 | Alchemy |  |
EPILOGUE
If the chemical philosophy seemed a plausible
alternative to the work of the mechanical philosophers in
the middle decades of the seventeenth century, this
alternative did not remain a viable one for long. The
impressive results of the mechanists-culminating in
the Principia mathematica of Isaac Newton
(1687)-stamped on "respectable" natural philosophy
the mathematical abstraction of the new physics. And
yet, this is not to say that alchemical thought died after
a final flowering in the sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries. The collection of manuscripts at King's
College, Cambridge leaves little doubt that Isaac Newton
was passionately concerned with the traditional
problems of transmutation. Furthermore, recent research
indicates that Newton's alchemical speculations may
have been instrumental in the crystallization of some
of his more acceptable concepts of physics. Similarly,
Robert Boyle was influenced by alchemical thought.
He published on the degradation of silver and his
theoretical views were strongly influenced by his early
reading of van Helmont. However, it is possible to go
beyond these examples. Alchemical works were written
by the important practical chemist, Johann Rudolf
Glauber and the medical chemistry of the Renaissance
alchemists found a new proponent in the revision of
Franciscus Sylvius de la Böe whose work went through
numerous seventeenth-and eighteenth-century
editions. In like manner many elements of Paracelsian
chemistry were retained in somewhat altered form in
the texts of the eighteenth-century phlogiston chemists.
At the same time the German revival of alchemy and
Rosicrucianism stimulated a new interest in earlier
interpretations of a vitalistic and mystically oriented
universe. The impact of this on the growth of the
nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie has yet to be
assessed.
Many characteristic themes of alchemical thought and style are present in the earliest texts that have survived. Both the secrecy and the practical recipes of the metallic craft tradition are evident in the works of the late Hellenistic authors dating from the late third and the fourth centuries A.D. The allegorical and symbolical style of later alchemical works is also present here, and this is a reflection of the mystical tenor of the current philosophies and religions of the late Empire. The medical theme is absent in the Greek tradition and this seems to have been derived from Eastern sources. First found in Chinese alchemical works emphasizing the lengthening of life and the search for immortality, medical alchemy was integrated first into Islamic and then into Western alchemy and medicine.
There is little doubt that alchemy, understood in its broadest sense as a chemical key to nature, played a significant role in the development of the Scientific Revolution. The claim that this mystical science should replace the Aristotelianism and Galenism of the schools was looked on with dismay by early seventeenth-century mechanists who were forced to clarify their own views in their attacks on authors such as Paracelsus and Robert Fludd. At the same time, however, the chemical and alchemical call for a new science based on new observations in nature was important in a period that witnessed an ever-lessening adherence to scholastic authority. Finally, the Paracelsian and iatrochemical adoption of the primary goal of the medical alchemy of the Middle Ages resulted in the permanent acceptance of chemistry as a legitimate tool of the physician and the pharmacist.
| Alchemy | |