ABSTRACT
The chemist accepts the bargain, only to discover, to his horror, that on his approach he transforms happy, moral beings into whining, snivelling wretches. The uncomplaining mother starts wishing she’d never married, the merry old grandfather becomes a petulant, old windbag. The only being he does not affect is a street urchin whom he has taken in, ‘A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast’ (p. 272). In the end the chemist has his powers of memory restored: in place of his destructive chemistry, with its power to uncombine things, he learns a new Christian chemistry, and applies one of his chemical laws to his own personal life: In the material world, as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe’ (p. 322). Science, from being an image of man’s
presumption, now becomes the vehicle of moral resolution through an invocation of the laws of the conservation of energy.
