beliefs, because they have
been, or appear to have been, superseded, so long will our study be
incomplete and ineffectual. And this, let me add, is no mere excuse for
the study of alchemy, no mere afterthought put forward in justification
of a predilection, but a plain statement of fact that renders this study
an imperative need. There are other questions of interest--of very great
interest--concerning alchemy: questions, for instance, as to the
scope and validity of its doctrines; but we ought not to allow their
fascination and promise to distract our attention from the fundamental
problem, whose solution is essential to their elucidation.

In the preceding essay on "The Quest of the Philosopher's Stone," which
was written from the standpoint I have sketched in the foregoing words,
my thesis was "that the alchemists constructed their chemical theories
for the main part by means of _a priori_ reasoning, and that the
premises from which they started were (i.) the truth of mystical
theology, especially the doctrine of the soul's regeneration, and (ii.)
the truth of mystical philosophy, which asserts that the objects of
nature are symbols of spiritual verities." Now, I wish to treat my
present thesis, which is concerned with a further source from which the
alchemists derived certain of their views and modes of expression by
means of _a priori_ reasoning, in connection with, and, in a sense,
as complementary to, my former thesis. I propose in the first place,
therefore, briefly to deal with certain possible objections to this view
of alchemy.

It has, for instance, been maintained(1) that the assimilation of
alchemical doctrines concerning the metals to those of mysticism
concerning the soul was an event late in the history of alchemy, and was
undertaken in the interests of the latter doctrines. Now we know that
certain mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did borrow
from the alchemists much of their terminology with which to discourse
of spiritual mysteries--JACOB BOEHME, HENRY KHUNRATH, and perhaps THOMAS
VAUGHAN, may be mentioned as the most prominent cases in point. But how
was this possible if it were not, as I have suggested, the repayment, in
a sense, of a sort of philological debt? Transmutation was an admirable
vehicle of language for describing the soul's regeneration, just because
the doctrine of transmutation was the result of an attempt to apply
the doctrine of regeneration in the sphere of metal