OLD AND NEW ALCHEMY 249 



couraged belief in the mutual convertibility of the "strange 

 and rare ' ' substances secreted, as if through some dim vital 

 process, by the earth under favor of the spheres. There 

 appeared, for instance, to be no reason, on the face of 

 things, why lead should not be ennobled into silver by the 

 cleansing action of fire, even as electrum was refined into 

 gold, and iron, strong and lustrous, was elicited from dull 

 earthy matter. 



The transcendental hopes of Egyptian artificers were 

 further raised and stimulated by the vague speculations of 

 Greek philosophers. Empedocles, vanishing amid the 

 flames of Etna, left behind him the long-lived doctrine of 

 the four elements, or "roots of things." The varieties of 

 matter, in his view, depended upon the variety of their 

 composition out of earth, water, air, and fire. Moreover, 

 the proportions of these admixtures were not supposed to 

 be determined inexorably, once for all. Expedients might 

 be found for their arbitrary modification. But here a log- 

 ical difficulty came in. The elements imparted quality, not 

 substance. Opposed by their qualities, they could not 

 be opposed in substance; 1 for substance is one, although 

 qualities are many. And qualities, to exist, must be incor- 

 porated. Aristotle evaded the crux by inventing a fifth ele- 

 ment to serve as a basis for the rest, and his "quintessence" 

 has, in more ways than one, obtained a kind of warrant 

 from modern science. But the immediate importance of 

 its introduction was that it availed to complete, and very 

 satisfactorily to complete, the antique theory of matter. 

 The hypothesis, in its finished shape, assumed a materia 

 prima ("potential matter," in Verulam's phrase) of inde- 

 terminate character, an elusive, and barely conceivable 

 essence, and gave it actuality by the addition, in suitable 

 measure, of a crowd of differentiating properties hardness, 

 color, weight, malleability, brittleness or toughness, and so 

 on. The scheme is frankly metaphysical ; it deals through- 



'M. Berthelot, Revue des Deux Mondes, September 1, 1893, page 

 322. 



