Note A2-1-3 — Chapter III

The thirst for gold which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drove so many emigrants to the western Eldorado, reminds one, by reason of its enthusiasm, of the crusades to the Holy Land. The striving after the making of gold which the emperors Rudolph II., Ferdinand III., Leopold I., Frederick I. of Prussia, Christian IV. of Denmark, Christian II. and Augustus the Strong of Saxony, Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig, Frederick of Würtemberg, harbored, and also the Silesian and Brandenburg princes even during the Hussite war (Riedel, Cod. Dipl. Brandenb., II, 4, 151), was, to a great extent, misplaced philosophy; men went in search of the materia universalissima,[TN 123] the spiritus universalis, from which all that is receives its esse et fieri, the universal elixir, at once the life-power of man, the universal medicine and maturing principle of natural bodies. (Roscher's Gesch., I, 230.)