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At the same time, under the Contra-Levitatem maxim, it was impossible to conceive of substance except as ponderable substance. These experiments are rightly regarded as the actual beginning of modern chemistry. In Lavoisier we find an observer of nature who was predominantly interested in what the scales could tell about changes in substances.
For its very formation had been the outcome of the Contra-Levitatem maxim. The following glance over the history of chemistry will show this. The birth of chemistry as a science, in the modern sense, is closely connected with a revolutionary change in the conception of what can be called the chemical arch-process-combustion, or, to use a more scientific term, oxidation.
This change arose out of the Contra-Levitatem maxim and the new conception of heat which this maxim required.
Not so obvious is the fact that heat, apart from being an agent working at matter in this way, is the very essence underlying all material existence, out of which matter in its three ponderable states comes into being and into which it is capable of returning again. Such a conception of matter was naturally absent from the age of the Contra-Levitatem orientation of the human mind.
This shows to what extent even the scientifically untrained consciousness in our time turns instinctively to the tangible or weighable side of nature, so that some effort is required to confess simply to what the eye and the other senses perceive. During the first hundred years after the establishment of the Contra-Levitatem maxim, man's situation was in a certain sense the opposite of this.
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