[1] The Sophic Hydrolith; or, Water Stone of the Wise. (See The Hermetic Museum, vol. i. pp. 74 and 75.)

[2] PETER BONUS:  The New Pearl of Great Price (trans. by A. E. WAITE, 1894), p. 275.

Now, what I suggest is that the alchemists constructed their chemical theories for the main part by means of a priori reasoning, and that the premises from which they started were (i.) the truth of mystical theology, especially the doctrine of the soul’s regeneration, and (ii.) the truth of mystical philosophy, which asserts that the objects of Nature are symbols of spiritual verities.  There is, I think, abundant evidence to show that alchemy was a more or less deliberate attempt to apply, according to the principles of analogy, the doctrines of religious mysticism to chemical and physical phenomena.  Some of this evidence I shall attempt to put forward in this essay.

In the first place, however, I propose to say a few words more in description of the theological and philosophical doctrines which so greatly influenced the alchemists, and which, I believe, they borrowed for their attempted explanations of chemical and physical phenomena.  This system of doctrine I have termed “mysticism”—­a word which is unfortunately equivocal, and has been used to denote various systems of religious and philosophical thought, from the noblest to the most degraded.  I have, therefore, further to define my usage of the term.

By mystical theology I mean that system of religious thought which emphasises the unity between Creator and creature, though not necessarily to the extent of becoming pantheistic.  Man, mystical theology asserts, has sprung from God, but has fallen away from Him through self-love.  Within man, however, is the seed of divine grace, whereby, if he will follow the narrow road of self-renunciation, he may be regenerated, born anew, becoming transformed into the likeness of God and ultimately indissolubly united to God in love.  God is at once the Creator and the Restorer of man’s soul, He is the Origin as well as the End of all existence; and He is also the Way to that End.  In Christian mysticism, CHRIST is the Pattern, towards which the mystic strives; CHRIST also is the means towards the attainment of this end.

By mystical philosophy I mean that system of philosophical thought which emphasises the unity of the Cosmos, asserting that God and the spiritual may be perceived immanent in the things of this world, because all things natural are symbols and emblems of spiritual verities.  As one of the Golden Verses attributed to PYTHAGORAS, which I have quoted in a previous essay, puts it:  “The Nature of this Universe is in all things alike”; commenting upon which, HIEROCLES, writing in the fifth or sixth century, remarks that “Nature, in forming this Universe after the Divine Measure and Proportion, made it in all things conformable and like to itself, analogically in different manners.  Of all the different species, diffused throughout the whole, it made, as it were, an Image of the Divine Beauty, imparting variously to the copy the perfections of the Original."[1] We have, however, already encountered so many instances of this belief, that no more need be said here concerning it.