Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/500

462 true etymology of the word chemic is logical, and had therefore no charms for the psychological spirit of the age. Later on, when men began to reflect that the ancient name for Egypt was Cham or Chemia, because, according to Plutarch, its soil was black like the pupil of the eye, it flattered the chemists to call chemistry "the art of the ancient Chemi." Hence from a false derivation the art received a fresh impulse.

The discovery of the principal manuscripts of the sacred art we owe to the labour of M. Ferdinand Hoefer. We can take no safer guide than the judicious and profound author of the History of Chemistry in investigating the delusions into which a master of the sacred art was most likely to fall.

But neither M. F. Hoefer's explanation of the appearances which the first master of the sacred art mistook for fact, nor the metaphysical theory of Nemesius, will enable us to understand how Zosimus the Theban, in the very infancy of the art, succeeded in discovering in sulphuric acid a solvent of metals; in assigning to mercury (which he called "holy water") its proper function, a function which succeeding generations of alchemists so monstrously exaggerated; and finally in disengaging from the red oxide of mercury oxygen gas, that Proteus which so often eluded the grasp of the alchemists, till at last it was held fast by the subtle analysis of Lavoisier. For we must remember that solid metals were considered as living bodies, and gases as souls which they allowed to escape. Of all the ingenious inventions of the Jewess Maria for regulating fusions and distillations, the only one that has survived is the Balneum Mariæ. The principle it depends on, viz., that the calcination of violent heat is less powerful as a solvent or component than the liquefaction produced by gentle heat, was afterwards reasserted by the Arabian Geber, and advocated by Francis Bacon. M. Hoefer imagines that Maria the Jewess discovered hydrochloric acid, the formidable rival of sulphuric acid. Succeeding writers on the history of chemistry have remarked that the band ages of Egyptian mummies were not more numerous than the mysteries of the sacred art, and the injunctions not to divulge its secrets, "under pain of the peach tree," or, to translate into modern English the language of an ancient papyrus, under pain of being poisoned by prussic acid. We should be wrong in thinking that all these allegories had no meaning for the initiated, and that this mystical tendency of the sacred art arrested its growth at starting. Rather the truth is, that these myths, which at a later stage prevented the free development of alchemy, at first served to stimulate its nascent powers.

Modern critics have pronounced some traditional sayings of Hermes Trismegistus to be apocryphal, but they have not given sufficient weight to the remarkable circumstance that it is precisely because these sayings are a medley of the cabalistic, gnostic, and Greek ideas with which Alexandria was then seething, that the seven golden chapters, the Emerald Table, and the Pimander obtained their authority—an authority they would never have possessed had they been only a translation of some obscure Egyptian treatise. No Egyptian priest could have written a sentence like that we find so often quoted as an axiom by subsequent alchemists: "Natura naturam superat; deinde verò natura naturæ congaudet; tandem natura naturam continet." Plato adds (not the disciple of Socrates, but a pseudo-Plato in the famous collection called Turba Philosophorum)—"continens autem omnia terra est." For, translated into modern language, this means that there may indeed be in this universe things which pass our intellectual ken; but that all that exists, all that is produced by the strife and changes of the elements, all, in a word, that appears to us supernatural, is really natural. That this is his meaning we may gather from the singularly bold comment which Plato himself adds, and which we may thus translate "Everything, even heaven and hell, are of this earth." It is true that the alchemists failed to draw any very definite conclusions from this fundamental axiom. But if we consider it carefully, we shall see that this earliest doctrine of the sacred art, which was now rapidly passing into alchemy, by thus excluding the supernatural, was making a great advance in the direction of positive science. This early advance was, however, counterbalanced by an early error (which itself arose from a noble ambition), viz., that art is as powerful as nature. The Emerald Table begins with a sentence no less celebrated than that quoted above:—"This is true, and far distant from a lie; whatsoever is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below. By this are acquired and perfected the miracles of the one thing." To understand the importance of this emphatic and categorical exordium, we must forget the sharp distinction we now draw between