By mystical philosophy I mean that system of philosophical thought which emphasises the unity of the Cosmos, asserting that God and the spiritual may be perceived immanent in the things of this world, because all things natural are symbols and emblems of spiritual verities.
As one of the _Golden Verses_ attributed to PYTHAGORAS, which I have quoted in a previous essay, puts it: "The Nature of this Universe is in all things alike"; commenting upon which, HIEROCLES, writing in the fifth or sixth century, remarks that "Nature, in forming this Universe after the Divine Measure and Proportion, made it in all things conformable and like to itself, analogically in different manners.
Of all the different species, diffused throughout the whole, it made, as it were, an Image of the Divine Beauty, imparting variously to the copy the perfections of the Original."[1] We have, however, already encountered so many instances of this belief, that no more need be said here concerning it.
[1] _Commentary of_ HIEROCLES _on the Golden Verses of_ PYTHAGORAS(trans. by N. ROWE, 1906), pp. 101 and 102.
In fine, as Dean INGE well says: "Religious Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as _the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal_."[2]
[2] WILLIAM RALPH INGE, M.A.: _Christian Mysticism_ (the Bampton Lectures, 1899), p. 5.
Now, doctrines such as these were not only very prevalent during the Middle Ages, when alchemy so greatly flourished, but are of great antiquity, and were undoubtedly believed in by the learned class in Egypt and elsewhere in the East in those remote days when, as some think, alchemy originated, though the evidence, as will, I hope, become plain as we proceed, points to a later and post-Christian origin for the central theorem of alchemy.
So far as we can judge from their writings, the more important alchemists were convinced of the truth of these doctrines, and it was with such beliefs in mind that they commenced their investigations of physical and chemical phenomena.
Indeed, if we may judge by the esteem in which the Hermetic maxim, "What is above is as that which is below, what is below is as that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing,"was held by every alchemist, we are justified in asserting that the mystical theory of the spiritual significance of Nature--a theory with which, as we have seen, is closely connected the Neoplatonic and Kabalistic doctrine that all things emanate in series from the Divine Source of all Being--was at the very heart of alchemy. As writes one alchemist:
" . . . the Sages have been taught of God that this natural world is only an image and material copy of a heavenly and spiritual pattern;that the very existence of this world is based upon the reality of its celestial archetype; and that God has created it in imitation of the spiritual and invisible universe, in order that men might be the better enabled to comprehend His heavenly teaching, and the wonders of His absolute and ineffable power and wisdom.
Thus the sage sees heaven reflected in Nature as in a mirror;and he pursues this Art, not for the sake of gold or silver, but for the love of the knowledge which it reveals; he jealously conceals it from the sinner and the scornful, lest the mysteries of heaven should be laid bare to the vulgar gaze."[1]
[1] MICHAEL SENDIVOGIUS (?): _The New Chemical Light, Pt.
II., Concerning Sulphur_. (See _The Hermetic Museum_, vol. ii. p. 138.)The alchemists, I hold, convinced of the truth of this view of Nature, _i.e_. that principles true of one plane of being are true also of all other planes, adopted analogy as their guide in dealing with the facts of chemistry and physics known to them. They endeavoured to explain these facts by an application to them of the principles of mystical theology, their chief aim being to prove the truth of these principles as applied to the facts of the natural realm, and by studying natural phenomena to become instructed in spiritual truth. They did not proceed by the sure, but slow, method of modern science, _i.e_. the method of induction, which questions experience at every step in the construction of a theory;but they boldly allowed their imaginations to leap ahead and to formulate a complete theory of the Cosmos on the strength of but few facts.
This led them into many fantastic errors, but I would not venture to deny them an intuitive perception of certain fundamental truths concerning the constitution of the Cosmos, even if they distorted these truths and dressed them in a fantastic garb.
Now, as I hope to make plain in the course of this excursion, the alchemists regarded the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the transmutation of "base" metals into gold as the consummation of the proof of the doctrines of mystical theology as applied to chemical phenomena, and it was as such that they so ardently sought to achieve the _magnum opus_, as this transmutation was called.
Of course, it would be useless to deny that many, accepting the truth of the great alchemical theorem, sought for the Philosopher's Stone because of what was claimed for it in the way of material benefits.
But, as I have already indicated, with the nobler alchemists this was not the case, and the desire for wealth, if present at all, was merely a secondary object.
The idea expressed in DALTON'S atomic hypothesis (1802), and universally held during the nineteenth century, that the material world is made up of a certain limited number of elements unalterable in quantity, subject in themselves to no change or development, and inconvertible one into another, is quite alien to the views of the alchemists.
