Humanism in Chemistry

Abstract

THE academic scientist of the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen turies has often appeared to historians to be a reactionary, pedantically pursuing the literal words of ancient authors at the expense of the fertile ideas of his immediate predecessors. Yet time and again the most stimulating scientists clothed their ideas in the language of humanism and, indeed, seem to have derived them from the same fount at which the pedants worshiped. We are so familiar with the fact that Copernicus felt himself to be only a latter day Pythagorean and Stevin a latter day Archimedes, that the early-sixteenth-century anatom ists were only following the method of the newly discovered works of Galen, and the naturalists were tracking down the mysteries of Aristotle's History of Animals, that we have accepted the fact that?however mis guided in its expressed purpose?humanism had a genuinely vital contri bution to make to early modern science. And indeed there are few impor tant aspects of sixteenth-century science which are not enriched with humanist learning and Greek discovery. Aside from magnetism?itself a part of natural magic which drew on the ancients for some of its inspira tion?only chemistry seems to have escaped the prevailing humanist influence, pursuing new ideas and methods without apparent benefit from Greek theory and practice. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the exaggerated mysticism associ ated with alchemy was only possible because of the lack of associated Greek rationalism which might have acted as a counterweight to the accumulated irrationalism of centuries. True, the Greek theory of matter, with its transmutable elements constituting the universe from the time of Aristotle, lies at the basis of the more philosophic part of alchemical theory, as Hopkins long ago pointed out.1 And Aristotle's theory of matter could be used to support the possibility of transmutation, though few chemists were interested in so using it before the development of theoretical chem istry in the early seventeenth century. But by and large chemistry drew what historical tradition it possessed from the immediate, rather than from the remote, past, in spite of the bogus historicism which permitted the attribution of modern works to authors long dead. The most obviously rational part of sixteenth-century chemistry would