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177
The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
·
M. M. Pattison Muir
162
In
their
study
of
different
kinds
of
matter,
chemists
have
found
it
very
helpful
to
place
in
one
class
those
substances
which
they
have
not
been
able
to
separate
into
unlike
parts.
They
have
distinguished
this
class
of
substances
from
other
substances,
and
have
named
them
elements.
The
expression
chemical
elements
is
merely
a
summary
of
certain
observed
facts.
For
many
centuries
chemists
have
worked
with
a
conceptual
machinery
based
on
the
notion
that
matter
has
a
grained
structure.
For
more
than
a
hundred
years
they
have
been
accustomed
to
think
of
atoms
as
the
ultimate
particles
with
which
they
have
had
to
deal.
Working
with
this
order-producing
instrument,
they
have
regarded
the
properties
of
elements
as
properties
of
the
atoms,
or
of
groups
of
a
few
of
the
atoms,
of
these
substances.
That
they
might
think
clearly
and
suggestively
about
the
properties
of
elements,
and
connect
these
with
other
chemical
facts,
they
have
translated
the
language
of
sense-perceptions
into
the
language
of
thought,
and,
for
properties
of
those
substances
which
have
not
been
decomposed,
have
used
the
more
fertile
expression
atomic
properties.
When
a
chemist
thinks
of
an
atom,
he
thinks
of
the
minutest
particle
of
one
of
the
substances
which
have
the
class-mark
have-not-been-decomposed,
and
the
class-name
element.
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