Better Living Through Alchemy

Bruce T. Moran. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 210 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed By Robert D. Hicks

In 1677 Otto Tachenius published a popular book, Hippocrates the Chemist, which begins by introducing an old man and woman. The old woman commends chemistry because it furnishes the means of coloring her hair. The old man, Hippocrates, notes that chemistry, with an honorable and ancient pedigree, supplies the basis for all other arts. The primacy of chemistry as a discipline was a new thing. By the end of the 17th century, chemistry had begun to assume recognizable intellectual boundaries, but the recognition still acknowledged the utility of alchemy as a practical art because of its emphasis on doing. Bruce T. Moran, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, aims to rehabilitate alchemy and its place within chemical history by upending historical canards that it is metaphysical looniness, best forgotten. Situating alchemy within the Scientific Revolution, Moran has written the first book for a lay audience to take stock of the last several years of historical analysis of the topic by such historians as Lawrence Principe and William Newman.

Alchemy has indeed endured a bad reputation. In popular historical accounts, the Scientific Revolution left alchemy behind, dispensing with groundless supernatural beliefs in favor of reason based on empiricist investigations of nature. But this view of alchemy and the Scientific Revolution misunderstands both and misses the point, “because alchemy was never altogether anything that people believed in; it was something that people did” (p. 10).We ought to respect alchemists as “ardent investigators of nature” (p. 9) propelled by a belief system analogous to today’s search for physical laws constituting the universal design of nature. Moran supplies a corrective to earlier historiography: “Separating the supposed rational purity of chemistry from the alleged logical impurities of alchemy as a way to establish the compelling features of a new chemical discipline is . . . misdirected because chemistry itself did not so much replace alchemy as subsume it” (p. 184).

Moran asks, for instance, why alchemists presumed that relatively valueless metals could be transformed into gold. He explains that to early modern minds, organic beings were not the only ones with a life cycle: minerals and metals, too, enjoyed their own. Aristotle taught that all things in nature seek their perfection, so it followed rationally that base metals would, in time, metamorphose into silver or gold. Alchemy then provided a way to hurry a natural process, using “a catalyst (given many names like the Philosopher’s Stone or the elixir of life)” (p. 29). And Tachenius’s old woman has a place in this world, too: Moran shows that the boundary between the apothecary and the kitchen cook was nigh invisible, making alchemical investigation a fit subject for many women.

After grounding his inquiry in a brief survey of the worldview that fostered alchemy, Moran explores the many contexts within which it was practiced and tours the places, methods, and texts that shaped how alchemy and chemistry were taught and learned. He presents a picture of what alchemists were doing, writing, and reading as variable, contradictory, and even murky, but their activities are always characterized by curiosity, nventiveness, insight, and much experiment. Moran dismantles misconceptions not only about alchemy but also about the Scientific Revolution. He finds that alchemy and early chemistry link to the Scientific Revolution in three distinct ways: first, chemistry became established as a taught discipline; second, alchemy fostered theoretical discourse on how to define the principles by which nature operates; and, third, alchemy secured an ongoing role in the emergence of the chemical sciences. The three trends happened concurrently, but according to Moran, the Scientific Revolution in chemistry did not occur suddenly: “It was a subjective reevaluation of experiences that had been around for a very long time” (p. 99).

Moran’s book ought to be read in tandem with Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (Peter Smith, 1971), and Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1999) as a comprehensive survey that explores the underpinnings of thought in early modern Europe—a remote and unfamiliar world that produced Galileo alongside belief in witchcraft. These books revise our judgments of our intellectual ancestors as ill-informed, messy thinkers who tainted scientific investigation with metaphysics.

The reader of this book will emerge with a new view of alchemy’s place within the Scientific Revolution. Though it is intended for a lay audience, such scholarly apparatus as embedded notes and the name-dropping of dozens of texts sometimes interfere with the book’s readability. Nevertheless, Distilling Knowledge breathes life into alchemy as a popular, practical field of human endeavor that deserves continuing respect.