Fludd Robert (1574–1637), English physician and writer. Influenced by Paracelsus, hermetism, and the cabala, Fludd defended a Neoplatonic worldview on the eve of its supersession by the new mechanistic philosophy. He produced improvements in the manufacture of steel and invented a thermometer, though he also used magnets to cure disease and devised a salve to be applied to a weapon to cure the wound it had inflicted. He held that science got its ideas from Scripture allegorically interpreted, when they were of any value. His works combine theology with an occult, Neoplatonic reading of the Bible, and contain numerous fine diagrams illustrating the mutual sympathy of human beings, the natural world, and the supernatural world, each reflecting the others in parallel harmonic structures. In controversy with Kepler, Fludd claimed to uncover essential natural processes rooted in natural sympathies and the operation of God’s light, rather than merely describing the external movements of the heavens. Creation is the extension of divine light into matter. Evil arises from a darkness in God, his failure to will. Matter is uncreated, but this poses no problem for orthodoxy, since matter is nothing, a mere possibility without the least actuality, not something coeternal with the Creator. See also NEOPLA – TONIS. J.Lo.