We have, my pupil, no arts by which we CAN PUT DEATH OUT OF OUR OPTION, or out of the will of Heaven.

These walls may crush me as I stand.

All that we profess to do is but this,--to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventives to the effects of time.

This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.
In our order we hold most noble,--first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.

But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret, which I will only hint to thee at present, by which HEAT, or CALORIC, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpetual renovater,--these I say, would not suffice for safety.