It is the nature of Homo sapiens to be curious – to ask the most fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality. Why is there something rather than nothing? What are we made of? Why do we think and feel? If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there, does it make a sound?
As humanity evolved from hunter-gatherer to settled communities, more time became available for asking those questions and making observations from which hypotheses could be created, putative answers to those questions that have gnawed at us from our birth as a separate species.
Our first attempts at defining the nature of reality were coded as myths and legends; supernatural beings whose actions defined the paths of celestial objects across the sky, good or bad harvests, and phenomena such as volcanoes and thunderstorms. Telling these stories was the job of shamen, not scientists.
Systematic scientific thinking and practice began in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the third and second millennia BC. These first steps in what would become mathematics, astronomy and medicine went on to influence Ancient Greek natural philosophy, who attempted to explain physical phenomena by natural, rather than supernatural, causes. Knowledge of these Greek concepts deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, but lived on in the Byzantine Empire. The Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived the learning of natural philosophy in the West.
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe marked a break with the natural philosophy that had preceded it. The scientific method that emerged departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. It was more mechanistic in its worldview, nudging out the supernatural explanations, it was more integrated with mathematics, and focused on acquiring and interpreting evidence. Proof became the ultimate goal, proving conjectures, experimentally or mathematically. Science became separate from philosophy; matter… from spirit.
Alchemy served as the bridge between Mediaeval thought and the birth of the scientific method in the Enlightenment. Dr Szydło’s book examines the links between alchemical thinking and practice and the first true scientists. In particular, the author sets out a number of Sendivogius’s accounts of processes, comparing them to modern chemistry. The book follows on with the work of pioneers of today’s scientific method, as they worked on identifying oxygen as an element.
Dr Szydło separates practical alchemy from philosophical alchemy in Sendivogius’s writings. The philosophical includes musings on “the spirit of the Earth”, the practical includes observations made while heating lead oxide, for example. Sendivogius’s central-nitre theory was instrumental in stimulating experimental investigation into the vital constituent of air and influenced Robert Boyle and John Mayow, whose work in isolating oxygen as a constituent of air were crucial in the shift from alchemy to chemistry.
Post-Enlightenment science took the path of reductionism, stripping away all of alchemy’s arcane trappings of mysticism, replacing it with empiricism. Yet four centuries on, scientists acknowledge many more gaps in their knowledge than was the case a hundred years ago. Reductionism is giving way to complexity. The acknowledgement of what we don’t know leads to new ways of thinking about the ultimate nature of reality. Consciousness and the conscious observer take on a new primacy. Thirty years on from when Water Which Does Not Wet Hands was published, new parallels can be sought between how alchemy viewed ultimate reality and how it is seen today.
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