ABSTRACT
Paracelsus aimed at a reform in the School of Medicine, as did his contemporary Luther in that of Religion, and they were heralds of change to come in their respective realms of dedication. If we look back upon the path that has been travelled, it will be found that the purposed intimations of high spiritual intent on the part of alchemists are without consequence for ourselves since their physical concern emerges unaffected throughout. From my own point of view it is a key to the spirit of the times that those who went down into the mines appealed to God for guidance, that the day and night vigils over crucibles were often vigils of prayer, as well as of work with hand; but it remains that the end in view was to transmute metals and not, as it has been suggested, to transfigure souls. Now, at the end of the sixteenth century and thence onward we begin to distinguish the uplifting of occasional other voices amidst the clamour of adepts and pretenders; but we must be careful not to overstate the import if it seems that there is another message. It must be remembered that at this period—above all in Germany—the claim of transmutation was everywhere but the evidential fact nowhere, while the trades driven in the subject by booksellers and their craftsmen in pamphlets had nauseated serious persons and led to something like a declaration of war on the part of the Rosy Cross in the second decade of the seventeenth century. The records of this are in one of my recent works and need not be recited here. 1 When another way of regarding the alchemical mystery arose at the same period in the Teutonic Fatherland and England under the names of Böhme and Fludd there is no question that it attained a certain vogue, to put my point at the lowest. There came a day in the problematical Brotherhood when it was preached almost like a gospel, 2 though it contributed nothing to the dreams of Mrs. Atwood and her Suggestive Inquiry, while it signifies little in the reality of things if Hitchcock might have found himself here and there justified in his own speculations or here and there rather curiously forestalled.
