The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

Lavoisier also recognised that certain definite substances could be divided into things simpler than themselves, but that other substances refused to undergo simplification by division into two or more unlike portions. He spoke of the object of chemistry as follows:--[8] "In submitting to experiments the different substances found in nature, chemistry seeks to decompose these substances, and to get them into such conditions that their various components may be examined separately. Chemistry advances to its end by dividing, sub-dividing, and again sub-dividing, and we do not know what will be the limits of such operations. We cannot be certain that what we regard as simple to-day is indeed simple; all we can say is, that such a substance is the actual term whereat chemical analysis has arrived, and that with our present knowledge we cannot sub-divide it." [8] I have given a free rendering of Lavoisier's words. In these words Lavoisier defines the chemical conception of elements; since his time an element is "the actual term whereat chemical analysis has arrived," it is that which "with our present knowledge we cannot sub-divide"; and, as a working hypothesis, the notion of element has no wider meaning than this. I have already quoted Boyle's statement that by elements he meant "certain primitive and simple bodies ... not made of any other bodies, or of one another." Boyle was still slightly restrained by the alchemical atmosphere around him; he was still inclined to say, "this must be the way nature works, she must begin with certain substances which are absolutely simple." Lavoisier had thrown off all the trammels which hindered the alchemists from making rigorous experimental investigations. If one may judge from his writings, he had not struggled to free himself from these trammels, he had not slowly emerged from the quagmires of alchemy, and painfully gained firmer ground; the extraordinary clearness and directness of his mental vision had led him straight to the very heart of the problems of chemistry, and enabled him not only calmly to ignore all the machinery of Elements, Principles, Essences, and the like, which the alchemists had constructed so laboriously, but also to construct, in place of that mechanism which hindered inquiry, genuine scientific hypotheses which directed inquiry, and were themselves altered by the results of the experiments they had suggested.