§ 22. Alchemistic View of the Nature of Gold.
The alchemists regarded gold as the most perfect metal, silver being
considered more perfect than the rest. The reason of this view is not
difficult to understand: gold is the most beautiful of all the metals,
and it retains its beauty without tarnishing; it resists the action of
fire and most corrosive liquids, and is unaffected by sulphur; it was
regarded, as we have pointed out above (see § 9), as symbolical of
the regenerate man. Silver, on the other hand, is, indeed, a beautiful
metal which wears well in a pure atmosphere and resists the action of
fire; but it is attacked by certain corrosives (e.g., aqua fortis
or nitric acid) and also by sulphur. Through all the metals, from the
one seed, Nature, according to the
alchemists, works continuously up to gold; so that, in a sense, all
other metals are gold in the making; their existence marks the staying
of Nature's powers; as "Eirenæus Philalethes" says: "All metallic
seed is the seed of gold; for gold is the intention of Nature in regard
to all metals. If the base metals are not gold, it is only through some
accidental hindrance; they are all potentially gold."
13 Or, as another alchemist puts it: "Since
. . . the substance of the metals is
one, and common to all, and
since this substance is (either at once, or after laying aside in course
of time the foreign and evil sulphur of the baser metals by a process of
gradual digestion) changed by the virtue of its own indwelling sulphur
into GOLD, which is the goal of all the metals, and the true intention
of Nature—we are obliged to admit, and freely confess that in the
mineral kingdom, as well as in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, Nature
seeks and demands a gradual attainment of perfection, and a gradual
approximation to the highest standard of purity and excellence."
14 Such was the alchemistic view of the
generation of the metals; a theory which is admittedly crude, but which,
nevertheless, contains the germ of a great principle of the utmost
importance, namely, the idea that all the varying forms of matter are
evolved from some one primordial stuff—a principle of which chemical
science lost sight for awhile, for its validity was unrecognised by
Dalton's Atomic Theory (at least, as enunciated by him),
but which is being demonstrated, as we hope to show hereinafter, by
recent scientific research. The alchemist was certainly a fantastic
evolutionist, but he
was an evolutionist, and, moreover, he did
not make the curious and paradoxical mistake of regarding the fact of
evolution as explaining away the existence of God—the alchemist
recognised the hand of the Divine in nature—and, although, in these
days of modern science, we cannot accept his theory of the growth of
metals, we can, nevertheless, appreciate and accept the fundamental
germ-idea underlying it.
