Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/498

460 made in various ways to verify and apply this theory; magic, indeed, or rather magical power, was at starting purely cosmogonic, i.e., regarded as an attribute of God or nature, before it was counterfeited by the magicians of various countries. But, as St Simon has well observed, chemical phenomena are much more complicated than astronomical—the latter requiring only observation, the former experiment—and hence astrology preceded alchemy. But there was then no hard and fast line between the several branches of science, and hence the most opposite were united, not, as now, by a common philosophical or philanthropical object, but by reason of their common theological origin. Thus alchemy was the daughter of astrology, and it was not till the end of the 16th century that she passed from a state of tutelage. Just in the same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for, as was natural, before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected beforehand that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy.

After this general introduction we may now proceed to consider the subject in detail under the following heads:—First, we will cast a rapid glance at certain cosmologies and philosophical systems, in order to bring prominently before the reader those points which throw light on chemical theories. Secondly, we will consider alchemy at the moment when it ceased to be purely religious and began an independent existence; that is to say, during the 3d and 4th centuries, and in that city which was the battlefield on which the various philosophical and religious creeds of the East met. In the fierce struggles which ensued, in the strange alliances which they there made, we shall find them, by their mutual recriminations, involuntarily revealing to us their hidden secrets. As the darkness of the middle ages approaches, we shall follow our science in its journey to Arabia; from Arabia we shall trace it back to Europe, and hear it taught with stammering lips and feeble tongue by subtile or solemn doctors. We shall attempt to analyse its ambitious aspirations and its barren performances. During the Renaissance we shall see it at its zenith, inspired by a mad enthusiasm which was near akin to genius, an enthusiasm which gave birth to medicine and modern chemistry. Lastly, in the 17th and 18th centuries we shall see it degenerate into pure charlatanism. In conclusion, we shall attempt to recover the few grains of pure ore which may be extracted from its broken alembics.

In India, as is well known, the contempt in which the caste of artizans was held was still farther increased by the tendency of religion to consider birth and life, and the actions and desires which are part and parcel of man's life, as an unmixed evil. Consequently, outside the workshop, practical chemistry can have made but little progress. Nevertheless, among the priests of India, as in later times in Europe, we find the ordeal of fire and of serpents commonly practised. It follows that the Brahmins must have possessed some chemical secrets to enable them to kill or save those they thought guilty or innocent. These secrets, too, must from time to time have been divulged by indiscretion or perfidy, and spread beyond the temple; for we read of accused persons escaping unharmed from the ordeal, even when their accuser was a Brahmin. But the Mussulman traveller of the 9th century, who has preserved this curious detail, allows that the trial was in his day becoming more elaborate and complicated, and that it was next to impossible for an accused person to escape. However this may be, it is certain that the meditative genius which distinguishes the race had, even before they conquered the yellow and black races, led these first speculators to certain conceptions which have an important bearing on the present subject. Some had conceived ether as composed of distinct atoms, others imagined an ether decomposing itself into atoms by the free play of its own forces. These two theories, the one dualistic, the other unitarian, strangely foreshadow the discoveries of modern dynamics. We find the speculators of another race indulging the singular fancy that they could observe in atoms what we may call oscultations of the play of forces. This, at any rate, is the most natural explanation of the term nodes by which the Phœnicians designated atoms. The Persians, who considered the first tree and the first bull as the two ancestors of man, discovered in physics generally two antagonistic principles, one male and one female, primordial fire and primordial water, corresponding to the good and bad principles of their religion. Over all creatures and all things there were presiding genii, Tzeds or Feroners. They had already formulated the parallelism between the Sephiroth, the empyrean, the primum mobile, the firmament, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Mercury, Moon, and the parts of the body, the brain, lungs, heart, &c. In this correspondence between the heavenly bodies and the human frame which the ancient Persians laid down, and the Hindu belief in the peregrination of sinful souls through the animal, vegetable, and even the mineral world, till, by these pilgrimages, they at last won absorption into the Deity, or Moncti, we have, in their original form, the two fundamental beliefs of alchemy.

The Greeks, unrivalled as they were in poetry, art, and ethics, made little way in occult philosophy. The Greek intellect, precise and anthropomorphic, with no leaning to transcendentalism, was a protest against the boldness of oriental metaphysics. Thus they contented themselves with inventing a strange gamut of deities corresponding to different types of men. This gamut—Jupiter, Saturn,