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177
The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
·
M. M. Pattison Muir
124
Looking
back
at
the
attempts
made
in
the
past
to
describe
natural
events,
we
are
often
inclined
to
exclaim,
"Why
did
investigators
bind
themselves
with
the
cords
of
absurd
theories;
why
did
they
always
wear
blinkers;
why
did
they
look
at
nature
through
the
distorting
mists
rising
from
their
own
imaginations?"
We
are
too
ready
to
forget
the
tremendous
difficulties
which
beset
the
path
of
him
who
is
seeking
accurate
knowledge.
"To
climb
steep
hills
requires
slow
pace
at
first."
Forgetting
that
the
statements
wherein
the
men
of
science
of
our
own
time
describe
the
relations
between
natural
events
are,
and
must
be,
expressed
in
terms
of
some
general
conception,
some
theory,
of
these
relations;
forgetting
that
the
simplest
natural
occurrence
is
so
complicated
that
our
powers
of
description
are
incapable
of
expressing
it
completely
and
accurately;
forgetting
the
uselessness
of
disconnected
facts;
we
are
inclined
to
overestimate
the
importance
of
our
own
views
of
nature's
ways,
and
to
underestimate
the
usefulness
of
the
views
of
our
predecessors.
Moreover,
as
naturalists
have
not
been
obliged,
in
recent
times,
to
make
a
complete
renunciation
of
any
comprehensive
theory
wherein
they
had
lived
and
moved
for
many
years,
we
forget
the
difficulties
of
breaking
loose
from
a
way
of
looking
at
natural
events
which
has
become
almost
as
real
as
the
events
themselves,
of
abandoning
a
language
which
has
expressed
the
most
vividly
realised
conceptions
of
generations
of
investigators,
of
forming
a
completely
new
mental
picture
of
natural
occurrences,
and
developing
a
completely
new
language
for
the
expression
of
those
conceptions
and
these
occurrences.
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