The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

In addition to these advantages, the phlogistic theory was based on experiments, and led to experiments, the results of which proved that the capacity to undergo combustion might be conveyed to an incombustible substance, by causing it to react with some other substance, itself combustible, under definite conditions. The theory thus prepared the way for the representation of a chemical change as an interaction between definite kinds of substances, marked by precise alterations both of properties and composition. The great fault of the theory of phlogiston, considered as a general conception which brings many facts into one point of view, and leads the way to new and exact knowledge, was its looseness, its flexibility. It was very easy to make use of the theory in a broad and general way; by stretching it here, and modifying it there, it seemed to cover all the facts concerning combustion and calcination which were discovered during two generations after the publication of Stahl's books. But many of the subsidiary hypotheses which were required to make the theory cover the new facts were contradictory, or at any rate seemed to be contradictory, of the primary assumptions of the theory. The addition of this ancillary machinery burdened the mechanism of the theory, threw it out of order, and finally made it unworkable. The phlogistic theory was destroyed by its own cumbersomeness. A scientific theory never lasts long if its fundamental assumptions are stated so loosely that they may be easily modified, expanded, contracted, and adjusted to meet the requirements of newly discovered facts. It is true that the theories which have been of the greatest service in science, as summaries of the relations between established facts, and suggestions of lines of investigation, have been stated in terms whose full meaning has gradually unfolded itself. But the foundations of these theories have been at once so rigidly defined and clearly stated as to be incapable of essential modification, and so full of meaning and widely applicable as to cover large classes of facts which were unknown when the theories were constructed. Of the founders of the lasting and expansible theories of natural science, it may be said, that "thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given."