Four Articles on Alchemy

Michel-Eugene Chevreul

FOUR ARTICLES ON ALCHEMY

Published in the "Journal des Savants"

In May 1851
In June 1851
In August 1851
In December 1851


First Article. MAY 1851


Many people believe that there are no more alchemists: the title of this article gives one insane! to this opinion, then one can ask how it is that alchemy has spread to our time, which is said to be unfavorable to beliefs, contrary to prejudice and disposed to admit only what is positively susceptible of demonstration? This question determined us to give an account of a work which, considered absolutely in itself, independently of the origin and the propagation of alchemy, should be abandoned to oblivion.

We hope to link what we propose to say on alchemy to our articles on the history of chemistry, and for that in this article we shall review the principal alchemist authors, and the most famous persons in the history of the hermetic art, and then we shall deal with the question whether the idea of ​​the transmutation of base metals into precious metals is absurd.

§ 1. review of the main alchemist authors and the most famous people in the history of hermetic art.

To judge alchemy from a theoretical and a practical point of view, and to appreciate its influence on the progress of the human mind, it is necessary, in accordance with what we have said in this journal (October 1849, page 595), to recognize that the speculative part which corresponds to what is called the theory of a science is completely foreign to practice .from its processes, for the reason that it derives not from these processes, but from a vast system of ideas which includes the sacred and profane science of antiquity and of the middle ages; we say sacred and profane, because we understand in the same whole the Christian religion with the other religions of the East, and, moreover, all the knowledge of the domain of reasoning which was then presented in the dogmatic form, and in conformity with the spirit of the a priori method. Ultimately, no really scientific connection existed between the processes of the alchemical art and its speculative part, drawn from the vast system of ideas of which we are speaking; but this speculative part inspired all the more esteem, as the origin seemed more respectable: also it was traced sometimes to divine or sacred beings, sometimes to personages of the highest antiquity,
The alchemist writers assigned to their art; an antiquity which it does not have, and the proof of this is in their very disagreement on the period to which its origin must be attributed. Some have thought that the processes of transmutation of metals had been communicated to the crumbs of the first men by angels or demons, who, enamored of their beauty, had made use of this very communication as a means of seduction; there are others who have not hesitated to attribute to Tubalcain or to Vulcan the invention of alchemy. It has also been claimed that chemistry goes back to Ham, son of Noah, or to his eldest son Mezraïm (Osiris of the Egyptians), or to the son of Mezraïm, Thoth 1st(Athotis, Hermes or Mercury), king of Thebes. It has also been asserted that this science spread little by little from Egypt to the rest of the world, under the name of chemistry , of the sacred art , of alchemy .

Other writers, by tracing the origin of chemistry or alchemical knowledge to a less remote time, do not further justify their opinion. According to them, it only dates from the 19th to 17th centuries BC, instead of from 25th to 24th . King Siphoas or Thoth II (Hermes, Mercury Trimegist of the Greeks), would have discovered chemistry at the same time as all the other sciences and the arts,
It is this last opinion which counted the most partisans in the first centuries of Christianity and the Middle Ages, and it is in accordance with it that so many writings have been attributed to this personage to recommend them to the respect of men. The Arabs, by translating them from the Greek into their language, and adding commentaries to them, have done much to spread the knowledge of them. .
To reject the opinion that attributes to Thoth I the discovery of an experimental science, it suffices to reflect on the numerous works on which any science rests, on the weakness of the intelligence of man and the brevity of his life. With all the more reason will we reject the opinion of those who honor such a discovery to Thoth II, who would still be, they say, the inventor of writing, arithmetic, physics, astronomy and the arts,

The works of chemistry or alchemy attributed to Hermès Trismegistus are:
The Emerald Table ;
The Seven Chapters ;
Poisons and their antidotes ;
Precious stones .

The Emerald Table is such a vague writing that one could take it for an allegory absolutely foreign to alchemy, if it were not accompanied by a commentary attributed to an author who is designated by the name of Hortulain, the Gardener, who develops a completely hermetic sense of it, Hortulain is said to have lived in the fourteenth century .

The seven chapters obviously have a completely alchemical meaning and agree in many points with Hortulain's commentary.

We are going to recall the hundred best-known alchemists according to the chronological order assigned to their respective authors, in order to be able then to cite the sources from which we will deduce general considerations on the principal speculative ideas to which the alchemists indulged.

Alchemical books have been attributed to a Mede named Ostanes, who was claimed to have been a pupil of Sophar the Persian who lived 540 BC, but it is more likely that an Egyptian Ostanes, who lived in the 5th century AD , was the author .
A pagan priest named John has been credited with an alchemical manuscript written in the Greek language.

Democritus of Abdera is said to be the author of a manuscript; Greek alchemy it is supposed that being in Memphis he met a Jew named Marie who dealt with alchemy successfully. This Mary, considered as the sister of Moses by some authors, figures as such in a dialogue entitled Dialogue de Marie et d'Aros . Morien, who lived from the 7th to the 8th century , cites Marie as an alchemist.

It is difficult to believe that the preceding writings were composed before the Christian era by the authors whose names they bear; it is therefore very probable that they are apocryphal; moreover, the opinion according to which alchemical ideas are attributed to Hermes, to Moses, to Sophar, to Ostanes the Mede, to the priest John, to Democritus, etc., is only a conjecture devoid of all proof, especially when one remembers the efforts which were made in the Middle Ages to make people believe in the antiquity of alchemy in order to persuade the vulgar of the sublimity of its work, whose respect for the tradition was so big then!
The schools of Alexandria which attached themselves to the institution of the Museum, the Jewish schools, the Neoplatonic schools and the Christian schools of the first centuries of our era never showed that they were concerned with anything like the practice of chemistry or alchemy. But, incontestably, from Christianity until the ninthcentury, the period in which Geber wrote, alchemy had fixed the attention of a large number of people from the speculative point of view as well as from the practical point of view. If we recall the general ideas which occupied the minds in the first centuries of Christianity, the way in which the phenomena of the visible world were considered as subordinate to the spirits of the invisible world, it was quite simple that persons animated by the desire to work matter with the intention of modifying its properties, had to seek to change the most common stones into precious stones, the cheapest metals into silver and gold; finally it was quite simple that, to obtain health, comparable to wealth, as a thing desirable for the happiness of this earthly life, the search for remedies in general and particularly that of a panacea for all ills; became the goal of the efforts of a great number of men.

We will continue the review of the most famous people in the splendours of alchemy, either as authors of writings or simply as having worked on the great work.

The Emperor Caligula is cited by the alchemists for having taken care of the transmutation i but, while acknowledging that he performed it, they admit that he found no advantage in it. It has been said that Saint John the Evangelist made gold, and changed the most common stones into precious stones to succor the poor. The hermetic knowledge has been attributed to Athenagoras, because, it is said, he demonstrated it in a novel called Perfect Love .

Sinesius of Cyrene, bishop of Ptolemaide, is the author of alchemical writings.
Zozime de Panopolis, who lived in the fifth century , wrote on chemistry and alchemy. Finally, we will still cite Geber, Pelagius, Olympiodorus, Democritus (Pseudo-), Archelaus; Ostanes the Egyptian, Theophrastus the Christian, Stephanus, Hierotheus, Pappus, and Cosimo.

The conclusion that we draw from this review is that the oldest authors who admitted the possibility of the transmutation of base metals into gold, are posterior to the first century of the Christian era.

Geber, who lived in the ninth century, composed four works remarkable for the great number of facts they contain. Although the author was imbued with alchemical doctrines, they do not occupy, in his books, much near as much scope as the practical part relating to chemistry properly so called, and it is true to say that the way in which he envisages the transmutation of metals had nothing improbable at a time when the experimental method did not exist.

Geber had successors among the Arabs, among whom we distinguish the physician Rhazes, who, it is said, first applied chemistry to medicine, Alpharabi, Salmana, Avicenna, Aristotle (Pseudo-), Adfar, the master of the Roman Morian, Calid, Artephius, Zadith, Haimon, Rachaïdib, Sophar, Bubacar, Alchid-Bechil and Albucasis, more famous as a doctor familiar with chemical operations than as a an alchemist proper, Albucasis belongs to the twelfth century .

From the 11th to the 13th century we can cite as alchemists, among the Byzantine Greeks, Psellus, Blemmidas and Theotonicus.

It is believed that Arist æ us, author of an alchemical writing, titled Turbo. philosophorum , and Rossinus, author of two alchemical letters, lived at this time.
But , if we now follow the propagation of alchemy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Western Europe, we see it take on a great development there, for the most illustrious names in science are connected with its history. We will quote:

1° Albert the Great .
From 1193 to 1282.
He took care of chemistry, but we are far from agreeing if he is really the author of a treatise De alchimia , which bears his name.
2° Saint Thomas of Acquin .
From 1225 to 1274.
Pupil of Albert the Great, and author of Esse et essentia mineralium and of Thesaurus alchimiae .
3° Alain de l'Isle .
From 1200 to 1298.
Qualified with the title of universal doctor.

4° Roger Bacon .
FROM 1214 TO 1394
If, as is claimed, he occupied himself with alchemy, he refused to publish his work.
5° Alfonso, King of Castile .

6° The monk Ferrari or Efferrari .

7° Arnauld de Villeneuve .
From 1235 to 1310
8° Raymond Lully .
From 1235 to 1315.

Author of the treatise Ars magna and of a considerable number of hermetic writings
Alchemists claim that Raymond Lully converted 50 thousand mercury, lead and tin into gold, in order to determine Edward V of England to make war on the infidels.
9° Pope John XXII .
From 1244 to 1334.
10° Jean de Meun .
From 1279 or 1280 to 1365,
The principal author of the Romance of the Rose .
11° Richard or Robert the Englishman .
12° Pierre Bon, of Lombardy .
13° Odomare .
14° John of Rupescissa .
15° Nicolas Flamel who worked from 1382 to 1412 .


We see, by the citations of the preceding names, that the most learned men, like Albert the Great, Alain de Lisle and Roger Bacon, really occupied themselves with alchemy or passed for being occupied with it; that it was the same with a saint, Saint Thomas Aquinas; of a pope, John xxii; of a king, Alphonse of Castile; of a scholar, Jean de Meun; from a private individual, Nicolas Flamel. Alchemy was therefore a very serious subject at that time, it seized the minds of men of all conditions and dominated it in various ways. But the most illustrious names we have just mentioned do not owe their fame to alchemy alone. As for Arnaud de Villeneuve, Raymond Lully and Nicolas Flamel especially, they owe it to their alchemical writings and to the opinion of the adepts, their successors, who never ceased to recognize in them the possession of the secret of transmutation.
The fifteenth century offers us four famous names with different titles in the history of alchemy, Count Bernard dit le Trévisan, author of a book full of the most interesting details on the life of a fifteenth - century alchemistcentury, Jean Isaac and Isaac called the Dutch, finally Basile Valentin. If all four share with Geber the glory of having possessed the science of the great work, among the adepts, the chemists must place them immediately near the Arab alchemist, since their books contain purely chemical documents which, today, are the oldest materials of pure science. We will also cite Thomas Morton, Cardinal Nicolas de Cusa, Georges Ripley, Father Jean Trithème, Jean Pico, Prince de la Mirandole, Marsille Ficin.

In the sixteenth century comes Paracelsus , of whom we have spoken sufficiently dan. one of our articles on the History of Chemistry by Dr. Hoëfer (November 1849, p. 665), to refrain from returning to the alchemical ideas of this bizarre man. After Paracelsus, we will cite Ulstade, author of Heaven of the Philosophers , Jean Aurélio Augurelli who celebrated the philosopher's stone in his poem Chrysopée , Wenceslas Lavinius of Moravia, pure alchemist, Denis Zachaire, whose book shows what the life of an alchemist was like in the 16th century .century, as the book of Bernard le Trévisan shows what it had been in the previous century, Kelley, who, after having had his ears cut off as a notary, convicted of forgery, became an alchemist, Gaston de Claves, Blaise de Vigenère, Alexandre Sethon or the Cosmopolitan, whose story, according to the followers, proves how much the life of an alchemist is compromised when it is at the disposal of a prince convinced of the alchemical power of this man, and hence how justified is the prudence of persons who, possessing the secret of the great work, do not wish it to be known.
In the seventeenth century only a small number of men acquired fame as pure alchemists, such are:

1° Sendivogius , who published the Cosmopolitan book of which Alexander Sethon was the author. Several treatises were attributed to Sendivogius, particularly that of the True Secret Salt of the Philosophers and of the Universal Spirit of the World .
2° Henri Nollius .
3° Gabriel de Castaigne , Cordelier.
4th Jean d'Espagnet , president at Bordeaux; the Arcanum hermeticae philosophiae , which bears his name, is attributed by some to an anonymous person who is called an imperial knight .
5° John Agricola .
6° Samuel Northon .
7° Robert Flud .
8° Benjamin Massaphia .
9. The true Philalethes passes for having been the pseudonym of a Thomas de Vagan.
10° Jean Frédéric Helvetius , author of the Vitulus aureus .

Michel Mayer was much more concerned with alchemy, from the literary point of view than from the practical point of view. Not only did he publish, under the name of Museum chimicum , a collection of alchemical treatises by different authors, but he also composed a large number of allegorical works concerning alchemy, most of which are adorned with figures of careful execution.

Olaus Borrichius , author of several treatises, namely: De Ortu chimiae, Conspectus scriptorum chimicorum, Docimastia metallica , is said to have been a follower.

If there is any proof of the influence of alchemy on the minds during the seventeenth century , it is to see men devoted to positive works, such as André Libavius ​​and J. Beccher, working at the same time on the philosopher's stone, or, if they did not work there, they believed, like the famous Glauber, in transmutation, finally, if Kunckel wrote against the alchemists, however several passages of his books indicate that they did not regard alchemy as a chimera.

We will add that the influence of alchemical ideas is very noticeable in Van Helmont, although his way of seeing does not allow him to consider transmutation in the same way as the alchemists, for whom there were at least three elements, sulfur, salt and mercury. However, he was convinced of the transmutation: for, in a writing entitled Arbor vitae , he claims to have effected the conversion of mercury into gold himself, with a powder of projection which a traveler had given him. But, far from concluding that he was an adept, we must believe, on the contrary, that he was not; otherwise, to operate the transmutation, he would not have needed to receive the projection powder from the hand of a stranger,
In the review which occupies us, we must not forget to mention men who occupied themselves with alchemy as enlightened, charlatans or swindlers. We will cite Jean Borri, who certainly belongs to both these categories of men after perhaps having belonged to the first.

At the beginning of the 17th century , the brothers of the Rose Croix appeared. Was this mysterious association concerned, as Lenglet Dufresnoy has argued, only with the occult sciences, including alchemy, or did it have a political aim, that of overthrowing the thrones and the chair of Saint Peter, as several publicists have claimed? These are questions we will not seek to resolve.

If there were alchemists in the eighteenth century , they did not occupy public attention in the same way as their predecessors. The reason is simple; in the eighteenthcentury, the men devoted to the study of chemistry cultivated it as a science, and the most eminent treated alchemy publicly as a chimera, or, if they recognized its reality, it was in secret. who, like Glauber, only worked in chemistry, yet publicly acknowledged alchemy as true. The consequence of this state of affairs was that the alchemists of the eighteenth century had no influence on science, and that consequently they are no longer comparable, in this respect, to those of preceding centuries.

Among the well-known men who wrote on alchemy, we can cite Jean Conrad Barchusen, whom the end of the seventeenth century can claim just as well as the beginning of the eighteenth . But, if the transmutation of metals was real for Barchusen, and if he published a series of figures relating to the philosopher's stone, he did not give a satisfactory explanation of these figures. Frédéric Meyer, author of letters on alchemy, published in 1766, had faith in the philosopher's stone, but his chemical writings and the role he attributed to imaginary bodies, causticum and acidum pingue, do not prove in favor of the sagacity and correctness of his judgment. Finally, if it is true, as the brother of the famous Proust has told us several times, that Guillaume François Rouelle was an alchemist, this would prove that in the eighteenth century alchemy was not a chimera for all truly distinguished men. But, by admitting as true the assertion of Proust's brother, who was a pupil of Hilaire Marin Rouelle, that would prove at the same time that the philosopher's stone was no longer fashionable. It was in a laboratory that Guillaume François Rouelle would have had on rue Copeau, that he would have devoted himself, in the greatest mystery, to his alchemical work,
Lenglet Dufresnoy wrote, in the eighteenth century, a history of hermetic philosophy in three volumes . It is composed of precious materials, but it is very singular in that sometimes the author admits the reality of the transmutation of metals, and sometimes he qualifies it as chimera or madness.

The eighteenth _century counts more than one visionary, a charlatan or a crook who gave himself to possess the philosopher's stone, one of the most extraordinary men of this period is undoubtedly a count of Saint Germain, who must not be confused with the famous minister of that name, successor, to the war department, of M. de Muy who had been called there on the accession of Louis XVI. court of Louis XV. People wondered about his family, the country where he was born, the properties he owned, and these questions remained unanswered. However, his expenses were excessive, and he yielded to no one in prodigality. Therefore, more was needed to persuade the world that the Count of Saint Germain possessed the philosopher's stone!

We will again quote Cagliostro, who fooled so many people in the second half of the eighteenth century . He shrank from no means of making a great fortune and exerting influence. He did not neglect to make believe that he was very advanced in the practice of the occult sciences, and that he possessed the philosopher's stone and the universal panacea. It was for having given this persuasion to powerful men under Louis XVI, that he saw the doors of the Bastille open before him, although he had been one of the most active intriguers in the affair of the necklace.

We do not believe that the Comte de Saint Germain and Cagliostro worked on the great work with conviction, but, by the very fact that they tried to pass themselves off as adepts, they gave the proof that in the eighteenth century there reigned an opinion favorable to alchemy in this society of the great world, renowned for its incredulity, and that, from then on, one way of capturing it was to make people believe that one had the secret of changing common stones into precious stones. base metals in gold or silver, finally, which we knew how to compose panaceas suitable for ensuring health and longevity .

If medals were minted prior to the eighteenth century to attest to posterity that transmutations had been made on solemn occasions, in the presence of crowned heads, in the eighteenth century , friends of the marvellous. asserted that a gentleman at Berlin made the King of Prussia witness to a transmutation, that the King of Poland Frederick Augustus, being at Dresden, witnessed a similar operation. We will add that, from 1706 to 1710, the court of Louis XIV was occupied with alleged transmutations which a Provençal, named Delisie, operated; finally, that Dr. James Price, member of the Royal Society of London, published a account of several experiments made on mercury, silver and gold, at Guilfort, in 1782, in the laboratory of Doctor James Price, the object of which is to certify the success of operations by which, at will, mercury was converted into gold or silver.

We have known in the 19th century several people well convinced of the reality of alchemy, among whom we will cite generals, doctors, magistrates, ecclesiastics. In 1832, there appeared, at Félix Locquin, rue Notre Dame des Victoires, N°16, a brochure entitled; Hermès unveiled , in which the author, who signs
Cyliani, says he finally operated a first transmutation on Maundy Thursday 1831, after thirty-seven years of effort. A Mr. Gilbert, friend of Mr. Ampère, attached to the editorial staff of the Gazette de France , and author of the article Alchemy of the Dictionary of General, Theoretical and Applied Physics , published by Mame, was engaged, in our time, in alchemical practices. We are thus led, in a continuous way, since the men began to deal with alchemy until the year 1843 date of the publication of the course of hermetic philosophy of L. P, François Cambriel.
Let us now deal with the question whether the idea of ​​the transmutation of base metals into precious metals is really absurd, as has often been claimed.

§ 2. Is the idea of ​​the transmutation of common metals into precious metals absurd ?

Reflecting today on alchemy, we notice above all that what it presents most extraordinary is not even the transformation of one metal into another, but the accessory ideas of this transformation, which concern the conditions to be fulfilled in order to achieve it, and this result, to which reflection leads, is only a consequence of what we have said of the lack of connection existing between the alchemical processes and their speculative part which will never be called theory ., as long as it is accepted with us that this expression applies immediately only to a set of facts ordered in a body of doctrine. Alchemy owes, in fact, the extraordinary character that everyone recognizes in it to the fact that the ancient alchemists believed they had to have recourse, to work on the great work, to means which emanated, not from a true scientific theory, but from beliefs or so-called occult sciences, today banished from the domain of positive science.
To put this distinction beyond doubt and to expose it clearly, it is necessary to define the hermetic art , the object of which, at first restricted to the change of common metals into silver and gold, was soon enlarged with the research of the means of changing common stones into precious stones, and with the search for a panacea for all evils,
The art had been imagined before any preoccupation with discussing the way in which one should design and operate the change . Therefore, transmutation , transformation , did not necessarily mean, at least for all alchemists, that the hermetic art consisted in putting a certain weight of lead, copper, mercury, .. under conditions determined by the artist to convert it into an equal weight of silver or gold. However, strictly speaking, the word transmutationshould have been applied only to the case of which we have just spoken; but this definition of transmutation having never been posed in principle, the goal of the alchemist could be reached by processes very different from each other, and, consequently, the result of the transmutation could be very different from that which would have been in conformity with this same definition,
To know now if the idea of ​​transmutation as it was understood by the alchemists was really absurd, we will consider it in the case where metals are simple bodies, as it has been universally admitted since Lavoisier, and in the case where they were compound bodies, as the alchemists believed.

At a certain time of alchemical research, the theory of the four elements having been insufficient, as we have said in this journal (notebook of March 1851, page 162), the alchemists admire three elements: sulphur, salt, and mercury, which were sometimes qualified as chemical ., to distinguish them from the other four. It is above all as principles of the metals that sulphur, salt and mercury played a great role in alchemy, and we are going to see, in fact, that, on the assumption that they constituted the metals, transmutation was much easier to conceive than in the opinion where its simplicity is admitted. Our readers will judge of it by what we say of transmutation, considered first in accordance with this opinion and then in accordance with the alchemical hypothesis.
A. On the transmutation envisaged in the opinion that metals are simple bodies.

If the metals are really simple, it is only possible to conceive their transmutation insofar as they are identical in their ponderable matter, so that their mutual differences would be due to a difference in the arrangement of the atoms, to a difference in the proportion of some imponderable agent, or to these two differences at the same time, in a word, the transmutation can only be conceived for species of simple bodies which would be isomers, that is to say, having the same essence with different properties: for, in the contrary case , the difference of essence would be an absolute obstacle to any transmutation .
If it is impossible to affirm a priori that two or more metals endowed with different properties are not isomers, let us however agree that isomerism is difficult to admit in simple bodies, when the differences of properties persist between these bodies, either that one subjects them to the most varied temperatures, to the influences of electricity, or that one subjects them to the action of the most energetic reagents. Indeed, if there did not exist a difference of essence between two metals, one would not conceive how, in circumstances as varied as those of which we speak, the atoms of one would not take the positions where the atoms of the other metal are found, which we suppose isomeric with the first.
For example, diamond and graphite, considered in relation to their physical properties, present such marked differences that one cannot help considering them as two subspecies of the same body. But if they are subject to the chemical affinity of energetic bodies like oxygen, they behave in the same way by producing absolutely identical compounds; so that it is true to say that, if isomerism exists, it is limited to physical properties only. This example shows how little probability there is for admitting that two metals whose characteristic differences persist despite the diversity of the circumstances in which they are placed, are nevertheless isomeric.
But is the simplicity of metals now admitted experimentally, or, in other words, because chemical analysis has been powerless to separate several kinds of matter from them, really? We cannot affirm that it is; consequently, if the metals were indeed composed, as the alchemists of all times have supposed, transmutation would then be less difficult to conceive, as we shall show.

B. On the transmutation envisaged in the opinion that metals would be compound bodies.

(a) Suppose metals formed of the same elements united in different proportions, evidently the change of one of them into another will be easy to conceive, if we look at the following formulas.

Gold is represented by the bodies a + b + c.
Lead is by a + 2b + 2c.
Mercury is a + 3b + 3c.

It is obvious that by subtracting lead b + c and mercury 2b + 2c, we will have gold. One could thus say that, in the chemical operations where one would have eliminated b + ç of the lead and 2b + 2c of the mercury, one would have transmuted the lead and the mercury into gold .

(b) If, instead of admitting three identical elements in the metals, we recognize only two which are; For example :
Gold being represented by the bodies a + b + c.
Lead will be by a + b + d.
Mercury will be by a + b + e.

Obviously, the transmutation of lead into gold can only be effected by replacing a by c, just as that of mercury into gold can only be effected by replacing e by c.
(b') If c is diffused in a large number of bodies, and of bodies whose market value is much lower than that of gold, and that it can be entered there at little expense, or, which comes to the same thing, that it can pass easily from this body into lead or mercury so as to expel d or e, transmutation will not only be possible, but also advantageous.

(b'') If c is otherwise, transmutation would still be possible, but it would not be advantageous; then the economic goal proposed by hermetic art would not be achieved. Consequently, we see that such a process where one would make gold would not be advantageous to the alchemist.

(c) But, if it is an element essential to gold, that is to say, it is considered, for example, in accordance with the phlogiston theory, as a hot of gold, and so are d and e with respect to lead and mercury; Obviously, if, by putting c in contact with lead or mercury, c unites with a + b by expelling d or e, we can no longer say that we have effected the transmutation of lead or mercury into gold, because what is really specific in gold, lead and mercury, that is to say c, d and e, have experienced no change, and we would have similarly succeeded by resorting to a - i - b, taken apart from lead and mercury.

We could have multiplied the cases where there would be a change of a metal into gold or silver. But those we have cited suffice to show that transmutation, considered as we have just done, has nothing absurd about it, but that it lost much of its probability when metals, ceasing to be considered as compound bodies, since Lavoisier, were included in the number of simple bodies.

It is in accordance with the bases that we have just laid down that, in a second article, we will see how the alchemists envisaged the means of arriving at the goal of the hermetic art.
E. CHEVREUL.

Second Article. JUNE 1851

§ 3. Fundamental ideas of alchemy.

We propose, in this article, to show the source of the fundamental ideas of alchemy. We will see if we were mistaken in advancing that the speculative part of hermetic art has no real relationship with its practical part; that one having been drawn, according to us, not from the facts of the domain of observation, but from the general ideas which were formed of the invisible world; we can therefore say that the speculative part of alchemy does not correspond to what is called the theory of a science.

I. Idea of ​​the greatness of God and the humility of the alchemist.
The most renowned alchemists seem to have always had the omnipotence of God in mind, for they generally sought to make it favorable to themselves by invocation, prayer and practices deemed most effective in making themselves worthy of its benefits. Geber himself, who was not a Christian, said: “It only remains for us to praise and bless in this place the most high and most glorious God, creator of all natures, for having deigned to reveal to us all the medicines that we have seen and known by experience; because it is by his holy inspiration that we applied ourselves to seek them with great difficulty…. Courage therefore, sons of science, seek and you will infallibly find this most excellent gift of God, which is reserved for you alone. And you, children of iniquity,
God is solicited much more humbly and much more frequently still by the Christian alchemists than by Geber. Let us quote in proof some passages of the most famous alchemical writings.

We read in the Peat of the Philosophers , a work attributed to a Christian named Aristaeus, who lived at the end of the twelfth century ; “and for this, our master Pythagoras says that whoever will read our books and go about it and will not have vain thoughts in his head, and will pray to God, he will rule the world.”….. Further on, he adds; “I tell you, lest you later curse us, that all haste in this art comes from the devil who tries to divert men from their good intentions.”
Arnaud de Villeneuve invokes God, calls him to witness, recognizes that he owes everything to him and that to him alone come glory and praise; thus he says:
In the Alchemy Mirror :

“Know then, my dear son, that this science is nothing but the perfect inspiration of God …..”

In the Rosary of the Philosophers:
“This book is called the Rosary , because it is an abridgment of the books of the philosophers in which I call God to witness that there is nothing hidden, turned back or taken away…..”

It ends with the words:
“ Glory to God alone ! »

In New Light he says:
“Father and reverend lord, although I am ignorant of the liberal sciences, because I am not assiduous in study, nor of the profession of clericship, God has nevertheless willed, as he inspires whom he pleases, to reveal to me the excellent secret of the philosophers , although I do not deserve it. »

It is in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ that the Testament (the old one) of master Raymond Lully begins. And he ends the elucidation of his will with this sentence; “O children of doctrine, now give thanks to God, that, by his divine illustration, he opens and closes the human understanding ; and may the holy name of God be blessed forever and ever.”

Nicolas Flamel thus begins the book in which he explains hieroglyphic figures that he had put in the cemetery of the SS. Innocents in Paris:

“Praise be forever to the Lord, my God, who lifts up the humble from the mud and makes the hearts of those who hope in him rejoice; who graciously opens to believers the springs of his benignity, and lays under their feet the worldly circles of all earthly bliss. In him always be our hope, in his fear our happiness, in his mercy the glory of the repair of our nature, and in his prayer our unshakable health. And you, O Almighty God, how your kindness has deigned to open on earth, before me, your unworthy servant, all the treasures of the riches of the world, may it please your clemency, when I am no longer among the living, to open to me again the treasures of heaven....

Basite Valentin is expressed in the following terms:

"In my preface to the treatise on the generation of the planets, I have obliged myself, my dear reader, in favor of those who are curious about science and who want to research the secrets of nature, to teach according to the capacity that God has given me, from where and from what material our ancestors first drew and then prepared the triangular stone given by the liberality of the sovereign . God , and which they used to maintain their health during the course of this mortal life, and to sprinkle as with heavenly salt the misfortunes of this world…” He says further; “Therefore I warn you, if you want to seek our stone, to follow my advice, which is that you pray to God, to favor your works, and if you feel your conscience loaded with sins, I advise you to relieve it of them by true contrition and by a good confession , taking a firm resolution to persevere in virtue, so that your heart may always be pure and your mind may be enlightened with the light of truth. ( Foreword to The Twelve Keys to Philosophy .)

Count Bernard, known as the good Trévisan, or the Trévisan, recognizes “that at the time of the donation of the law, ancient in the desert, near Mount Sinai, this science (the hermetic art), was given and revealed to some of the children of Israel..., and thus the work was given from God to some , as I said . The others have found it as if by nature, without revelation, or any books whatsoever, or experience…., but Hermes, after the deluge, was the first inventor and prover of this science of philosophy…”

The real Philalethes, who is believed to be the pseudonym of Thomas de Vagan, says, in his book Entry to the Closed Palace of the King , addressing the operator.... “Now, thank God, who has given you so much grace, to bring your work to this point of perfection; ask him to guide you and prevent your haste from causing you to lose a work which has come in such perfect condition. This work dates from 1666.

We find, at the end of the first volume of the chemical library of Manget, fifteen folio engravings, the whole of which bears the title of: Mutus liber in quo tamen, tota philosophia hermetica figuris hieroglyphicis depingitar , etc. Among the remarkable things that they present, there is one above all: it is the association of the man and the woman taking part in all the operations that the Mutus liber has figured. Well, three of these operations, plates 2, 8 and 11, show the man and the woman in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on both sides of a furnace where the philosophical egg containing the material of the work is, heated only by a lamp burning in the ashtray of the furnace.

If the preceding quotations are a sufficient proof of the perfect alliance of alchemy with the most rigid orthodoxy, it would remain to explain how it passed for a cursed or illicit science with many people, but to give the reason for it now would be to treat this subject in an incomplete way, if we did not want to expose ourselves later to repetitions, we therefore prefer to return to it in a future article, after having laid down the fundamental ideas of alchemy which we still have to talk about.

2. Idea concerning the perfectibility attributed to metals, in its relations with the visible world and the invisible world.

In the absence of a precise definition of the idea of ​​transmutation , the imagination of the alchemists, as we have pointed out (Cahier de mai), had complete freedom to conceive the way in which common metals could be transmuted into silver or gold.

The idea that metals were endowed with a kind of life was generally spread among alchemists, it could only have occurred to them by considering metal as a complex body of a variable nature and susceptible, with time, of a progressive but limited development.

Hence the idea of ​​the imperfect or common metal applied to iron, lead, tin, copper, mercury, and that of the perfect metal applied to silver and above all to gold; hence also the idea of ​​progress or development applied to the successive passages from imperfect to perfect metals; hence, finally, the comparison of this development with that taken by living beings emerging from a seed or an egg, before gradually arriving at the term which, in animals, constitutes the adult state. ,

Now, how did the imperfect metal become perfect in the bosom of the earth? To know how the alchemists conceived of this change, we must go back to the time when astrology was considered a real science, that is to say to antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The influence of the celestial bodies on all terrestrial bodies, animals, plants and minerals, was therefore, at those times, a general belief, which evidently flowed from the universally widespread opinion of the power of heaven, whether it was considered as simple and one, or whether it was shared among several beings, from this resulted various ways of representing the influence of heaven on terrestrial things, which can today be reduced to three general opinions, when this influence is considered in its action. immediate on earthly bodies.

According to one of them, the celestial bodies were gods who directed the events of human societies; according to the two others, they did not possess this essence; but one of these opinions admitted that they were animated and that their soul had the power to act on terrestrial objects; if the other opinion refused them a soul, it attributed to them faculties of exercising actions at a distance , as gravity is attributed today to stellar systems, and these faculties, true occult properties which they held from the creative cause, rendered them capable of the same actions which were attributed to souls in the second opinion and to gods in the first.

In any case, the alchemists thought that the celestial bodies acted on the metals of the interior of the earth, in such a way as to develop them, to ripen them, to perfect them, as learned bodies develop, but the transmutation of an imperfect metal into a perfect metal, by the simple influence of the celestial bodies, was progressive and very slow, it required centuries to be accomplished, and even then it required a combination of circumstances in the place of the earth where the imperfect metal was. placed. Also the alchemists were not embarrassed to answer, when one asked them why a statue of bronze or wrought iron did not differ, for centuries, from what they were at the time of their leaving the workshop of the founder or the blacksmith.

The influence of celestial bodies, to modify metals, once admitted, the question of knowing if man would not have the power to operate in a few years or even in a few months what nature took centuries to produce, must have occurred to the thought, however Geber teaches us (chapter IX, chapter of the Sum of perfection) that all those who recognized the influence of the stars having reached a certain fixed and determined point of the firmament to engender and perfect terrestrial bodies did not grant man the power to compensate for this influence . Anyway, the idea of ​​hermetic artonce conceived, it had to be realized. It was then that the change of the imperfect metal into the perfect metal was assimilated to the development and small to the generation of a living being, Or even to a fermentation. The philosopher's stone , the great work , the magisterium , the powder of projection , the elixir , synonymous expressions, therefore applied to a matter which, in relation to imperfect metals, was what leaven , or fermented flour dough , is to fresh flour dough, for the reason that this, in contact with the former, changes itself into leaven . Finally, the name adept applied to the alchemist who operated the transmutation knowingly.

The hermetic art began by effecting the union of a male seed and a female seed; after that, the set of the two seeds was to develop like a seed or an egg. The alchemist thought to achieve his goal by enclosing the materials in a vase called, because of its shape and its destination, the philosophical egg, which was only to be exposed to a very mild temperature comparable to that required for the germination of the seed or the hatching of the egg of animals .

Let us show by quotations that the most famous hermetic authors professed the ideas that we have just deposited, and follow, as far as possible, the chronological order.

If the alchemists regard Hermes as the author of the Emerald Table and the Seven Chapters , despite the well-founded criticism that Casaubon has made of this opinion, and if one generally agrees to consider the commentary on the Emerald Table which disguised his name under that of Hortulain and who is presumed to have lived before the fifteenth century, nevertheless we will begin our quotations with the commentary on the Emerald Table and the Seven Chapters s .

According to Hortulain, the stone has in itself the four elements; it is produced like an animal, the sun gives the seed and the moon receives it as in a womb,
The air being the life, and the life the soul, the air intervenes in the generation of the stone, and the earth then contributes to it as food,
The stone acts like a ferment for its own multiplication.

Finally, it is perfect, because it unites in itself the mineral nature, the vegetable and animal natures.

One finds in the Seven Chapters attributed to Hermes, ideas quite similar to those of the commentary on the Emerald Tablet .

The author of the Seven Chapters admits four elements in the stone, but he believes in the alterability of these elements,
He compares the great work to the egg, and insists a great deal on the union of spirits with bodies, so that the latter, having become alive by this union, have the faculty of acting on other bodies.

He draws from the fact of the constancy of the organic forms transmitted from the ascendants to the descendants, the necessity that the stone having to engender gold, already has some in it , and here again is the comparison of the stone with the ferment .

Just as the sun causes all plants to be born and grow, and produces and ripens all the fruits of the earth, so gold contains all the metals in perfection . It is he who vivifies them, because it is he who is the leaven of the elixir, and without him the elixir cannot be perfect,
Geber admits the influence of the stars for the perfection of metals, but their position in the firmament does not have enough influence to prevent transmutation. For the rest, the Sum of Perfection , which has always been considered Geber's best work, is, of all the alchemical writings properly so called, the most sober in vague ideas, and the richest in positive facts. Let us add that, by the way in which the author envisaged the metals, relatively to their nature composed of sulphur, mercury and arsenic, transmutation was far from being an absurd opinion, in accordance with what we said in the preceding article (§ 2).

In the interview with King Calid and the philosopher Morien , the author distinguishes as parts of the operation, coupling , conception , pregnancy, childbirth or childbirth , food . The order of this operation therefore resembles the production of man.

The ferment of gold is gold, as the ferment of bread is bread, 1 part of stone changes 1000 parts of silver into gold.

Artephius says that the stone results from the conjunction of the body, the spirit and the soul, that is to say of the sun, the moon and mercury. The soul is what unites the body with the spirit ( 1 ), and the analogy of the stone, not only with the animal but with the man himself, is thus proven.

He recognizes the influence of the solar rays to unite the principles of the metals in the terrestrial layers.

He believes that the stone's property of effecting transmutation increases in intensity with the number of operations to which it is subjected.

If Albert the Great actually composed the book entitled De Alchimia , which bears his name, he believed in transmutation, but the opinions professed in this work were not all in conformity with those of most alchemists.

According to him, the species are immutable, and, if transmutation is possible, it is because lead, copper, iron, silver, etc., not being species, are only different forms of the same species formed of sulfur and mercury . In nature, these two bodies, in a state of purity, constitute gold; but, if, by accident, the location of the earth is not favorable to this result, imperfect metals are produced; the earth then acting on the sulfur and the mercury like a diseased matrix on the embryo it conceals, an embryo which will only give to represent the species an individual, puny and sickly, although the seed from which it draws its origin was good elsewhere.

Dr. Hoëfer, reporting several passages from the book Compositum de çompositis , cites one which would indicate that, if Albert the Great is its author, he would then have expressed an opinion if not contrary, at least different from the preceding one, since he would have said that alchemical gold , far from being identical to natural gold , differs from it because it does not rejoice the heart of man, that it does not cure leprosy and that it irritates wounds. s . Be that as it may, this passage did not authorize Dr. Hoëfer to say: Therefore the alchemists themselves did not believe in the transmutation of metals into true gold; their gold was a compound more or less reminiscent of the color of gold; because certainly it is necessary to distinguish here the idea of ​​the alchemists from the error that some of them may have committed in taking for gold an alloy which did not have all the properties .

The author of the Peat of the Philosophers expounds at length how he understands generation by the mixing of male sperm, which is hot and dry , with female sperm, which is cold and moist . Digestion takes place, by means of the heat proper to the woman's body, in the womb, of which nature closes the door by the will of God. After further details, the author adds: So it is with our work ! and what follows is intended to establish an intimate relationship between the stone and the matter it must transmute ; art aids matter, and nature completes. Finally he compares the material of the stone to an egg, in these terms; “Know that our matter is an egg; the hull is the ship, and there is white and red inside, let it brood for its mother seven weeks or nine days or three days, or once or twice, or sublimate it, whichever you like, two hundred and eighty days: and there will be a chicken with a red head, white feathers and black feet…”

We read in the Key to Wisdom , attributed to Alfonso X, King of Castile, that the germ of gold existing in all minerals, develops under the influence of celestial bodies.

Arnaud de Villeneuve says that metals multiply like plants, by a ferment which animates them as the intermediate soul between the body and the spirit animates the body of man ( 2 ) .

Raymond Lully says that the stone contains three things: a soul , a spirit and a body . It is mineral because it is mineral, animal because it has a soul, and vegetable because it grows and is multiplied.

Metals are formed, according to Nicolas Flamel , of two principles, sulfur and mercury , one male and the other female; and each of them contains the four elements.

The stone contains the four elements in the same way, but it has a vegetative soul,
On the other hand, he admits a body, which is Venus and woman, and a spirit , which is mercury. The union of the two is produced by the ferment or the soul .
If Basil Valentine, or the author of the works which bear his name, is generally credited with having spoken of the first of the three chemical principles , sulphur , mercury and salt , it is none the less true that the two Dutchmen Isaac and Jean Isaac contributed the most to spread this opinion by their writings. But, as we do not know the precise period in which the Dutch worked, and as the existence of a monk, alchemist, named Basil Valentin, is doubtful for many people, it is difficult to state an opinion with certainty on this historical point.

The name of Basil Valentin owes its alchemical fame above all to the works entitled the Twelve Keys , the Azoth , the Revelation of Metal Tinctures or rather the Treatise on Natural and Supernatural Things .

B. Valentin admits as principles of metals salt , sulfur and mercury , and, moreover, a spirit qualified as metallic .

The earth owes soul and life to the spirit; it is the spirit of the earth which, under the influence of the stars, nourishes, develops and perfects grasses, trees, roots, metals and minerals. And, as the mother herself feeds the child she carries in her womb, so the earth produces and nourishes from the spirit descended from heaven the minerals she carries in her womb.

He admits the four elements, as well as salt , sulfur and mercury , which he terms material principles of stone. Here, moreover, is the completely allegorical statement concerning the man and the stone.

Adam was first composed of earth, water, air and fire, and then of soul, spirit and body; then mercury, sulfur and salt.

Our stone is composed of two, three, four and five;
Of five, that is to say of its quintessence;
Of four, that is to say of the four elements;
Of three, that is to say of the three principles of natural things;
Of two, that is to say double mercury;

And of one, that is to say of the first principle of all things, which was produced pure at the time of the creation of the world,
Basile Valentin conceives the diversity of metals in the same way as the diversity of men.

Men are begotten of the same seed and of the same matter, yet they present great differences between them, the cause of which is connected with celestial influences; it is to this that we must attribute the special aptitude of men for a science or a trade.

The metals coming from the same seed and from the same matter owe their specific diversities to these same celestial influences.

Basil Valentin recognizes three worlds:
The supercelestial or archetypal world , source of the life and soul of everything.
The celestial or ectypical world , where the planets and stars are found, causes of the generation of metals and minerals by their spiritual influences; that is where the light of the spirit comes from.

The elementary or typical world , in which are all the elements and the sublunary creatures.

Count Bernard of Treviso or the Trevisan admits the four elements and complex bodies which he considers as principles of other bodies, that is to say, they correspond perfectly to what we today call the immediate principles of salts or living bodies.

Nature alone makes the seeds of the various species of bodies which must develop and multiply like living beings. If art is powerless to form them, it can conjoin or unite them together, according to their special nature.

The influence of proportions, according to which the elements, where immediate principles are united, have an influence on the specific properties of bodies, a very remarkable idea for the fifteenth century where the author lived.

The movement of the celestial bodies and the movement of the fire which surrounds the earth, being communicated to the mines of the terrestrial strata, there result modifications in their properties, it is as a result of this action that the mercury changes into lead, tin, silver, brass, iron, then gold. The Trevisan thinks that there is no heat, strictly speaking, in the slowness of action, while fire, actively and properly directed , operates in a short time what nature does in thousands of years. Hence the different roles of nature and art in transmutation.

The silver and the gold of nature are dead , but those which hermetic art produces are alive , that is to say, they differ from the first, by the faculty of transmuting imperfect metals into their own substance,
The philosopher's stone has the triple nature of mineral, vegetable and animal, it possesses the power of male and female, to develop a germ, so that the physical egg is quite comparable to the animal egg.

Obviously, the action of the philosopher's stone, in the spirit of Trevisan, was that of a leaven.

In summary, nothing more remarkable in the history of alchemy, in our opinion, than the way in which Trevisan explains transmutation.

Matter is the basis of forms .

The first matter of man is the sperm of man and that of woman, but if this matter is composed of four elements , it is not immediately , nature has previously transmuted them into the matter of man.

The same for metals; they are formed of the four elements, ultimately, but mercury and sulfur immediately represent their nature.

The Trevisan adds that by expressing himself otherwise than he does, men , metals , herbs , plants, beasts , would be one and the same thing, namely, the four elements ; hence one could no longer say: like begets like , hence no generation, no special seeds.

Le Trévisan cites, in support of his way of seeing, most of the alchemical authors who preceded him, such as Geber (but he criticizes, and even quite strongly, several of his opinions), Morien, Calis, Isudrius, one of the interlocutors of La Tourbe, Armand de Villeneuve , etc.

We will recall that we have already said in this journal (November 1849, page 667) that Paracelsus exaggerated the opinions professed by alchemists in general. According to him, under the influence of the stars and the ground, not only the imperfect metals changed into silver and gold, but the metals changed into stone and the minerals developed through vegetation.

Recognizing, with Isaac the Dutch and Basil Valentine, metals as ternary compounds, he compared their nature to that of man; the salt represented the body , the sulfur the soul, and the mercury the spirit, which effected the union of the first two.

Denis Zachaire shares alchemical beliefs regarding transmutation and the influence of ferments.

If the four elements, in spite of their contrary qualities, are capable of changing one into the other, with all the more reason must the metals formed from the same matter be subject to transmutation,
But Zachaire does not admit, like Paracelsus and other alchemists, that the procreation of metals is circular , that is to say that they can pass from the imperfect state to the perfect state and vice versa; he admits progress properly so called, progress which one could call rectilinear to oppose it to the circular procreation of metals; but, according to him, the progress is limited, it has for its term the perfect state, that is to say, it ceases when the imperfect metal has become gold ; on the other hand Zachaire certainly thinks that, in transmutation, there is elimination of a matter which he calls sulphur , there is therefore, according to him, purification, which is effected by a perfect decoction .

He admits that artificial gold is identical to natural gold.

The stone is essentially formed of body and soul united together through a spirit which participates by its mean nature in both.

The mercury is alive, and the gold must exist in the stone, because, in accordance with the principle of homology, it acts as a ferment .

For the rest, the writing of Zachaire, relative to the clarity and neatness of the ideas, is much inferior to that of Trevisan, although a century younger.

If Blaise de Vigenère seems to have practiced the hermetic art himself little, he adopted, in his book Du feu et du sel , the transmutation of metals, the influence of the stars on each terrestrial object, finally he admitted the principle of homology with regard to ferments of organic origin, but he did not apply it to the transmutation of metals; like Zachaire he admits the limited progress in their passage from the imperfect state to the golden state, and he explains at some length in what consists the perfection of this body.

We have spoken too long of Van Helmont ( Journal des Sauvants , February and March 1850) for it to be necessary to reconsider his opinions, we will confine ourselves to recalling that, while believing transmutation possible, he necessarily envisaged it quite differently from the alchemists, since, air excepted, all the other bodies being for him only water, the differences which distinguish them from each other were due to the specific nature of the archaea of ​​each of them conjoined. to water, since the matter being identical in the bodies, the transmutation had to relate to the archaea. But, to our knowledge, Van Helmont has not sufficiently explained himself for us to be entitled to say how he conceived the possibility of the transmutation of imperfect metals into gold.

If Van Helmont made ferment play a great role in his doctrine, it was not in the manner of the alchemists; finally, if he believed in the influence of the stars, he explicitly rejected the opinion of those who claimed that this influence extended to the faculties of men, to their vocation or to their fortune; in this respect they diverged absolutely from the opinion of Basil Valentine.

We will still cite as alchemist Eyrénée Philalèthe , or rather Thomas de Vagan who is said to have taken this pseudonym as we said above.

He admits, in the writing entitled The True Philalethes or The Entry into the Closed Palace of the King , the principle of homology; for the stone must, according to him, contain gold to transmute imperfect metals into perfect metal, but the gold which, in the stone, possesses this faculty, differs from common gold in that the latter is dead, while the former owes life to the conjunction which it has contracted with the mercury of the philosophers, under the influence of heat ; gold thus acquiring germinative life , mercury has acted on it as good soil acts on the grain of wheat which it germinates, it is a soul, a living and vivifying principle which makes gold a true seed.

One can do the work using artificial gold or common gold, but there is more difficulty in operating with this one than with the first, and the stone which results from it is less energetic than that which one has prepared with artificial gold, it is especially by subjecting the two stones to repeated treatments that one sees the virtue of the transmutation increase rapidly with the number of treatments in the stone where artificial gold has been introduced .

Philalethes prescribes carrying out the digestion or the fermentation of the stone in a matrass having the shape of an egg.

In ending our quotations here, we will recall that Glauber, who believed in alchemy without practicing it, compared metals to living beings, but, according to him, the perfect metal, gold, was liable, under suitable circumstances, to demote to the state of an imperfect metal . He also believed in the influence of the stars on the production of metals, as astrological belief was still widespread in the middle of the seventeenth century (see Journal des Savants, May 1850, pages 297, 297, 299, 300). If we can cite, after Glauber, a few men distinguished by a real science, who, like Beccher, believed in alchemy, these men, too much modified by their positive works and the general ideas of the natural philosophy of their time, no longer count sufficiently as hermetic authorities for us to have to deal with them . In summary, we believe that we are authorized by the preceding quotations to make the following conclusions:

1° The most famous alchemists believed in the influence of celestial bodies on metals, these, animated by a kind of life, were susceptible of a development after which they passed from the imperfect state; in perfect condition. This idea, the starting point of alchemy, absolutely foreign to the field of observation, had its origin in the astrological beliefs to which most of the knowledge of antiquity and the Middle Ages was subject.

2. The greater number of alchemists believed that the progress of metals was limited, so that after having become gold , their state was fixed. The few thought, like Glauber, that the changes of the metals passing from the imperfect state to the perfect state did not constitute progress properly so called, for the reason that the metal having become perfect returned to the imperfect state; the transformations, instead of constituting a progress whose last term was as far as possible from the starting point, were therefore represented by a circular curve whose point of arrival coincided with the starting point.

3° Be that as it may, the alchemical art consisted in making up for by particular practices the slow action of the celestial bodies on the metals.

4° The alchemical art was ultimately composed of two general operations. The preparation of the stone and the use of this stone to operate the transmutation.
The purpose of preparing the stone was to communicate to a matter of mineral origin a vital energy or ferment large enough to supplement the secular action of the celestial bodies in the transmutation of imperfect metals into gold.

Several ideas directed the alchemist in the preparation of the stone.

The first , based on the destruction of living bodies exposed to a high temperature, meant that the alchemist only subjected the materials which were to constitute the stone to low temperatures, capable of promoting the conception of the germ and its evolution. So he worked to develop chemical actions that we today call slow .

In accordance with this idea, the operation of the great work was to resemble the incubation of the egg by the bird, and one means of achieving this was the use of an ovoid vase in which the elements of the stone were to be contained .
The second idea was the principle of homology. To have regard to it, the gold had to be found in the stone. For, absent from the preparation, it became impossible for the stone to be a leaven , that is to say that it could convert an imperfect metal into its own substance, as leaven converted into leaven an indefinite quantity of flour paste, but this result was only possible on condition of giving to the gold of the stone an energy which it did not have in its natural state. Hence the distinction between the living gold contained in the stone, and the dead gold of nature .

Such are, in short, the fundamental ideas of the hermetic art, formulated in the manner most conformable to the numerous writings which we have examined in recent years from the point of view of the history of one of the branches of the human mind, the most curious to study.

The relations of these ideas with the invisible world are evident, not only with regard to the influence of the stars on terrestrial bodies, the inspiration which the alchemist expects from God, but also with regard to the ideas drawn from the visible world, relative to the production of the egg and its hatching. Indeed, it is not the material part of the stone that occupies the alchemist, strictly speaking, but the life that it is a question of giving it by making something animated of it, which will present a matter or a body united to a soul through the intermediary of a spirit which will participate at the same time in the material nature and the spiritual nature .

§ 4. Idea concerning the organoleptic properties of stone to maintain the health of man or preserve him from disease.

The idea of ​​life and progression once admitted in the passage of the metal from the imperfect state to the state spoke, the fixity of the properties of gold, considered as the progress accomplished, as the last term of the progression reached; finally, the conviction that the adepts had of being able to operate this progression at will, led many alchemists to think that it would not be impossible to bring man to a state of perfection where he would preserve himself from illnesses, fight with success any ones he might have, and thus postpone the end of his life. Such is the undeniable link between alchemy and the search for panaceas, one of the consequences of which has been to attribute to gold , the perfect metal , quite marvelous therapeutic properties.

The examination that we will make, in a future article, of the private life of the alchemist and of his relations with temporal power and spiritual power, will lead us to explain why alchemy has been considered by a certain number of people as an illicit science. Finally, a last article will be devoted to the presentation of the relationship of alchemical ideas with the physical sciences and to the examination of Cambriel's hermetic philosophy course.

E. CHEVREUL.

1. The alchemists generally considered the spirit as the bond of the soul with the body, because of the middle participating nature of both, which they attributed to it.
2. See the note on the previous page.

Third article. AUGUST 1851.

We will successively examine the alchemist in his private life and in his relations with temporal power and spiritual power; we will then show the causes which determined a certain number of people to consider alchemy as an illicit or accursed science.

§ 1. Of the private life of the alchemist.

If novelists, scholars like Monteil, have included, more or less fortunately, alchemists among the characters they have depicted in their literary compositions, however it is not there that one will take the most exact and most complete idea of ​​the life they led, one will know it much better by seeking the details in writings where some of them spoke naively of the conditions so particular that the art they cultivated made to them, within a society convinced of the reality of the transmutation of metals.

Let us first expose the obstacles or impediments to the execution of the work that Geber points out at the beginning of his book The Sum of Perfection , or Abridged of the Perfect Magisterium .

The impediments to art come from three causes:
1° From a bad disposition of the body of the artist , such that his organs are neither whole nor healthy, that he is sick, or decrepit and in extreme old age.

2° Of a bad disposition of the mind , such that man cannot devote himself to the research of natural principles, for lack of intelligence, or that by being endowed with them, he is delivered to a disordered imagination, that he lacks faith in the reality of the work, that he is miserly with his money.

3° Of the social position , by which the man cannot make the expense of the work, or that, being able, he does not have the free disposition of his time.
After having set forth these considerations, Geber shows that the conditions of the success of the artist will be, instruction in natural philosophy, a lively, penetrating, inventive and industrious mind, a resolute, persevering and moderate character, a reasoned economy in the expense which the work requires, finally, the artist will not indulge in any sophistication, otherwise God would infallibly punish him as unworthy of success.

At least four hundred years after Geber, in the 13th century , the author of the De alchemia attributed to Albert the Great, speaks of the conditions that the artist must fulfill:

“1° He will be silent, and will reveal to no one the result of his operations;
“2° He will live in an isolated house;
“3° He will choose the time and the hours of his work;
“4° He will be patient, assiduous and persevering;
“5° He will carry out, according to the rules of the art, trituration, sublimation, fixation, calcination, solution, distillation and coagulation;
“6° He will only use vessels of glass or glazed pottery;
“7° He will be rich enough to meet the expenses required by his operations;
“8° He will avoid, finally, having any relation with the princes and the lords…”

We will say later why.
Let's now talk about two authors whom we have already quoted several times, Le Trévisan and Denis Zachaire. They will show us what was the private life of an alchemist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries .

Count Bernard of Treviso, known as Le Trévisan , born in Padua in 1406, died aged 84. Reading Rasés inspired him, from the age of fourteen to sixteen, with a taste for alchemical work; he devoted himself to it sometimes alone, sometimes with people who, like him, sought the philosopher's stone with conviction, or else with people of bad faith who made him pay dearly for the communication of their so-called science. He reached the age of sixty-two, after having spent 20,000 crowns, without having reached the goal towards which all his efforts had been directed since his adolescence; it was then that he left his country, and, as he says: "Trusting always in the mercy of God, who never fails those who have good will and work, I went to Rhodes, for fear of being known. He spent 500 crowns unsuccessfully working another three years with a monk who was told he knew the stone ; but, if the knowledge of his collaborator was lacking, the books he possessed, such as the Grand Rosary , Arnauld de Villeneuve, the Livre de Marie , etc., put the Trevisan on the trail of what he had been seeking for so long; after deep meditations and obstinate works, suggested especially by the things on which these authors were agreed, he discovered the truth, and this truth determined him to write for the public.

We know of no book which shows as well as that of Trévisan, speaking of his disappointments, the uselessness of his efforts and the boredom of his labors, what was the life of an alchemist in the fifteenth century, either in solitude or in his relations with collaborators . The imagination can conceive nothing more painful than this mysterious and yet so agitated life; the book of Trevisan gives, moreover, the strongest proof of the lack of agreement existing between the alchemists, when it was a question of choosing the presumed processes most suitable for the execution of the great work: because so many artists, so many different thoughts.

We will make five quotations in support of this view:
I. Fine silver and quick silver or mercury were separately dissolved in nitric acid. The solutions, after having been left to themselves for a year, had to be mixed, then concentrated to 2/3 of their original volume on hot ashes. The residue, placed in a very narrow triangular cucurbite, received the influence of the rays of the sun, then it was exposed to the air, so that small crystals were produced there (small crystalline lapils ) . After five years nothing had happened!
II. Le Trévisan, with Master Geoffroy de Leuvrier, monk of Cîteaux, buys 2000 eggs of géline (chicken): they make them harden, they remove the shells from them, which they calcine; they then separate the aubins (whites) from the reds (yellows), which they rot into horse manure, then they distill them thirty times, to ultimately extract a white water and a red oil . The Trevisan omits many other details, because all this great work comes to nothing .

III. He works with a prothonotary from Bergues who claimed to make the stone with rosacea.

After having distilled strong vinegar eight times , they put in the product of the last distillation the rosacea, which had undergone three months ' calcination ; then we distilled, and that fifteen times a day , these fifteen distillations were repeated every day for a year .

As a result of this work, the Trevisan had a quartan fever from which he almost died; it lasted fourteen months.

IV. He worked with Master Henry, the emperor's confessor. Fine silver and quicksilver were mixed together, sulfur and olive oil were added to the mixture, and then melted over a fire. They cooked it slowly, with a pelican, stirring continuously, after two months the whole was dried in a lute flask of good clay, and placed in hot ashes for a fortnight or three weeks ; lead was added, melted and refined. The money was to be multiplied by the third party, according to Master Henry; but the Trévisan, which had given ten marcs of silver, only withdrew four after refining .

V. The monk whom the Trevisan met at Rhodes took fine gold very well beaten, fine silver similarly very well beaten, he put them together with four parts of sublimated mercury; the mixture was put in digestion during eleven months in the manure of horse, then one distilled it; the liquid was collected and the earthy residue calcined over a high fire. The liquid underwent six successive distillations and the residues were combined with the earthy residue . When the distilled liquid vaporized completely, it was poured into a urinal (balloon), then it was spread little by little over the earthy residue . After seven monthsof contact there was no more conjunction than at the moment of mixing, and heat had no action to determine it; the Trévisan adds: All was lost . The operation had lasted three years , and the expenses had risen to 300 crowns !

Let's move on to the story of Denis Zachaire; he was from Toulouse; Sent at the age of twenty to hear the arts at the College of Bordeaux, he had a master who devoted himself to alchemical studies, and classmates who possessed hermetic recipe books.

Back in Toulouse, after having lost his father and his mother, he devoted himself to alchemical work according to the recipes he had brought back from Bordeaux.
The gold on which he operated, far from multiplying, greatly diminished, Zachaire lost in the same year 200 crowns and the master who directed him; this one died of exhaustion from having blown.

Zachaire tells how 400 écus were reduced to 230, and how an Italian gave him a recipe that was worthless and took 20 écus from him.

He was no happier in associating with an abbé to repeat, at common expense, a recipe which the latter claimed to be excellent,
A marc of gold, after having been calcined for a month, was placed in two coupled glass retorts, containing four marcs of eau-de-vie rectified several times. The fire was kept up for a whole year in the furnace where they had been placed…. But, after this time, the gold was removed from the retorts just as it had been put there .

According to the advice of the abbot, he left for Paris with 800 écus and arrived there after a journey of fifteen days, it was a meeting place for operators from all countries, Zachaire frequented there craftsmen, goldsmiths, founders, glaziers, manufacturers of furnaces, etc., and he met there alchemists working with stone by the most different processes. They met sometimes at one house, sometimes at another, and often, on Sundays and holidays, they met in the church of Notre-Dame. Zachaire adds that no one succeeded, but that everyone agreed that the goal would have been achieved if a completely unforeseen accident had not happened.

Zachaire worked with a Greek who reduced three marcs of silver to powder, molded; this powder reduced to a paste in the form of nails, mixed the nails with pulverized cinnabar, left them to cook in a well-covered earthen vessel. After having thus dried them, he melted them and cut them. He claimed to withdraw more than three marks of silver.

A foreign gentleman with whom he made friends, and who claimed to know how to make gold , communicated to him, after a year of acquaintance, a process which was only a decoy.

Zachaire had been in Paris for three years when he was called back by the abbé, his partner, to whom the King of Navarre, grandfather of Henri IV, asked that he send him Zachaire in order to have communication of his secrets. He promised 3 to 4000 crowns. Zachaire says he satisfied him, but the king only gave him thanks and promises.

Before returning to Toulouse, where his partner was, he had the opportunity to see a monk very skilled in natural philosophy, who advised him to read the books of the ancient philosophers carefully before embarking on new works. He followed this advice, joined the abbot to settle accounts with him. Of the 800 scudi constituting the association fund, only 180 remained.

Zachaire left Toulouse and arrived in Paris the day after All Saints Day 1546; he lodged in the faubourg Saint Marceau with a little servant, and he studied the Tourbe des philosophes , the good Trévisan , the Remonstrance of natureand some other of the best books. After a year of solitary study, he saw, not the operators he had known, but true philosophers. He was no further advanced, because of the doubts aroused in himself by the diversity of their methods. Finally the Holy Spirit inspired him with the idea of ​​reading Raymond Lully and the Great Rosary of Arnauld de Villeneuve, and, after another year of reading and meditation, he returned to Toulouse. He arrived there at the beginning of Lent in 1549, and resumed his alchemical work there, finally, on Easter day in the year 1550, he converted, he assures us in less than an hour, common quicksilver into very good gold. He was forty years old. He sold the property he had, left France with one of his relatives, they retired first to Lausanne in Switzerland, and it seems that they then went to Germany.

These quotations show that the life of the alchemist was as painful physically as intellectually, and yet we have spoken from two authors who came from noble families and enjoyed the gifts of fortune; Bernard was a count and Zachaire a gentleman. The first left his country when he was over sixty years old, and the second said he was so obsessed, tired of his parents and his friends, that he decided to emigrate, and it was in a foreign country that he published his book. Whether Zachaire is a pseudonym or not, our thoughts still stand, and there's more, if the pseudonym exists, doesn't that justify our thoughts?

§ 2. Of the relations of the alchemist with the temporal power.

If the relations of the alchemist were difficult with his family and even his friends, they were incomparably more so with the grown-ups; also the author of De alchimia attributed to Albert the Great, advises the alchemist to avoid princes and lords, because, he says, “if you. you have the misfortune to approach them, they will ask you, Master, how is the operation going? when will we see something good? and, not wanting to wait for the end of the work, they will insult you, and your boredom will be great; and, if you do not arrive at a good end, you will be for them an object of general indignation; but, if you come to a good end, they will think of keeping you forever and will forbid you to go out, and so you will be caught in the lace by the words that come out of your mouth and entwined by your own speeches. »

Lenglet Dufresnoy, in his History of Hermetic Philosophy , reports, according to several testimonies, and in particular that of Desnoyers, secretary of Madame de Gonzague, queen of Poland, wife of King Uladislas (1), the adventures of a Catholic Scotsman named Alexandre Sethon absolutely in conformity with the quotations that we have just made, they are a new example of what an alchemist could fear when he was in the dependence of a powerful lord.

Sethon, on the reputation of adept of which he had the imprudence to boast and to give, it is said, the proof, was arrested by order of the Duke of Saxony in 1602 and locked up in a tower under the guard of forty men. Sethon, a Catholic, refused the duke the communication of his secret, flatteries, the most advantageous promises, then tortures of the question and the fire, all was useless; the Catholic stubbornly refused to deliver the preparation of the stone to a heretical prince.

Finally Michael Sendivogius of Moravia, who dealt with alchemy, having entered Sethon's prison with the duke's permission, ended up removing him after having drunk his guards. Sethon, out of gratitude, gave projection powder to his liberator, but refused to reveal to him the secret of the stone, he died shortly afterwards, before 1604.

Sethon is the author of the book entitled the Cosmopolitan , which was published in Prague by M. Sendivogius.

Finally, let us end this paragraph with quotations from the Philalethes or Treaty of the open entrance to the closed palace of the King , composed, as the anonymous author says, in 1645. We borrow the translation from the Chemical Library of Solomon, 3rd edition , volume IV (see chap. XIII, p, 34 et seq.):

… “But would to God that gold and silver, these two great idols, which have hitherto been worshiped by everyone, should become as contemptible as mud and dung? For I, who know the art of doing them, would not be so hard pressed to conceal myself that I am, so that it would seem that the curse of Cain has fallen on me (which I cannot think without shedding tears and without sighing) and that I am like him driven from before the face of the Lord, seeing myself deprived of the pleasant company of my friends, with whom I had formerly conversed in complete freedom. But now it seems that I am pursued by the furies and I cannot stay long in any place in confidence.. . »

.... "I dare not even take care of my family, being vagabond and wandering, .... and, although I possess all the wealth, I can nevertheless use it very little." ..”

… “We can't do anything alone and without communicating…. and yet, if one wants to do it, one puts one's life in danger, as I have experienced in foreign countries, where, having given my medicine to the dying and to other abandoned sick people, or who had annoying and very difficult diseases there, and having cured them, as if by miracle, they began to say that it was done by the elixir of the philosophers(alchemists), so that I found myself in trouble several times, and I was forced to change my clothes, to shave, to take the wig, and, having changed my name, to escape at night, so as not to fall into the hands of very wicked people, who were angry with me on the sole suspicion that they had that I possessed this secret and by the envy and detestable greed to have gold. »

… “Apart from the fact that it is enough, to be laid in ambushes, that one has the least conjecture of the world of his secret, men are so wicked, that I know that there have been some hanged on this simple suspicion, who nevertheless knew nothing . It was enough that a few desperate people had even heard of this science, and that those who suspected it had the reputation of knowing it.

… “And for real, can't we see that alchemy is a real pretext that everyone uses; so that, if you do the least thing in secret, you will hardly be able to take three steps without being betrayed? The precaution that you will take to hide yourself will make the curious want to observe you more closely; they'll spread the word that you're making counterfeit money. »

Speaking of the difficulty of selling the gold or the silver which the alchemist has made, he adds: "If you therefore go and sell a great quantity of fine silver, you will find yourself thereby, and if you will alloy it, being neither a goldsmith nor a coiner, you deserve death by the laws of Holland and England and of almost all the nations which prohibit on pain of life any person who is not a master goldsmith or coiner, from making any alloy to gold and silver, although there is only the necessary weight. »

§ 3. Of the relations of the alchemist with spiritual power.

The quotations which we have made in the second article must leave no doubt in the mind of the reader, on the religious feelings which were animated by the most renowned men by their hermetic science. That being so, why has the contrary opinion spread? Why has the solitary life of the alchemist given rise to so many absurd tales, to so many vague accusations? When he was not denounced as a counterfeiter, why say that he had given himself to Satan, so that the operations in which he indulged were to be cursed, and that one imagined to personify the alchemical spirit in a doctor named Faust ? because obviously this character sums up the reproaches and accusations of which the alchemists could have been the object,
We will explain this fact by the very origin that we assigned to the speculative part of the hermetic art, when we deduced it from the general ideas that people had of the invisible world, and when we showed the alchemist seeking to give life to the inorganic matter of the philosopher's stone by bringing it into conjunction with a soul through the intermediary of a spirit. Nature had submitted to it, according to the opinions of the Middle Ages.

Most of the ancient religions of the East were based on dualism, they admitted a genius of good and an evil genius , or celestial spirits and infernal spirits .
The priests of Persia, known under the name of Magi , had in antiquity such a great reputation for knowledge and wisdom, that the name of magic was given to the science of divine and human things, including the reciprocal influences of all beings.

Magic therefore embraced:
The science of the invisible world , that is to say, that of spirits or pneumatology;

The science of the visible world , which was called natural magic or general physics ;

Pneumatology , in the general sense, included: the science of celestial and infernal spirits , and, in the particular sense it was restricted to that of the former, the science of infernal spirits advocating the name of demonology .
It was generally accepted that man was capable of producing wonders, supernatural things, miracles, through spirits. It was thaumaturgy , and we called teratoscopy the contemplation of these miracles, of these marvels, to seek the causes and the meanings,
Thaumaturgy included theurgy and demonourgy , depending on whether supernatural things were produced with the assistance of celestial spirits or that of infernal spirits.

Among the most marvelous things that man seeks, there is none, in his eyes, more important than the knowledge of the future; also, in all times, to satisfy this desire, he resorted to theurgy or demonourgy , and from this arose theomancy , or divination by God , and demonomancy , or diabolical divination .

The Church admits the essence of these ideas: according to her, there was communication from God with the prophets, and the future was suddenly revealed by divine inspirations to some, as it was by dreams to some others, when their senses were dulled by sleep, on the other hand, she recognized the possibility of the possession of man by the devil. In accordance with this doctrine, man can therefore produce supernatural effects; but they must be distinguished according to whether the cause which produces them is licit or illicit . God cooperates with the first, while the devil intervenes in the manifestation of the second.

If from the science of the invisible world we pass to the science of the visible world, we will see that there is not in antiquity or in the Middle Ages an object on which man has fixed his attention, which has not been for him a subject of meditation as to the use he could derive from it relative to the knowledge of the future. We will confine ourselves to citing only, among the studies of which the visible world was the object, the importance which he attached to the study of the sky, which he called astrology ; he did not confine himself to fixing the division of time according to the observation of celestial phenomena: all his efforts were employed to read in the sky the history of future things; from there, judicial astrology , of which one of the most cultivated branches was horoscopy, or the art of deducing from the position of the stars on the horizon, at the time of an individual's birth, what he would become and what his character would be. Some of the most distinguished men believed, in the Middle Ages, in judicial astrology .
Man therefore sought in each of the knowledge he acquired after astrology the means of foreseeing the future, so that there came a time when it was possible to unite under the general title of divinatory art a considerable number of practices or procedures whose object was to know future things.

The divinatory art comprised four very distinct branches:
1. Divine divination, or theomancy ;
2. Natural divination;
3. Human divination;
4° Diabolical divination, or demonomancy .

Divine divination was the knowledge of the future that God gave to some men in some way.

Natural divination consisted of predicting the future by studying natural phenomena.

Human divination sought to know future things through the history of past and contemporary facts of human societies.

These three branches of the divinatory art have been recognized as licit by various religions, and the Catholic Church has itself considered them as such; but she has declared demonomancy illicit .

It is clear that the divinatory art was composed of various knowledge drawn from very different sources, and that therefore it could not be considered as an art having its own essence outside of any other branch of knowledge: thus horoscopy, part of judicial astrology, belonged like this to general astrology . Natural divination was composed of varied knowledge, distributed among a crowd of knowledge within the province of the visible world, and human divination embraced facts within the province of the history of humanity, or of the knowledge of man.
If, as we observed the phenomena of the visible world, many effects left the domain of the marvelous to return to that of natural facts, however a difficulty always remained when, supernatural effects being admitted as real, it was a question of seeing whether the cause was licit or illicit .

This difficulty probably contributed to modifying the way in which magic was considered when it was the expression of the highest science as well as the object of the teaching professed by the Magi in the sanctuary of their temple, and when, according to Saint Matthew, the mysterious star led from the east to Bethlehem three Magi who came there to adore the Saviour ! After these times, the meaning of the word magic was generally restricted to denominating the art of producing extraordinary effects; and it was then that, in accordance with the distinction between the supernatural effects produced by a licit cause and those produced by an illicit cause, a white magic was distinguished.and a black magic , depending on whether one recognized the intervention of God or the devil in the manifestation of the effects. This distinction is perfectly established in this passage from Don Quixote (volume VIII, page 52, of the edition of Paris. Dedongchamps, 1824): “My father taught me magic when I was not yet nine years old; it was only white magic , because I never wanted to try black magic , which is only suitable for doing harm. (Speech of the surgeon who treated Sancho at Madame Quitteri.)
It is therefore to judge those who occupied themselves with black magic , or who were considered as sorcerers because they knowingly endeavored by diabolical means to achieve something , that we had a special system of inquisition: one of the most curious writings published on this subject is undoubtedly Demonomania or the scourge of demons and sorcerers by J. Bodin d'Angers. It is remarkable in more than one way, the clarity of the style, the precision of the definitions, the order of the subjects, the perfect conviction that the author had of the existence of sorcerers, the power that he recognized in them to produce supernatural effects, and, moreover, the means that can be described as abominable .which he naively exposes in the fourth book, entitled De l'inquisition des sorciers , so that the judge can, by using them, arrive at the certainty that the defendant is really a sorcerer, are as many reasons for having this work read by all those who study history with the intention of knowing man from the scientific point of view, in order to appreciate all that he is capable of, good and bad, as an individual in given circumstances.

It has perhaps not been sufficiently noticed how much the author of the fourth book of Demonomania , the code of the most barbarous inquisition, bears little resemblance to Bodin, the author of the book of the Republic , who is cited as the precursor of the Spirit of Laws , to Bodin the Calvinist who became a Catholic, in whom biographers recognize an enlightened and tolerant spirit, allied to lofty and independent sentiments which place him among the most distinguished philosopher-writers. When one reads this book, which appeared in 1580, one can clearly see the danger that the author knows of something extraordinary enough to make it appear supernatural, or that it could cause people to say before judges that the one who had done it had knowingly endeavored by diabolical means to achieve something , since then witnesses heard in a procedure could make the judges believe that a defendant had operated this extraordinary thing only by resorting to the demon .

According to this, that an alchemist was damned for having called Satan to his aid, having given him his soul in return for the success of his work, evidently this alchemist, being in the category of sorcerers, was exposed to undergo the most ignominious punishment, usually that of fire.

Thus the predictions, the preparation of the stone or of a panacea, which were at bottom perfectly licit , ceased to be so, if those who indulged in them gave rise to the suspicion of having had recourse to the devil; they then entered the category of sorcerers, of those who evoked the dead and infernal spirits, cast spells by engaging in demonourgy. In this state of things, was it not natural that people who really had to complain of alchemists or pretended adepts, just as well as those who obeyed feelings of hatred or revenge against them, should present them to justice as men habitually engaged in illicit work?

Unquestionably a large number of deceivers presented themselves as operators, adepts and even philosophers, and as such, cheated the money of people who were too credulous or, what is the same thing, too convinced of the reality of the great work; the Italian of whom Zachaire speaks is an example of one of these cheats, just as Zachaire is an example of a man endowed with intelligence who had been duped by his faith in alchemy. Unquestionably, there were circumstances where a counterfeiter adorned himself with the same titles to hide his culpable industry, and where a criminal succeeded in concealing his thefts by selling ingots of real gold or real silver of which he had been only the mere founder and not the producer. Finally, so-called adepts not only sold alchemical recipes,
If now we take into consideration that, by the admission of even the most renowned authors, there were only an extremely small number of adepts or operators capable of knowingly carrying out the transmutation, because they knew how to prepare the philosopher's stone themselves, and if we add that certain hermetic authors admit that, in most cases, the artificial production of gold was more expensive than the natural gold of commerce, we see, without it being necessary to admit in principle the possibility or impossibility of undoing gold, how many there must have been in fact deceived men, no longer by deceivers, but by men of good faith, like the Trévisan, for example, who, by his own admission, only succeeded in effecting the transmutation after more than forty years of unheard-of work, and yet, during the whole time of his impotence, he never ceased to believe in the possibility of the great work.

Now, among these people deceived or disappointed in their hopes were not only simple private individuals, but powerful men, like emperors, kings, princes, lords and high dignitaries of the Church. From then on, numerous and well-founded complaints had to be uttered against deceivers and even against operators who, fooled by their alchemical illusions, had been unable to fulfill promises made before putting their hands on their great work, among those who had undertaken to pay the expenses that this work required to be brought to a successful conclusion . It must even have happened often that these powerful men, who made stone workpoor alchemists in their palaces or castles imagined that if they did not give them the gold they had promised them, it was not out of impotence, but out of ill will, and that henceforth they believed that it was only justice for the strong to punish the weak.

Things brought to this point, it is easy to conceive how those who complained about operators and alchemists could cry anathema against their science, because they called it cursed., and how the alchemist was not, in their eyes, a man full of humility who sought, in the simplicity of his heart, to make himself worthy of divine inspiration, in order to find a faithful guide in the practice of rapid processes equivalent to the secular influence of the stars on the perfection of metals by the suitable direction he will give to terrestrial fire! In their eyes, the alchemist was a man prey to the pride of domination, devoured by the love of earthly pleasures, calling Satan to his aid to succeed in the great work, by delivering his soul to him after having devoted his person to him; finally the alchemist was no longer the Christian, it was Faust .

The alchemist not only could be accused of theft, of preparing gold or silver alloy, of manufacturing counterfeit money, two acts punishable by capital punishment, but he also became liable to the torture of fire, if the judges believed that he had given his soul to Satan, then where reigned the inquisition, it was; to his tribunal that he was answerable for his conduct. Thus threatened in his dearest interests and his very life, is it astonishing that he sought the most absolute isolation? And sometimes did he not invoke the holy name of God to forestall accusations of illicit work ?

Finally, when, in 1669, Naudé published his Apology of the great men accused of magic , included among them several famous alchemists, because he clearly saw that the practice of alchemy, as well as that of magic, had been causes of persecution for bad faith or ignorance.

In a last article we will speak about the work of F. Cambriel and about some opinions whose analogy with the alchemical ideas, such as we exposed them in the two preceding articles, appears to us certain, when one examines the origin of them from the point of view, of the method a priori .

E. CHEVREUL.

1. This letter is dated Warsaw, June 12, 1651. It was printed in the Treasure of Gallic and French Research and Antiquities by Pierre Borel and the 1st volume of the History of Hermetic Philosophy by Lenglet Dufresnoy.

Fourth item. DECEMBER 1851

We have shown in the first article (May 1851) that, for there to have been a transmutation, strictly speaking, of an imperfect metal into gold, it would have been necessary for a weight A of the first to have been changed into a weight A of the second. the imperfect metal, and, if it had not been admitted, there would have been both purification and transmutation , or purification and combination. If, on the contrary, the weight of gold had been greater than A, there would have been a combination of a matter foreign to the imperfect metal with that of this metal, without transformation this case had not been considered probable by the alchemists.

Ultimately, transmutation should only have been admitted where the hermetic operations would have acted effectively, by virtue of the isomerism existing between matter before transmutation and matter after transmutation.

But alchemists have never understood, explicitly at least, transmutation with this degree of precision. They limited themselves to considering the imperfect metals as modifiable over time, under the influence of celestial bodies, by virtue of a kind of life, which developed only in certain circumstances where these imperfect metals were placed within the terrestrial layer which contained them .

This kind of life to which the imperfect metal was subjected until the moment of its transformation into gold, under the influence of the stars, only developed with extreme slowness, since it took, according to them, several centuries to accomplish the transformation.

Such was the natural transmutation . Let's see what artificial transmutation consisted of .

The goal of the Hermetic art was the preparation of a composition which was called the philosopher's stone , which enjoyed, according to the Hermetic philosophy, the faculty of effecting the conversion of an imperfect metal into gold, no longer by a secular action, but by virtue of a contact of a few hours.

The difficulty of the art was not the actual conversion of the imperfect metal into gold, but the preparation of the stone; for this, once made, could act in hands which were not those of an adept. It is thus that Van Helmont, without having devoted himself to alchemical works, asserts that he effected a transmutation with the powder of projection , or of the philosopher's stone , which a stranger had given him, and that Sendivogius passes for having effected it in the same way, by means of a powder which he held as a testimony of the recognition of the service he had rendered to Sethon, in making him escape from the prison where the elector of Saxony held him. third article, August).
The difficulty of the hermetic art therefore consisted, we repeat, in the preparation of the stone, which could require years.

Now this preparation consisted in giving life to an inorganic matter, by effecting its conjunction with a soul by the intermediary of a spirit , a medium substance which participated at the same time in matter and in the soul.

Now the matter that had to be animated had to contain gold, for the reason that the philosopher's stone acting on the imperfect metal like a ferment, it was necessary, to make it effective, according to the principle of homology, that it already contained gold .

But this metal which entered into the composition of the stone, under the influence of the earthly fire suitably directed by the adept, only acted effectively after having become alive ; it was then only that he acquired the virtue of ferment , or, in other words, the property of converting a body into its own substance, and that by acting, as we say today, by his mere presence .
Certainly, if there is something which, from the point of view of history, should arrest us, it is this life attributed to the stone, and the comparison of its action to that of a ferment, when we recognize in it the aptitude to operate the conversion into gold of an imperfect metal. Now it should be known that today we admit, according to the microscopic observations of M. Cagniard-Latour, the vitality of the ferment of yeast, so that it is small living bodies which determine alcoholic fermentation by disturbing the balance of the elements of sugar, by virtue of an action still unknown of the kind of those which are called actions of presence . But, to remain in the truth, let us notice that here one does not see the intervention of the principle of homology, unless admitting the conversion of a portion of sugar into ferment.

If, in this way of conceiving transmutation, everything was related to the idea of ​​life, that one extended from animals and plants to minerals, it is because then natural philosophy was concerned with the study of causes more than that of effects, and it was in the invisible world that one sought the agents or the causes of the phenomena which appear on the earth, what existed there in large was the macrocosm, what existed on the earth was the microcosm , that is to say the repetition in small of the macrocosm . It should not be forgotten that instead of proceeding from the known to the unknown, as is done in the a posteriori method, we proceeded inversely, since it was according to the way of representing this invisible world that we formed the image of the visible world.

With this system of ideas, nothing could lead to what we now call a chemical theory , since the latter, far from starting from the invisible world, starts from the observation of phenomena to seek, not the remote cause, but the immediate or immediate cause, and it considers the material seat of the phenomena under all aspects, in order to know as many properties as possible, and to study them in perfectly defined circumstances.

We have followed the alchemist in his solitary and mysterious life, as well as in his relations with temporal power and spiritual power, and always paints us rays from himself.

All our citations have shown him, in the twelfth century , as well as in the sixteenth and fifteenth , painfully seeking, for a long series of years, what was constantly escaping him.... At last there came a time when he thought he had made the stone ! But, as we have seen, it was almost always not by pursuing one's own labors; he had abandoned them, after having lost all hope of attaining the goal, and often renounced the aid of a collaborator or an associate. If he had taken them up again, it was because an attentive reading of alchemical writings had opened his eyes, an unexpected light having come to shine had directed him surely in the work of the great work ., so that only then had the goal been hit.

Let us first remark that not one of these authors has given a precise formula of the operations to be carried out in order to carry out the transmutation; that everything they discuss is mystery or allegory, and therefore susceptible of very different interpretations; finally (that the reagents then known were only in very small number.

Did we make the stone? If we wanted to demonstrate, in our first article, that the transmutation of the so-called imperfect metals into silver and gold would not be absurd, supposing the metals to be compound, as the ancients and the alchemists thought it, nevertheless we do not believe that this transmutation has ever been effected, and we add that our way of seeing is absolutely independent of the currently accepted opinion, according to which the metals are simple bodies.

But it will no doubt be asked how we explain that men of good faith, like Trevisan, for example, claimed to have made this transmutation; we will answer that they may themselves have been deceived by the materials used, either that these contained, without their knowledge, gold which appeared only after having been released from a combination or a mixture, or that an alloy had been formed which was then taken for pure gold, or even that there had been some error in weight. This is what can happen in a work done solitarily by a man of good faith, such as Trevisan.

As for an alchemist interested in making believe that he knew the stone , and whose work was limited to operating simply by projection powder in front of spectators unfamiliar with the practices of the art, such as emperors, kings, princes, lords, etc., it was extremely easy to impose on them the false instead of the truth. One can see in a memoir entitled Deceptions concerning the philosopher's stone by E. Geoffroy, the author of the Tables of chemical affinities , a man of great knowledge and of the most honorable character ( Journal des Savants, February 1851 p. 103 et seq.), the exposition of a great number of operations which were only means of misleading the witnesses of their execution. Finally, M. Berzelius, in recent times, has similarly indicated processes whose object was the same.

But, if one wanted to subject the alchemical writings to a reasoned criticism. in order to distinguish between truth and error, as regards the date on which they were composed, the names of their respective authors and the analysis of the facts which they contain, one would encounter the greatest difficulties. We will quote, for example, the books which bear the name of Nicolas Flamel, if they had really been written by himself, the date would go back to the year 1382 to the year 1418. Nicolas Flamel really existed, as evidenced by the monuments he erected, as well as the donations or foundations he made, and whose reality is attested by authentic documents, which were still in the eighteenth century .century, in the archives of the church of Saint-Jacques-de-Boucherie. Well, when one reads the two volumes published by the Abbé Villain on this church and on the life of Nicolas Flamel, it is hardly possible, in our opinion, not to admit that this personage never had the great wealth that has been attributed to him, that he did not concern himself with alchemy, that the sculptures and stained glass windows that he had executed have no hermetic meaning, that consequently the writings which bear his name were composed long after his death. .

But what interest did the author or authors of the writings that bear the name of Nicolas Flamel have in composing them and knowingly making a forgery? One sees little of it except the motive of selling manuscripts which must have been sought after by people more or less rich, occupied with the philosopher's stone, or even that of propagating, under the name of others, opinions in which one had faith; and it was thought to achieve this end by having recourse to a personage known to the people of Paris, to whom one could attribute, with probability, great riches derived from the practice of the hermetic art. The story of Nicolas Flamel's trip to Santiago de Compostela, the meeting of the Jew, the advantage that had been taken from the mutual attachment of Nicolas Flamel and the lady Pernelle, his wife,
Be that as it may, having admitted that no one has ever effected the transmutation, it suffices for us that the ideas on which we have based our considerations and our conclusions on the philosopher's stone have been professed by the alchemists, for us to believe ourselves exempted from examining whether these ideas were really emitted by persons whose names are inscribed on the books where they are found stated. Thus, whether there was a monk in Erfurth by the name of Basil Valentine, author of the books which bear his name, or whether Basil Valentine was a pseudonym, is irrelevant, if the quotations which we have made from these books are exact and if the alchemists have adopted them as expressing their way of seeing things.

The experimental sciences were born from alchemy, we believe the thing indisputable and certainly, the Sum of perfection of the magisterium , the Treaty of the furnaces, of Geber, have a great importance from the historical point of view, since they are the oldest books where a large number of processes of the spring of the molecular actions exerted in apparent contact are described, with the apparatuses suitable for carrying out these processes. If the subject of these books is the great work, the theoretical ideas set forth therein, as we have remarked, cannot be called absurd, and, if there is one, that of the life attributed to inorganic bodies, which appears to be so today, it was quite natural at the time when the books of which we speak were written.

Roger Bacon, and even Albert the Great, studied nature rather as physicists than as chemists.

The works which bear the names of Isaac the Dutchman and Basil Valentine continue Geber as to the description of many chemical processes, but evidently they contain more ideas obscured by the alchemical mind which conceived and coordinated them, than do the books of the Arab author contain.

Paracelsus, seeking reputation and wealth in the application of the ideas he had drawn from the alchemists for the cure of disease, did not shrink from the use of any of the most energetic preparations which they had made known.

Van Helmont, with a bold imagination and an undeniable genius, threw himself into the way opened by Paracelsus; but, if he did not always undertake it with prudence, his conscience as an honest man never abandoned him. According to him, everything is animated; and, if he did not indulge in alchemy, he believed in the virtue of projection powder .

Glauber also believed in alchemy, and, like Van Helmont again, he did not practice it. He composed very remarkable works from the point of view of chemical processes, if the theoretical part is vague, because of the influence of the alchemical ideas which he admitted, the practical part was superior to all that had been written before.

Beccher is the last famous author who professed alchemy, at the same time as he enunciated the ideas to which Stahl gave so many developments, while excluding them absolutely; and explicitly any alchemical opinion.

From here at the end of the seventeenth century until today, there has therefore been no longer an avowed alchemist of great name in science. If truly distinguished or commendable men worked on the great work, they did so in silence and without claiming to push back the limits of human knowledge. For a long time we wanted to be able to know for ourselves with certainty how at least one of these men engaged in this kind of work. But it was in vain until these last days, when the friendship of our honorable colleague Mr. Armand Séguier satisfied our desires, by giving us a family box containing alchemical manuscripts, perfectly authentic, from the hand of his great-grandfather, Claude-Alexandre Séguier, born in 1656 .

Claude-Alexandre Séguier , lieutenant in the King's regiment, married twice: by his first wife, M, J, Le Noir, he had three sons; the eldest and the young entered religious orders, and the second, Louis-Anne Séguier , councilor in parliament, was the grandfather of the first President Séguier.

Claude-Alexandre spent a large part of his life in hermetic work, and spent thereon, it is said, more than 600,000 francs. He died in 1725.

Seeing the manuscripts he left, and which have been religiously preserved by his descendants, one is, above all, struck by the care that went into their preparation. The writing is fine, constantly neat and regular; obviously Claude-Alexandre Séguier took pleasure in drawing it. Although alchemy was his dominant thought, he nevertheless occupied himself with historical research on the arts, and particularly on that of making glass. Several notebooks consist of recipes concerning the arts, home economics, the preparation of medicines in general and elixirs in particular: it is clear that Claude-Alexandre Séguier dealt with the two fundamental branches of alchemy, the search for the philosopher's stone and that of the panacea.

Examination of his manuscripts shows that he himself copied quite a large number of alchemical writings, among which there are quite voluminous ones, such as the Miroir d'alchimie by Arnauld de Villeneuve, and especially the Testament by Raymond Lully; he also copied three old treatises on metallic transmutation into French rhythms , namely:

“The Fountain of science lovers, author J. de la Fontaine (1413);
“The Remonstrances of Nature to the Errant Alchemist, with the response of the said alchemist, by J. de Meung together a feature of his romance of the Rose concerning the said art (1320);
“The Philosophical Summary of Nicolas Flamel (1399). In Paris, with Guillaume Gaillard and Amaury Warancore, rue Saint Jacques, under the Sainte-Barbe sign, 1561.

If Claude-Alexandre Seguier copied in his own hand printed treatises that he could easily obtain on the market, there is no reason to be surprised that he copied writings that had not been printed: such are the three treatises attributed to three followers who worked in society, Nicotas de Valois, Nicolas de Gros-Parmy and Nicot or Vicot, priest.

A beautiful copy of these manuscripts is in the Arsenal library, and, not counting that of Claude-Alexandre Séguier, we ourselves have two copies, one of which is part of an alchemical collection in five large folio volumes collected by Nicolas Vauquelin, lord of Yveteaux, the tutor of Louis XIII.

The large number of alchemical manuscripts by Claude-Alexandre Séguier, the time he had devoted not only to collecting them, but also to copying them himself, are proof of the value that alchemists in general, and he in particular, attached to them, and we draw the conclusion that manuscripts could have been composed by obscure alchemists, who put them under the patronage of an ancient name in order to make better use of them, by selling them at a higher price, or to raise science in the minds of the world, the object of all their thoughts and all their studies.
But, among the manuscripts of Claude-Alexandre Séguier, there are especially some which clearly denote this study that each alchemist made of the writings in which he thought he would find useful information. These are tables of contents of several printed works, among which we will cite Caneparius' book on inks , printed in 1718, and Basil Valentine's Triumphal Chariot of Antimony . The work on Caneparius is proof that Claude-Alexandre Séguier was still involved in alchemy seven years before his death, and the work on the Triumphal Chariot shows us how he proceeded in his practical research into transmutation. Indeed, the manuscript concerning the Triumphal Chariotcomprises two parts: the first is a list of everything that seems interesting to him in the book attributed to the monk of Erfurth, Basil Valentine, the second part is a sort of diary of a series of alchemical works on antimony, the execution of which lasted more than three years.
Seeing the care with which the work of a lieutenant in the King's regiment is exposed, the clarity of the descriptions, the neatness of the handwriting of the manuscript, the constant use he made of the balance to give an exact account of each of his operations, one appreciates the strength of his alchemical convictions, and one cannot doubt that with his perseverance in experimental research and his observant spirit, he would not have been able to advance science, if he had devoted himself to it for enlarge its domain and not to achieve an imaginary goal.

Such were the works of a man who occupied a high rank in the world and who devoted himself to alchemy in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth .

We can affirm, according to the great number of alchemical manuscripts written, in the eighteenth century that we have seen and traversed, when we have not read them with any attention, that the number of alchemists did not cease to be considerable at that time when so many beliefs were shaken! It is therefore not surprising that these exist today and that there are still many people willing to pay dearly for manuscripts and alchemical books, but we must tell the truth. All 18th century manuscriptscentury that we have examined with some attention have no scientific interest; there is absolutely nothing comparable, in importance, to the chemical facts of the Hermetic writings of the centuries prior to the seventeenth that we have pointed out to our readers. The extreme difference which distinguishes the ancient alchemist from the modern alchemist is that the former devoted himself to a work which was connected with chemical actions, that is to say with the most intimate actions of matter, and that this study was really, as we have said, the cradle of the physico-chemical experimental sciences. Today that there are chemical and physical sciences, no famous man could seriously say, without warning the learned world against him, that he works in search of metallic transmutation .or that of a universal panacea . These reflections were necessary to prepare the reader for the account that we are going to give of the work of F. Cambriel, the title of which is at the beginning of this article and of the three others which preceded it. F. Cambriel is a contemporary alchemist, who will show us nothing comparable to what is interesting in the writings of the ancient alchemist.
His course of alchemy divided into nineteen lessons, as the title indicates, cannot be the object of a detailed analysis, because there is absolutely nothing positive as facts of experiments or as results of chemical research; there is more, the author says positively never to have learned chemistry in the schools , and no passage of his book authorizes to think that he made the least experiment. So much for the practice.

As for the theory, there is none. F. Cambriel cites the names of several ancient alchemists, but there is no evidence that he studied them, or even read them with any attention. The ideas he expresses, from the point of view of alchemical literature, are common and very superficial, and he always states them in an absolute manner, without showing their relationship with those of the authors whom he should have considered as his masters; thus, his second lesson is devoted to the explanation of a figure of a bishop and his accessories which are part of the sculptures of one of the side portals of Notre-Dame de Paris. This figure and its accessories, all allegorical, represent, according to him, for those who know how to explain the hieroglyphs, as clearly as possible all the work and the product ,or the result of the philosopher's stone . He relates that it was while passing one day in front of the Church of Notre-Dame de Paris that he examined with great attention the beautiful sculptures with which the three doors are adorned, that he saw at one of these doors one of the most beautiful hieroglyphs, of which he had never noticed. Well, if he had little knowledge of alchemical literature, he would have known that, in the fourth volume of the Library of Chemical Philosophers , page 366, one reads a very curious explanation of the enigmas and hieroglyphic, physical figures, which are at the great portal of the cathedral and metropolitan church of Notre-Dame de Paris, by the Sieur Esprit Gobineau de Montluisant, a gentleman from Chartres, a friend of natural and alchemical philosophy .

Here is the first paragraph of this writing, which begins on page 366, and ends with page 393.

"On Wednesday, May 20, 1640, the eve of the glorious ascension of our Savior Jesus Christ, after having prayed to God and his most holy virgin mother in the cathedral and metropolitan church of Paris, I left this beautiful and large church, and attentively considering its rich and magnificent portal, the structure of which is very exquisite, from the foundation to the summit of its two lofty and admirable towers, I made the remarks which I am about to set forth. »
Such is the preamble of a writing whose object is the same as that of F.

Cambriel's second lesson. We prefer to believe that the author did not know this writing, rather than admitting that he knowingly did not mention it.

But the explanation of this way of proceeding in the exposition of his ideas is the consequence of the way in which F, Cambriel says he managed to shorten by half the duration of the preparation of the philosopher's stone; full of humility, he says he is indebted to God himself!

God , he says, inspired him in three different times and four years apart from one inspiration to another, the way to do well the alchemical operation that he was unaware of., and, after having related in detail the circumstances of these inspirations, he has recourse to a singular proof to convince his readers that, a stranger to lies, he writes only the truth. He therefore affirms that another great mark of love that God had the goodness to grant him during his childhood, it is a faithful picture of the perfections with which the creator of all things is endowed! and in these perfections is included a minute description of his physical qualities! Certainly, if the Cours de philosophie alchimie was not the writing of a 79-year-old man, if his candor, his sincerity, had not been attested to us by recommendable men, among whom we will cite M. Baudrimont, to whom Cambriel was introduced by a friend of Ampère, the late Gilbert, whom we knew as editor of the scientific journal of the Gazette de France,Journal of Scientists .

But, after the long examination that we have made of the History of Chemistry by Dr. Hoefer, it seemed appropriate to complete the general considerations to which we have given ourselves over by an outline of the alchemical doctrines, in conformity with the lessons that we gave in 1847 and in 1848, at the Museum of Natural History.

The main points of this latest review that we have highlighted are the following two, which we give as a summary:

1st point . We have shown the hermetic art as the cradle of the physico-chemical sciences.

It is not in the oldest alchemists, such as Geber , that we have found the most exaggerated or erroneous ideas.

At one time, men coming out of alchemical laboratories devoted themselves exclusively to the practice of purely chemical processes, without for that ceasing to believe in the reality of the transmutation of metals such is Glauber .
At a later period, the man of science made the alchemist disappear; but, if this has disappeared, it has not ceased to exist, and, speaking of the most recent hermetic work, we have shown in the modern alchemist the absence of all science; it is under this report that we spoke about the work of F. Cambriel .

2 nd point. There has never been a special theory specific to the hermetic art, but general ideas drawn from the study of the invisible world that each alchemist applied to his research as he saw fit. These are the ideas that presided exclusively over Cambriel's book.

The alchemist, in his humility, convinced of the omnipotence of God, invokes him, and a moment comes when he believes in divine inspiration.

The idea of ​​power , of force , of life , dominates with him over the idea of ​​impotence , of passive matter , of death , from then on he distinguishes the gold of nature from alchemical gold. The first, however precious it may be, is dead; the second is alive.

To this life attributed to alchemical gold is linked the idea of ​​a soul and that of a spirit that must be given to the dead gold of nature. It is on this condition that he will acquire through the alchemical operation the ability to transmute imperfect metals into gold.

Obviously these ideas have their source in the invisible world, they are the most abstract expression of alchemical thought.

To make it clearer, more intelligible, the idea of ​​life leads to the idea of ​​generation, and then we speak of a hot and dry principle, acting as male seed, and of a cold and humid principle, acting as female seed.

Finally, the observation of the ferment made in the visible world leads to the idea of ​​considering the animated gold of the philosopher's stone as acting like a ferment, an agent characterized by the property of converting or transforming a matter into its own substance.

Such is, for us, the filiation of alchemical ideas: deriving from the invisible world, they are applied to the knowledge of matter in accordance with the a priori method .

Some considerations on the knowledge of antiquity and the Middle Ages from the point of view of the a priori method .

We have often heard positive minds say that alchemical ideas are found in branches of knowledge very different from the chemical sciences: this proposition is indisputable, but, to remain in the truth, we must not believe that the ideas of which we speak were borrowed from alchemy; according to us, they hold their greater or lesser analogy from the community of their origin, from the unique source from which they were drawn, resulting from the contemplation of the invisible world, they were then coordinated by the imagination, mysticism, or the a priori method .

Indeed, the idea of ​​life attributed by the alchemists to the gold of the philosopher's stone, which from the hermetic operation had received a soul and a spirit, is incontestably analogous to the system of Van Helmont, a system absolutely independent of alchemy, according to which, however, the chemical species result from the conjunction of water with principles called archaea, which derive from God a sort of consciousness of their special existence . Prior to alchemy, in certain philosophies, in certain Eastern mythologies, the earth, the moon, the sun, in short, the planets and the stars, were considered as living bodies, and even today there are natural philosophers in Germany, for whom the earth is; a large animal, The ideas of macrocosm and microcosm which preceded alchemy by several centuries are found in the hypotheses of anatomy and physiology professed in the 19th century .

These comparisons sufficiently show that the idea of ​​life attributed to inorganic bodies, which is common to the different systems that we have just recalled, derives originally from the contemplation of the invisible world, in accordance with the a priori method, that it is consequently not the result of the a posteriori method .according to which one starts from the observation of phenomena to seek the proximate causes of these; it would be interesting, from the point of view of scientific truth, to show the relations by which many of these opinions, given today, as new, are connected with very old hypotheses, and how excessively restricted observations, made on objects of the visible world, have been generalized to the extreme, in order to pass them off as demonstrative proofs of completely erroneous ideas.

This history, which we desire, would not be useless work; the conclusion would certainly explain a fact which has struck many observant minds more than once: it is the rapidity with which intellectual relations are established between a certain class of men devoted to the most diverse studies or preoccupied with the most different ideas as to the nature of the objects to which they relate. Whether they enter into a relationship through writing or through a simple meeting, whatever the diversity of their studies or their habitual meditations, they understand each other perfectly, often even half-heartedly; they part happy with each other and with perfect esteem for their minds. Where does this mutual understanding come from? From their inclination to indulge in ideas which flatter them or which are in any way agreeable to them, carried along by the imagination (they do not feel the need of having demonstrative proof of the propositions which they are disposed to admit as true, and ignorance of the past exposes them, moreover, often to take old errors for new truths.a posteriori method ; it is that, never having had the thought of having recourse to the control which, according to us, is the character of the experimental method , they confuse inductions, and even simple conjectures, with demonstrated truths.

We admit, in scientific works, inductions, and even conjectures, because, if they are founded, there comes a day when they testify to the force and the correctness of the spirit of their author, and, if they are only specious, they can, be the occasion of important work; but we admit them on the condition that they will be given explicitly for what they are, and not for positive consequences derived from observation, and marked with the stamp of truth which would have received from the control to which these consequences would have been subjected. Otherwise, inductions and conjectures given for the truth might have the most untoward influence in intelligence and in the further development of science.

We end this article with a table of the knowledge of antiquity and the Middle Ages, drawn up accordingly to the a priori method . By reproducing therein definitions of several branches of knowledge or so-called sciences given in the preceding article, he will have the advantage of presenting them in a state of coordination suitable for showing their mutual relations.

Preliminary remarks relating to the following table.

Knowledge which, among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, was not advanced enough to constitute, in our opinion, a body of doctrine capable of being qualified as science , is indicated by characters of green color; such are chemistry , mineralogy , anatomy , physiology , medicine , and agriculture .
Everything concerning the divinatory art , consisting of four branches, divine divination, natural divination , human divination , diabolical divination , is printed in red-colored characters.

This table is a summary of the science of antiquity and the Middle Ages, considered in its greatest generality, and apart from particular opinions which may differ up to a certain point from the classification which it presents.
We have included the series of spiritual beings admitted pure Christianity, in order to show their correspondence with beings recognized by various religions. This correspondence is given as a fact; however, wanting to prevent the reproach that some people could address to us, of having confused the truth with the error, by placing the Christian religion beside other religions, under the general title of magic, we have isolated, so to speak, from the table what relates to Christianity, by tracing around it a line of green color . This explanation will doubtless forestall the reproach which might have been made to us for having confused revealed truths with systems of ideas which are the products of the mind of man.

We will make two further remarks, the first, that the table, in accordance with the title, presents above all human knowledge of antiquity and the Middle Ages as a whole, without consideration of the period. We would therefore be mistaken if we thought that we had claimed to represent this knowledge as existing all at the same time in the same period of time.

The second relates to the knowledge which was considered licit and illicit, the distinction between these two categories of knowledge belongs above all to Christian thought, and the table indicates the opinion which seemed to us the most common.

We are going to develop each of these remarks in turn, so that our thought will be well understood by the reader.

First remark.
The word magic , in its primitive meaning, applied to the most general science, the highest as well as the most sublime that it is given to man to know: it had lost its generality when a distinction was made between natural magic, and above all white magic and black magic . Consequently, the painting, by presenting the expressions magic , natural magic , white magic and black magic , traces a succession and not a simultaneity of things.

Second remark.
The peoples who, by recognizing the existence of divine or celestial spirits and that of infernal spirits, admitted their influence on human society in general, and on the individual, in particular, should thereby make a great difference between human acts, according to whether in their eyes, to realize them, there had been intervention of the first spirits or intervention of the second. It is therefore in the distinction and delimitation of these two kinds of intervention that we must seek the origin of what, according to them, was permitted or licit , and of what was forbidden or illicit .; and it must be recognized that where there has been an institution for the maintenance of a system of religious beliefs, there has been condemnation of acts in which the intervention of infernal spirits was admitted.

After all this, it is natural that the doctrine of the Catholic Church declared illicit any act whose execution had required the intervention of Satan, that it condemned, in principle, under the name of sorcerer, any man who resorted voluntarily to this intervention to produce supernatural effects.

But where a real difficulty lay was when it came to applying the principle to a given act, to know whether the perpetrator of that act was innocent or should be condemned as guilty. It is therefore not surprising that we have varied opinions, according to the times, on the distinction of what was lawful from what was not,
For example, in times of ignorance, natural phenomena or surprising acts that men knew how to produce were considered as belonging to black magic , phenomena which were later classified among those of natural magic or white magic .

The ancient peoples and most of the Greek philosophers believed in astrology, that is to say in the influence of the celestial bodies and particularly the planets on men. If some philosophers did not consider the stars as gods or as being animated, they nevertheless recognized in them the faculty of acting on terrestrial objects and particularly on men.

The horoscopy was the consequence of this opinion. The Catholic Church considered it partly lawful, as it was about things on which the stars had, according to her, a real influence, while the horoscopy became illicit, when great people made use of it with the intention of foreseeing the future of a war that they wanted to undertake, of an alliance that they wanted to form…. The Anglican Church has rejected horoscopy as illicit.

A part of the aruspicine, that which relates to comets, was, at a certain time, considered as licit, comets were then classified among the meteors. Signs of the wrath of God, the Church prescribed during their manifestation, a large number of religious practices, such as prayers, fasts, alms, to ward off celestial wrath.
In concluding what we wanted to say on the distinction between what was licit and what was illicit, and of the judgments made by ecclesiastical tribunals, in accordance with this distinction, we think it right to remark that, wherever there has been faith or conviction in religious beliefs, acts contrary to the doctrines which were considered sacred have been condemned. Let us recall as an example, the condemnation of Socrates to drink hemlock, pronounced by 281 votes against 220. And yet the judges did not constitute an exceptional court, nor even a court responsible for hearing only matters of religion: fellow citizens of the great man, they had never lost sight of him, the pupils of the victim were there to testify that their master had given them only the principles of the healthiest morality. The judges belonged to the most spiritual people in the world, and the Athenians were part of that Greek nation which did not have, like the other peoples of antiquity, a single central power whose action extended to all the individuals of the nation. The Greek nation therefore did not have, like the Egyptian people, colleges of priests answerable to a great pontiff.epistolographer . Finally, by the independence of the particular States into which it was divided, by the diversity of the laws which governed each State, by the independence of its philosophers, it constituted a society which was the transition from those of the ancient peoples to ours, because of the influence which the individual who was neither priest, nor king, nor prince, nor soldier, could exercise there by the simple influence of his word and his writings.

Well, Socrates succumbs, in his native city, under the double accusation of impiety and of having corrupted the youth. Sophists are not afraid to accuse him of having researched , with impious curiosity , what happens in heaven and in the interior of the earth , and of not recognizing the gods to whom his fellow-citizens sacrifice . They add that Socrates himself claims that a spirit, a demon directs his conduct.

If Melitus, Anytus, and Lycon obeyed the vilest passions, articulating accusations which they knew to be false, yet they carried the conviction of the defendant's guilt in 281, consciences which were not all, at least, under the influence of the passions which supported the accusation. Certainly, if history condemned the judges of Galilee, it must admit in their favor extenuating circumstances, by comparing their sentence to that of the Areopagus who condemned Socrates to death.
E. CHEVREUL.