NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 19 



swered that it was not ; that God might have taken the form of a 

 stone, or of a log, or of a beast. The possibilities opened to wild 

 substitutes for science by this sort of reasoning were infinite. 

 Men have often wondered how it was that the Arabians accom- 

 plished so much in scientific discovery as compared with Christian 

 investigators: the reason is not far to seek; the Arabians were 

 comparatively free from these mystic allurements, these theologic 

 modes of thought which in Christian Europe flickered in the air 

 on all sides, luring men into paths which led no-whither. 



Strong investigators like Arnold de Villanova, Raimond Lully, 

 Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were thus drawn 

 far out of the only paths which led to fruitful truths. In a work 

 generally ascribed to Arnold of Villanova, the student is told that 

 in mixing his chemicals he must repeat the psalm Exsurge Do- 

 mine, and that on certain chemical vessels must be placed the last 

 words of Jesus on the cross. Vincent de Beauvais insists that as 

 the Bible declares that Noah, when five hundred years old, had 

 children born to him, he must have possessed alchemical means 

 of preserving life ; and much later Dickinson insists that the 

 patriarchs generally must have owed their long lives to such 

 means. It was loudly declared that the reality of the philoso- 

 pher's stone was proved by the words of St. John in the Revela- 

 tion, " To the victor I will give a white stone/' The reasonable- 

 ness of seeking to develop gold out of the baser metals was for 

 many generations based upon the doctrine of the resurrection of 

 the physical body, which, though explicitly denied by St. Paul, 

 had become a part of the creed of the Church. Martin Luther 

 was especially drawn to believe in the alchemistic doctrine of 

 transmutation by this analogy. The Bible was everywhere used, 

 both among Protestants and Catholics, in support of these mystic 

 adulterations of science, and one writer, as late as 1751, based his 

 alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred passages of Script- 

 ure. As an example of this sort of reasoning, we have a proof 

 that the elect will preserve the philosopher's stone until the last 

 judgment, drawn from a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Co- 

 rinthians, " This treasure have we in earthen vessels." 



The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new in- 

 gredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic 

 thought ; the Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the Prot- 

 estant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic reveries 

 of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething mass. 



And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we 

 find scriptural arguments no less perverse and even comical used 

 on the other side. As an example of this, just before the great 

 discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of 

 Becher opposed with the following syllogism : " King Solomon, 



