Alchemy and Modern Science: The Reassessment

In the summer of 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes went to a Sotheby’s auction and bought a large portion of Isaac Newton’s alchemical papers. Keynes was already a careful reader of Newton; he had edited the General Theory out of ideas Newton had sketched in manuscript two centuries earlier. But the alchemical papers were something else. Keynes read through them at his leisure over the following months, and in 1947 he published a brief, devastating reassessment. Newton was “not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago” (Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” 1947; reprinted in Gleick, ed., Newton: A Contemporary Perspective, 2003, p. 4).

That sentence is the founding document of the modern reassessment of alchemy. Before Keynes, the alchemical tradition was, in academic history of science, mostly a footnote — a curiosity of the seventeenth century, properly left behind. After Keynes — and after the much longer, much more careful work of scholars like Betty Dobbs, Richard Westfall, Lawrence Principe, and William Newman — the alchemical tradition is recognised as a major and continuous intellectual tradition that contributed substantially to the founding of modern science. The broad outlines of the reassessment are settled. The interesting disputes are about how far the reassessment goes.

The older view: a chapter of errors

The standard nineteenth-century story was simple. Alchemy was a chapter in the history of mistakes. The alchemists were mystics, charlatans, or deluded gold-seekers. The chemists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — Boyle, the phlogiston theorists, Lavoisier, Dalton — replaced the alchemical framework with a proper scientific chemistry. The boundary between the two traditions was the boundary between error and knowledge, and the alchemists were on the wrong side of it.

The story had respectable sources. The chemists themselves had been eager to draw the line. Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist (1661) is a polemic against the tria prima and the four elements of the inherited alchemical tradition. Lavoisier’s Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (1789) is, on its title page and in its first pages, a self-conscious rejection of the alchemical inheritance. The chemists wanted to be seen as making a clean break, and the older history of science accepted the framing.

But the framing was never quite right. The alchemists had written in deliberately obscure, allegorical, often coded language, and their claims — transmutation, the elixir of life, the integration of the human being with the cosmos — sounded absurd to the modern ear. The dismissal was easy. What the dismissal missed was that the alchemists were also, by the standards of their time, doing careful empirical laboratory work, and the laboratory tradition they built was the laboratory tradition that the chemists inherited.

The recovery of Newton

The first crack in the older view came with the recognition that Newton was a serious alchemist. That recognition was not, at first, an academic one. The economist Keynes was the first modern reader of Newton’s alchemical papers in something approaching their entirety, and his 1947 essay is the founding text. The professional historians took another generation. Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest (1980) is the first full biography that gives Newton’s alchemy its proper weight. Betty Dobbs’s The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (1975) is the first scholarly book to take Newton’s alchemical work seriously as a coherent intellectual programme. Lawrence Principe’s The Aspiring Adept (1998) is the first book to read Newton’s alchemy as alchemy, on its own terms, rather than as a prelude to something else. William Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018) is the definitive treatment.

What the recovery showed was three things. First, Newton’s alchemical work filled more than a million words and occupied more of his time, over a longer period, than any other branch of his natural philosophical work. Second, Newton’s alchemical work was not a youthful indiscretion that he later abandoned; it was a sustained, serious, lifelong commitment. Third, Newton’s alchemical work was integrated with the rest of his natural philosophy in ways that the older view could not accommodate. The famous “Queries” appended to the Opticks (1704) are unintelligible without the alchemical background. The alchemical theory of active forces is, in a sense, the same theory as the gravitational theory of the Principia (Newman, 2018, ch. 7). The boundary between alchemy and the new science, in Newton’s case, simply does not exist.

The recovery of the other founders

Newton was the largest catch, but he was not the only one. Robert Boyle, the supposed founder of the modern chemical tradition, left a substantial alchemical manuscript corpus in the Royal Society archives, and the manuscripts show that Boyle never repudiated the transmutational project in private, even as his published Sceptical Chymist attacked the inherited elemental theory. Principe (2013, pp. 145–152) reads the public/private split as a careful negotiation rather than a contradiction. John Locke, the supposed founder of empiricism, was an alchemist. So was Robert Hooke. So was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The founding generation of the Scientific Revolution was, by a substantial fraction of its members, an alchemical generation.

The recovery also extended backward. The Greek alchemical corpus, including Zosimos and the pseudo-Democritus, was edited and translated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, 1986; Martelli, The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus, 2014). The Arabic alchemical corpus, including Jabir and al-Razi, was made more widely available through the work of Kraus (1942–1943), Holmyard (Alchemy, 1957), and the more recent scholarship of Newman and the GAS tradition. The Latin alchemical corpus, including the medieval and early modern alchemists, was made accessible through critical editions and studies by Obrist, Pereira, and others. The recovery made it possible to study the alchemical tradition in its own terms.

The new history: what it claims

The “new history of alchemy” is not a single thesis; it is a cluster of arguments developed over the last forty years by Newman, Principe, Pamela Smith, and others.

First, the alchemists were serious thinkers and practitioners, not mystics or charlatans. They worked within a sophisticated theoretical framework and a disciplined laboratory tradition, and the framework and the tradition are coherent on their own terms. Principe (2013) is the strongest voice here. His central methodological move is to take the alchemists’ own language seriously — to read “philosophical mercury” as a technical term rather than as a metaphor — and that move has changed the field.

Second, the alchemical laboratory tradition is a major ancestor of the modern scientific laboratory. The alchemists developed the basic techniques (calcination, dissolution, distillation, sublimation, coagulation, crystallisation, filtration), the basic apparatus (the alembic, the retort, the athanor, the pelican, the cucurbit, the water bath, the sand bath), and the basic empirical knowledge of substances that the modern chemical laboratory inherited. Newman and Principe’s Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2002) is the most thorough case.

Third, the alchemists’ conviction that the differences among substances are differences in the proportions of basic constituents is a foundational idea of modern chemistry. The alchemists were wrong in detail (the four elements and the tria prima are not, in fact, the constituents of matter) but they were right in structure, and the structural insight is a major contribution to the history of science.

Fourth, the alchemical synthesis of natural philosophy, religion, and philosophy is an ancestor of the modern attempt to integrate science, religion, and philosophy. This last point is more contested than the first three, and Principe and Newman have written more cautiously about it than the older generation of historians.

The most important methodological innovation of the last thirty years is the social history of alchemy, principally associated with Pamela Smith’s The Business of Alchemy (1994). Smith’s book read the alchemical tradition as a network of patronage, finance, and craft, and it made the simple point that alchemy was a working business — apothecaries, metallurgists, assayers, mining entrepreneurs — and not just a theoretical tradition. The alchemical laboratory was funded. The alchemical laboratory produced things people wanted. The alchemical laboratory was, in many cases, profitable.

Smith’s argument has been refined and complicated by the subsequent scholarship, and there is a genuine debate (the “Smith–Panter debate”) about how much weight to put on the social and economic context. Principe (in a series of responses, gathered in The Aspiring Adept, 1998) has been the most careful critic, and the position that has emerged is that the social and economic context matters without being sufficient. The alchemical laboratory was a working business. It was also, in many cases, a serious natural-philosophical laboratory, and the two readings have to be held together.

The alchemical laboratory: what was actually done

The alchemical contribution to the laboratory sciences is easier to specify than the theoretical contribution, and it is harder to dismiss.

The alchemists developed the basic techniques of the modern chemical laboratory. Calcination, dissolution, distillation, sublimation, coagulation, crystallisation, filtration — these are the working operations of chemistry, and the alchemists developed them over more than two millennia of laboratory practice. The techniques remained the standard techniques of the chemical laboratory until the nineteenth century, and several are still in daily use.

The alchemists developed the basic apparatus. The alembic, the retort, the athanor (the self-feeding furnace that could keep a constant temperature for weeks), the pelican (the reflux distillation vessel with its long arms returning the condensate to the flask), the cucurbit (the gourd-shaped distillation vessel) — all of these are alchemical inventions, and all of them are ancestors of the modern laboratory apparatus. The modern chemist who sets up a distillation is performing an operation that the alchemists developed in the ninth and tenth centuries.

The alchemists prepared and studied a wide range of chemical substances. Sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, aqua regia, mercury compounds, antimony compounds, lead compounds, copper compounds — the list is long, and many of the most important reagents of the modern laboratory were first prepared and studied by alchemists. The Arabic Jabirian corpus in particular is full of new preparations, and the work of the Latin alchemists in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries extended the list further.

The alchemists made a substantial body of empirical observations about the behaviour of substances — what happens when you heat them, what dissolves in what, what crystallises and what does not, what reacts and what does not. The observations are the working knowledge of any chemist, and the alchemists built the empirical foundation that the chemists inherited.

The theoretical contribution: more qualified

The alchemical contribution to the theoretical framework of the modern sciences is more qualified, and Principe (2013) is the right person to make the qualification. The alchemists’ theory of the four elements and the tria prima was wrong in its details, and the modern chemical theory is incompatible with the alchemical framework. The alchemists were not proto-chemists. They were working within a different theoretical vocabulary, and the vocabulary does not map onto the modern one in any straightforward way.

But the alchemists did develop several theoretical ideas that have survived into the modern tradition, often in transformed form. The alchemists developed the concept of the unity of matter — that all substances are composed of the same underlying principles, and the differences among them are differences in proportion. The modern atomic theory is a transformation of this idea. The alchemists developed the concept of chemical analysis — that any substance can be decomposed into its components, and the components identified. The modern analytical chemistry is a transformation of this idea. The alchemists developed the concept of the laboratory as a controlled environment in which natural processes can be reproduced and manipulated. The modern laboratory is a transformation of this idea. The alchemists’ theoretical contribution is not in the details. It is in the structure of the question.

The alchemical inheritance in modern thought

The alchemical contribution to the modern philosophical and religious tradition is more diffuse, and it is harder to assess. The alchemists’ vision of the cosmos as a network of correspondences, governed by the principle of “as above, so below,” has been a recurring motif in the modern Western esoteric tradition, and the alchemical synthesis of natural philosophy, religion, and philosophy is one of the sources of the modern attempt to integrate science, religion, and philosophy.

The alchemical tradition is also a major topic in the academic study of Western esotericism, and the work of Wouter Hanegraaff, Kocku von Stuckrad, and the Aries journal tradition has done much to make the alchemical inheritance a serious object of scholarly study. The alchemical tradition is, in other words, a living part of the contemporary Western intellectual and cultural inheritance.

The modern reception

The modern reception of the alchemical tradition is complex and fragmented. The alchemical tradition is studied seriously by historians of science (Principe, Newman, Smith, Holmes, Beretta, among many others). It is studied by historians of religion (Hanegraaff, von Stuckrad, Faivre). It is studied by historians of philosophy and literature (Yates, Copenhaver, Brann). It is also a living part of the contemporary Western esoteric inheritance, and the alchemical symbolism and practice are central to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society, the modern Rosicrucian orders, and the contemporary spagyric revival.

The Jungian reading of alchemy, developed by Carl Gustav Jung in Psychologie und Alchemie (1944) and elaborated through Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955), has been enormously influential in the popular reception, and Jung is the figure most people who have heard of alchemy have heard of. The historians of alchemy have been more critical. Principe (The Aspiring Adept, 1998) and Newman (Promethean Ambitions, 2004) have argued that Jung’s projection of modern psychological categories onto a working laboratory tradition obscures what the alchemists actually thought and did, and the current scholarly consensus is that Jung’s reading is best treated as a brilliant misreading.

The interesting question for the next generation of historians is not whether alchemy contributed to modern science — that question is settled — but how the contribution is to be measured, and what the alchemical inheritance looks like once it is properly integrated into the history of modern science rather than treated as a precursor.

FAQ

Q: Why is the recovery of Newton’s alchemical papers so important? A: Keynes’s 1936 purchase revealed that the most rigorous natural philosopher of the early Enlightenment devoted more time to alchemy than to any other branch of his work. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018) documents the point in detail, and the documentation forced the reassessment of the relationship between alchemy and the Scientific Revolution.

Q: Was Boyle an alchemist? A: Yes. Boyle left a substantial alchemical manuscript corpus, much of it still unpublished in the Royal Society archives, and never repudiated the transmutational project in private. His published Sceptical Chymist (1661) attacked the inherited elemental theory, but the public/private split is one of the puzzles Principe (2013) addresses.

Q: Did alchemy really contribute to modern chemistry? A: In the narrow sense of laboratory techniques, apparatus, and reagents, yes. In the theoretical sense, the alchemical framework (the four elements, the tria prima) was displaced, not preserved, by modern chemistry.

Q: What is the scholarly consensus on the “alchemy → science” narrative? A: The whiggish version is dead. The current view, articulated by Newman and Principe, is that alchemy and the new science were intertwined rather than sequential: the same practitioners often worked in both modes, and the modern chemical theory displaced alchemical theory on specific empirical grounds rather than as a matter of general progress.