Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution

"I think if Locke or Boyle were to be resuscitated and read Newman’s book, their line would be, ‘Yes, of course.’ The narrative Newman gives is one that was familiar to experimental philosophers in the 17th century: Boyle explicitly called himself an experimental philosopher, and Locke was certainly working in a tradition of natural philosophy that built on the kinds of experiments alchemists were doing. ‘Chymistry’ is Newman’s forced term. It does exist in the history of English, but he’s reviving it for programmatic purposes. He wants to say, ‘Look, I don’t care about the historical question of when alchemy becomes chemistry.’ There, you can make different cases for different pivotal authors and time periods. He wants to treat, rather, a program of inquiry, a research program that might share in some of what we think of as the desiderata of the alchemists, but that is also at the same time doing real chemical experiments. And Newman himself actually recreates these chemical experiments in his own laboratory. He dissolves silver in aqua fortis and then finally reduces the precipitate to retrieve the original silver. Whatever—call it alchemy, call it chemistry, or let’s just have an umbrella term and call it ‘chymistry’: that’s Newman’s idea. And I think it’s quite helpful even though it makes people confused at first. Yes. Newman is definitely working in that vein. It’s a wonderful exemplar of this kind of revisionist history, where he’s trying to recover what these historical figures actually cared about, and having to sift and get back past centuries that (in the case of the history of alchemy and chemistry) are really centuries of misrepresentation. For complex reasons, until the 17th century—even until the early 19th century—a figure that is recognisable is the scientist probing into the dark secrets of nature that God or piety has warned us to stay away from. There’s something demonic or black magical about inquiry into how science works. What’s the term? Hacking through nature’s thorns. Nature puts the thorns on the plants, everywhere, to warn you off from hacking through them, and then when you do, you unleash dark powers. That was a standard prejudice slash general understanding of what experimental philosophy was doing, that even the most sober, cautious, lucid experimental philosopher like Boyle had to contend with. “By the 17th century, you could hack through nature’s thorns in Oxford or in London without having to worry too much that you’d be accused of being a witch” By the 17th century, you could hack through nature’s thorns in Oxford or in London without having to worry too much that you’d be accused of being a witch and lynched. Whereas if you look at the way that people represented Roger Bacon—not Francis Bacon but Roger Bacon a few centuries earlier—the lore about him just takes it for granted that he was some kind of some kind of magician with access to supernatural powers. So, it’s a consequence of the Scientific Revolution that you could do things like chemical experiments without having to deal too much with the suspicion of satanic dabbling. That history then gets folded in as we move into the scientific period, where occult, esoteric movements of the 18th and 19th century claim the work that the alchemists were doing because of this cultural perception that I’ve just explained. But that doesn’t mean that they weren’t actually doing real experiments with chemical elements and discovering their properties. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, Newman’s work has been incredible in revealing to us what it is they actually discovered, and also the way these discoveries flowed into new ideas about the workings of the physical world that we associate with both the Scientific Revolution and the birth of modern philosophy. In particular, the study—and this goes back through Arab experimental philosophy back to the so-called meteorological tradition of Aristotle—of mixed bodies. When do you have just two different kinds of things stirred together? And when do these two different kinds of things stirred together become one thing? That was the philosophical question in the solution of silver experiment. It’s a big metaphysical problem that was all over the place in modern philosophical reflections on the origins of the qualitative variety of the natural world. You can say that it’s all just a bunch of atoms or corpuscles arranged together in an appropriate way, but that is, I think, everyone understood, even Descartes understood, Boyle certainly understood, that is a lot of hand-waving. Because you have no idea how these bare, inert corpuscles with nothing more than mass, figure and motion are ever going to give you the qualitative richness of say, a garden full of flowers. But the notion of texture is just the classical example of this hand-waving. Or not just hand-waving, but pointing further down the road—passing the buck. The people who had the most to say about how you get the qualitative richness of the natural world from basic components were the chemists. And we can see direct lines of transmission from unknown figures working in their laboratories through somewhat known figures like Daniel Sennert, a German natural philosopher Newman works on, for example, to major figures like Boyle and Locke. This is a secret history of philosophy that Newman does just ingeniously."