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If the spiritual nature is to become the dominating partner, the body must be mortified: the alchemists, of course, used this kind of imagery, and it was very real to them. In like manner the spirit of metals will be laid bare and enabled to exercise its transforming influences, only when the material form of the individual metal has been destroyed.
There were some periods, however, in the early part of mediæval history when this material was not forgotten: when the caliphs of the East formed of it some of the beautiful ornaments of their palaces; when the Arabian alchemists subjected it to the crucible, and so produced the pigment ivory black; when a Danish knight killed an elephant in the holy wars, and established an order of knighthood which still exists; when Charlemagne, the emperor of the West, had ivory ornaments of rare and curious carving.
The room around him was a jungle of terrestrial and celestial globes, chemists' retorts, tubes, pipes, and all the indescribable apparatus that modern science has invented, and which, to the uninitiated, seems as incomprehensible as the ancient paraphernalia of alchemists and astrologers.
It may be dissatisfied with its own combinations, hypotheses, systems; and leave Ptolemy for Newton, the alchemists for Lavoisier and Davy;—that is, it may decide that it has not yet touched the bottom of its own subject; but still its aim will be to get to the bottom, and nothing more. With matter it began, with matter it will end; it will never trespass into the province of mind.
The principle of phlogiston was more tangible, and more readily used, than the Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury of the alchemists; and to accustom people to speak of the material substance which remained when a metal, or other combustible substance, was calcined or burnt, as one of the elements of the thing which had been changed, prepared the way for the chemical conception of an element as a definite substance with certain definite properties.
Perhaps the language may be reconstructed; perhaps it may be found to embody something worth a hearing. Success is most likely to come by considering the growth of alchemy; by trying to find the ideas which were expressed in the strange tongue; by endeavouring to look at our surroundings as the alchemists looked at theirs. Do what we will, we always, more or less, construct our own universe.
It is probably well founded psychologically, a fact that I should like to emphasize in opposition to Fischer, Kat. The material to work upon, say the alchemists, is quite common and is met with everywhere. It is necessary only to know how to distinguish it, and that is where all the difficulty lies.
I could not help thinking that we three bespectacled figures lacked only the flowing robes to be taken for a group of mediaeval alchemists set down a few centuries out of our time in the murky light of Prescott's sanctum.
So we see that, exact science cannot take us far, yet, it is a mighty factor, in the evolution of the microcosm Man, and in consciously relating him to the Infinite Macrocosm God, Spirit, All. Paracelsus, the most celebrated of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, thus mystically speaks of his art: "If I have manna in my constitution, I can attract manna from heaven.
I think you will admit that the alchemists never found a method of transmuting the elements certainly none which was commercially feasible. And who can argue with the statement that "there wasn't a scientist worthy of the name in the whole outfit"?
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