FLUDD or FLUD, ROBERT [ROBERTUS DE FLUCTIBUS] English physician and mystical philosopher, son of Sir Thomas Fludd, treasurer of war to Queen Elizabeth in France and the Low Countries, was born at Milgate, Kent. After study ing at St. John's College, Oxford, he travelled in Europe and read the works of Paracelsus. He subsequently returned to Ox ford, and taking his medical degrees, practised in London. Fol lowing Paracelsus, he maintained that the universe proceeds from and will return to God. The act of creation is the separation of the active principle (light) from the passive (darkness) in the bosom of the divine unity (God) . The universe consists of three worlds; the archetypal (God), the macrocosm (the world), the microcosm (man). Man is the world in miniature, all the parts of both sympathetically correspond and act upon each other. Fludd's pantheistic materialism was refuted by Kepler and Gassendi. Fludd was a man of varied attainments, interested in scientific experiments, and defending the Rosicrucians. De Quincey con siders him to have been the immediate, as J. V. Andrea was the remote, father of freemasonry. Fludd died in London on Sept. 8, 163 7.
See J. B. Craven, Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian (1902), where a list of his works is given; A. E. Waite, History of the Rosicrucians (1887) ; De Quincey, The Rosicrucians and Freemasons; J. Hunt, Religious Thought in England (1870) . His works were published in 6 vols., Oppenheim and Gouda, 1638.