Читать книгу Alchemy: Ancient and Modern - Being a Brief Account of the Alchemistic Doctrines, and their Relations, to Mysticism on the One Hand, and to Recent Discoveries in Physical Science on the Other Hand - H. Stanley Redgrove - Страница 15

§ 7. If we are ever to understand the meaning of Alchemy aright we must look at the subject from the alchemistic point of view. In modern times there has come about a divorce between Religion and Science in men’s minds (though more recently a unifying tendency has set in); but it was otherwise with the alchemists, their religion and their science were closely united. We have said that “Alchemy was the attempt to demonstrate experimentally on the material plane the validity of a certain philosophical view of the Cosmos”; now, this “philosophical view of the Cosmos” was Mysticism. Alchemy had its origin in the attempt to apply, in a certain manner, the principles of Mysticism to the things of the physical plane, and was, therefore, of a dual nature, on the one hand spiritual and religious, on the other, physical and material. As the anonymous author of Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (1815) remarks, “The universal chemistry, by which the science of alchemy opens the knowledge of all nature, being founded on first principles forms analogy with whatever knowledge is founded on the same first principles. . . . Saint John describes the redemption, or the new creation of the fallen soul, on the same first principles, until the consummation of the work, in which the Divine tincture transmutes the base metal of the soul into a perfection, that will pass the fire of eternity;”⁶ that is to say, Alchemy and the mystical regeneration of man (in this writer’s opinion) are analogous processes on different planes of being, because they are founded on the same first principles.