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177
The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
·
M. M. Pattison Muir
78
CHAPTER
VII.
THE
LANGUAGE
OF
ALCHEMY
The
vagueness
of
the
general
conceptions
of
alchemy,
and
the
attribution
of
ethical
qualities
to
material
things
by
the
alchemists,
necessarily
led
to
the
employment
of
a
language
which
is
inexact,
undescriptive,
and
unsuggestive
to
modern
ears.
The
same
name
was
given
to
different
things,
and
the
same
thing
went
under
many
names.
In
Chapter
IV.
I
endeavoured
to
analyse
two
terms
which
were
constantly
used
by
the
alchemists
to
convey
ideas
of
great
importance,
the
terms
Element
and
Principle.
That
attempt
sufficed,
at
any
rate,
to
show
the
vagueness
of
the
ideas
which
these
terms
were
intended
to
express,
and
to
make
evident
the
inconsistencies
between
the
meanings
given
to
the
words
by
different
alchemical
writers.
The
story
quoted
in
Chapter
III.,
from
Michael
Sendivogius,
illustrates
the
difficulty
which
the
alchemists
themselves
had
in
understanding
what
they
meant
by
the
term
Mercury;
yet
there
is
perhaps
no
word
more
often
used
by
them
than
that.
Some
of
them
evidently
took
it
to
mean
the
substance
then,
and
now,
called
mercury;
the
results
of
this
literal
interpretation
were
disastrous;
others
thought
of
mercury
as
a
substance
which
could
be
obtained,
or,
at
any
rate,
might
be
obtained,
by
repeatedly
distilling
ordinary
mercury,
both
alone
and
when
mixed
with
other
substances;
others
used
the
word
to
mean
a
hypothetical
something
which
was
liquid
but
did
not
wet
things,
limpid
yet
capable
of
becoming
solid,
volatile
yet
able
to
prevent
the
volatilisation
of
other
things,
and
white,
yet
ready
to
cause
other
white
things
to
change
their
colour;
they
thought
of
this
something,
this
soul
of
mercury,
as
having
properties
without
itself
being
tangible,
as
at
once
a
substance
and
not
a
substance,
at
once
a
bodily
spirit
and
a
spiritual
body.
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