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Having studied the sciences with his father Pierre and his uncle Claude Grandier, who were learned astrologers and alchemists, he entered, at the age of twelve, the Jesuit college at Bordeaux, having already received the ordinary education of a young man.
These chemical studies were continued in Europe by the alchemists, a name also of Arabic origin, a set of inquirers who were to a great extent drawn away from scientific studies by vain though unending efforts to change the baser metals into gold and silver, as well as to find a compound which would make men immortal in the body.
There is a proposal for a new and universal language, based of course on French; and we are reminded by an article on Alcahest, a mysterious drug of the alchemists, to which two columns and a half are devoted, that the eighteenth century was nearer to the Middle Ages than the nineteenth. Yet all this mere learning was not what came nearest to the heart of Diderot and his fellow-workers.
So numerous and so great are these that the old alchemists, unlimited range through the material, immaterial and supernatural as they claimed for their art, would rub their eyes, bleared over blowpipe and alembic, at sight of its present riches. The half-hewn block handed down by these worthies not by any means Like that great Dawn which baffled Angelo Left shapeless, grander for its mystery,
Among the extravagant pretensions of the alchemists, that of forming a universal medicine was perhaps not the most irrational. It was only when they pretended to cure every disease, and to confer longevity, that they did violence to reason.
The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond. Yet we have discovered the nature and the law of its composition. "'As for me, he continued, 'I have gone farther still.
But the alchemical method found it easier to begin by introspection. The alchemist spun his universe from his own ideas of order, symmetry, and simplicity, as the spider spins her web from her own substance. A favourite saying of the alchemists was, "What is above is as what is below."
McQuirk, a morose man with a red eye, dashed each unsuccessful completed mixture into the waste pipes with curses gentle, husky and deep. They labored heavily and untiringly to achieve some mysterious solution like two alchemists striving to resolve gold from the elements. Into this back room one evening when his watch was done sauntered Con.
If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old alchemists, he may as well let it alone. He must talk in very plain words, and that is what I have done. You want to know what a certain number of scores of years have taught me that I think best worth telling.
Simon and Fourier, social alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor, he shows that he is far below these same alchemists. For Socialism, which will emancipate human labor force from its place as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have none is a matter of the greatest importance.
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