Renaissance thinker reminding you that the same universe that yields gold also yields beans, and you may not be the metal you think you are.