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177
The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
·
M. M. Pattison Muir
173
The
alchemists
set
forth
on
the
quest.
Their
quest
was
barren.
They
made
the
great
mistake
of
fashioning
The
One
Thing,
The
Essence,
The
Water
of
Paradise,
from
their
own
imaginings
of
what
nature
ought
to
be.
In
their
own
likeness
they
created
their
goal,
and
the
road
to
it.
If
we
are
to
understand
nature,
they
cried,
her
ways
must
be
simple;
therefore,
her
ways
are
simple.
Chemists
are
people
of
a
humbler
heart.
Their
reward
has
been
greater
than
the
alchemists
dreamed.
By
selecting
a
few
instances
of
material
changes,
and
studying
these
with
painful
care,
they
have
gradually
elaborated
a
general
conception
of
all
those
transformations
wherein
substances
are
produced
unlike
those
by
the
interaction
of
which
they
are
formed.
That
general
conception
is
now
both
widening
and
becoming
more
definite.
To-day,
chemists
see
a
way
opening
before
them
which
they
reasonably
hope
will
lead
them
to
a
finer,
a
more
far-reaching,
a
more
suggestive,
at
once
a
more
complex
and
a
simpler
conception
of
material
changes
than
any
of
those
which
have
guided
them
in
the
past.
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