Alchemy
In the narrow sense of the word, alchemy
is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmitting the base metals
into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the
Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era; thence it
passed to the Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to the Western Europe and its
realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down to the time of Paracelsus
and even later. Alchemy in its wider and true significant stands for the
chemistry of the middle ages. The idea of transmutation, in the country of its
origin, had a philosophical basis and was linked up with the Greek theories of
matter there current; thus, supplying a central philosophical principle, it is
to some extent unified and focused chemical effort, which previously, so far as
it existed at all, had been expended on acquiring empirical acquaintance with a
mass of disconnected chemical process. Alchemy in this sense is merely an early
phase of the development of systematic chemistry; in Leibig’s words, it was “never
at any time anything different from chemistry”.
[Encyclopedia Britannica]
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