Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/502

464 Persia. Mohammed-ben-Zakaria, so celebrated in mediæval Europe under the name of Rhazès, was also a Persian. In Spain the Jews of the famous school of Saadia and Juda Halevy exercised considerable influence over the academy of Cordova. Lastly, European historians have systematically exaggerated the ignorance of the Arabs before the time of Mahomet and their intolerance after the establishment of Moslemism, either from the zeal which prompted them to carry on a sort of literary crusade in honour of Christianity, or because in the 18th century they directed against Mahomet attacks which were intended for Christianity itself.

Alchemy received from the Arabians many significant titles. It was the science of the key, because it opened all the mysteries of creation, physiology, and medicine; it was the science of the letter M (misam is the Arabic for balance), because by means of the balance the gain or loss of all bodies could be determined, even while undergoing chemical combinations. Later on, as is well known, it was by a rigorous and obstinate use of the balance in the hands of Priestley, Cavendish, and Lavoisier, that positive chemistry was founded. Lastly, Rhazès gave to the science of the philosopher's stone a name which plunges us again into the mythological ages of chemistry. He called it the astrology of the lower world.

The discoveries of Geber as a chemist do not form part of our subject; but we may mention, in passing, the infernal stone, the corrosive sublimate, the exact process of the cupellation of gold and silver, and three sorts of distillation by evaporation, condensation, and simple nitration. In another direction Geber, by re-inventing aqua fortis, and by discovering ammoniacal salts for his aqua regalis, laid the foundation both of alchemy and chemistry. The salt of ammonia, so easy to volatilise, was the source of many baseless dreams, as is proved by its various names—anima sensibilis, aqua duorum fratrum ex sorore, cancer, lapis angeli conjungentis, &c. Geber believed in the parallelism between metals and planets; lie thought that metals were all equally composed of mercury, arsenic, and sulphur, and that in the descending scale from gold to lead, mercury, arsenic, and sulphur were each present in a greater or less degree of purity in proportion to the colour and quality of each metal. Later on, the addition of the four elements—heat, cold, dryness, and moisture—complicated still more the reasonings by which the alchemists sought to prove that the transmutation of metals was in the power of any man who imitated nature—i.e., perfected the imperfect metal by correcting its excess of heat or moisture. Geber did not think that an operation of the laboratory could counterfeit the natural work of purification, which demanded a thousand years. But with him moisture played the same part as phlogiston in Stahl's system. In other words, the philosopher to whom all succeeding searchers for the philosopher's stone swore allegiance was contented to formulate his theory without considering the possibility of putting it in practice. He was an alchemist indeed, but no gold-seeker. This forerunner of positive science foresaw the part which the gases would be found to play in the composition of bodies; he called them spirits—a figure which took strong hold on the imagination of Geber, as well as of the masters of the sacred art, and which was formalised by the alchemists of the middle ages. Khazès, who re-invented sulphuric acid and aqua vitæ, was par excellence a doctor. The same remark applies to Avicenna, whose works are a methodical, but not very profound, systematisation of the current ideas and science of his day. Artephius was a cabalist, as his theory of the apparent and latent parts of man's nature shows. The author of The Key of Wisdom and A Secret Book on the Philosopher's Stone was the reputed possessor of an elixir vitæ. We do not know whether this was potable gold or a quintessence of all the active elements of the three kingdoms. However this may be, this mysterious alchemist, who lived about 1130, was the inventor of soap, and, what is of more importance for our subject the promoter of a new interpretation of Jacob's ladder or Homer's chain. Minerals, he said, come from the primitive elements, plants from minerals, animals from plants, and as each body is resolved into another body of the order immediately below it, animals become vegetables and vegetables minerals. We see that in this view of the interdependence of the three kingdoms there is as much truth as error. With Calid, the author of the Book of the Three Words and of the Book of the Secrets of Alchemy, the parallelism between the metals and planets takes a retrograde step towards astrology. This Calid, a soi-disant king of Egypt, held that before engaging in any operation of alchemy the stars ought to be consulted. This recommendation was literally followed by the thaumaturgists of the middle ages and the Renaissance. The effect was fatal; if, when Calid or one of his school saw the metals obstinately refuse to be purified in his crucible, he did not wait for a happy conjunction of constellations above in order to try his chance again with the operations of inferior astrology.

The East, when it accepted from Aristotle the theory of form and matter, invested it with a signification of its own never dreamed of by the Stagyrite, and invented, as it were, an Arabian Aristotle—that is, the Aristotle of the middle ages. Not only at Alexandria had the students of the sacred art evolved the theory of the trans mutation of the four elements (Cicero assigns the doctrine to the Stoics), but in the East the translators of Aristotle added to the theory a corollary more important than the proposition itself, viz., that every body by its form and natural motions indicates its soul, its natural properties, &c.; that the resemblance between the external appearance of things and beings indicates their natural likenesses, &c. The idea of destiny, which all nations who accepted the doctrine of the Logos expressed by some term or other analogous to the Latin fatum (what is spoken), Mahomet translated by his famous phrase ncctoub (it was written). We find a Turkish writer, the declared enemy of astrology and elixirs, Nabi Eil endi, in his remarkable book, Counsels to my Son, Aboul Khair, saying that heaven is covered with a writing that only God can read, and seeking what letter the eyes, the eyebrows, the mouth, &c., form to find therein the secret of their better use. Like one of the Talmudists, the obscure Kallir for instance, he decomposes the name Mahomet in order the better to offer the prophet, as it were, the quintessence of praise, more worthy of God, who in that sacred name, as in all terrestrial things, has written at least one letter of the Word which will serve as a key to open all their hidden virtues. By pursuing an analogous direction, mediævalism, and more especially the Renaissance, introduced new subtleties into the astrological branch of alchemy—tetragrams, pentacles, and other mysterious characters and figures.

It is not surprising, then, to find that Nabi Effendi, who lived in the second half of the 17th century, can produce no other reasons for dissuading his son from joining the alchemists than the fact that some were poor, others quacks, and, as the most important ground of all, that God had declared his wrath against those who dare to imitate his works. Indeed, the peculiar symbolism of the various nations of the East had been broken up by revolutions and conquests, and the disjecta membra again reunited, so as to form a wonderful phantasmagoria of ideas and images—a sort of scientific Arabian Nights.

The care we have taken to note down at the moment of its birth each of the ideas which influenced alchemy, allows us to sketch more rapidly the history of its decline and fall. Albert Groot, commonly known as Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), revived the theory of Geber; and, in spite of the tendencies of the time, entertained the same doubts as his illustrious master on the possibility of transmutation. He is the first to speak of the affinity of bodies, a term he uses in reference to the action of sulphur on metals. He gives the savans of the day the sage advice not to take service with princes, who are sure to treat as thieves those who do not succeed. And, indirectly, he warns princes that philosopher's gold is only tinsel. Beginning with nitric acid, which he calls prime water, and so on, through a regular series of secondary, tertiary waters, &c., he proposed a method for dissolving all metals. Roger Bacon, while opposing magic, calls oxygen aer cibus ignis, and regards the elixir as a substitute for time, that agent of which nature takes no account. Gold is perfect, because nature has consummated her work. But Roger Bacon seems to have turned his genius principally to physics and mechanism. St Thomas Aquinas, in his theological writings, forbids the sale of alchemist's gold, and in his special treatise on the subject unmasks an imposture of the charlatans of the day, who pretended to make silver by projecting a sublimate of white arsenic on copper. Further, Aquinas, by reducing the primitive elements of metals to two, revives and corroborates the theory of Galen and Albertus Magnus. About the same time we find a pope, John XXII., and a king, Alphonso X. of Leon and Castile, occupying themselves with alchemy. But the pope in a well-known bull denounced all those searchers for gold "who promised more than they could perform;" another proof that alchemy and the search for gold, though distinguished by