MODERN ALCHEMY.
IT is difficult to watch the singular inquiry now going on before Mr. Hannay—the case known to reporters as "The Philosopher's Stone," in which Mr. Streeter prosecutes a man who assured him that he could multiply gold by three —without asking oneself the question why such cases are nowadays so infrequent. One would have fancied, a priori, that they would be common. They were frequent towards the close of the last century, "adepts" who offered to make gold or to sell the Elixir of Life appearing in most capitals of Europe ; and the ground for their operations in our time has been much more carefully manured. Right through the minds of the half-educated but well-to-do, who form a deep stratum lying above the fluid "masses" of our modern society, there is a credulity about science, and the possible acquisitions of man through science, which is at least as wonderful as the readiness to believe in baseless or impossible theological pro- positions. No statement is too wild to be accepted if only it is made in the name of science, and is supported by some plausible sentences or some name of authority, and this, too, even if it involves an a priori impossibility. The reasoning powers of men have not been developed like their knowledge of facts—we know at least one man of learning who asserts that there may be a world in which two plus two make five, a thing impossible even to the Deity—and science has attracted and fired men's imaginations until they have in many cases ceased almost to be able to think about the antecedent probability of any assertion said to be scientific. We have not the remotest doubt that if the Times announced to-morrow that a method of securing perpetual motion had been discovered, or that the circle had been squared, or that a new sensitised paper had revealed the features of men in Mars, or that Mr. Edison had invented a perpetual self-renewing light, the state- ment would be believed for a week at least by men not generally suspected either of ignorance or of deficiency in shrewdness. The telegraph, it would be said, would have seemed impossible to our ancestors, and as the phonograph exists, and can repeat sentences uttered years ago in their dead speaker's voice, why should not anything else be discovered in its turn? Dbspite the prevalence of scepticism as to spiritual things, a materialistic credulity is rampant, and we should have thought that the old dreams about manu- factured gold, and the tincture which kept off death, and the self-sustaining light would have appealed to it most powerfully.
The arguments for the possibility of such things, be it remetnbered, though they all contain fallacies, are not so patently silly that credulous men with a strong temptation to believe them would reject them at once. There is, we believe, some relation between lead and silver the secret of which metallurgists have not found, and the assump- tion that there may be one like it between lead or other cheap metal and gold, though utterly unwarranted, is not, to men knowing nothing either of metallurgy or chemistry, simply and plainly preposterous. The person accused before Mr. Hannay declares, it is alleged, that by means of a powder in his possession he can triple an existing mass of gold, which would seem to be like saying that you can get three times as much hay out of a field as there is grass in it, and is possible only to creative power ; but the old argument of the alchemists was cleverer than that. They urged that the production of gold from lead or copper must be possible if one only knew how, because all things tend towards their own perfection, and as gold is the perfect metal, all metals must be tending to become gold. It is only necessary to discover a method of quickening the permanent tendency, just as the application of heat does quicken the tendency of a cucumber to grow. The three gigantic assumptions involved in that theory, that all things tend to be perfect, that gold is per- fect among metals, and that a dead thing has capacity of grow tli without accretion, did not strike our fathers, and we doubt if it would at once -strike &Very mind among ourselves. At least, Radicals believe the first assumption about Humanity,
with an apparently sincere faith. Granted an impostor of in- tellect, and modern scientific credulity, and the increased greed for money—increased because it can do so much more in the way of realising wishes—we should have thought the trade of the alchemist might have been a profitable one. The prize is so very big, a fortune "beyond the dreams of avarice" to be won by listening to advice, and advancing a little money for experiments which would have also to be advanced if they were experiments in a new method of smelting iron, or a new mode of accumulating electric power. It is not so, however. This is the first alleged " case " we remember in Court during the past thirty years. Prosecutions for fraud under pretence of alchemy have, in fact, ceased, and this although there is every reason to believe that sincere seekers for the Philo- sopher's Stone, like sincere astrologers, still linger among us and work hard, not so much in the hope of fabulous wealth as in their desire to prove that they are not fools, but men of deep insight into Nature's mysteries.
The ground for the sale of the Elixir of Life is even better prepared. People have been accustomed for years to the great triumphs of hygiene, and to the use of preventives which, like quinine, do seem to liberate some constitutions from liability to malarious poison, and the notion of an antiseptic drug which can arrest decay from all causes will not strike all of them as absurd. We do arrest decay in dead things, as, for example, when we freeze meat, or embalm bodies by the Turin method, or inject preservative fluids into railway-sleepers; and why not in living tissues also? If the organism could be preserved unchanged, why should not life remain in it, at least for wholly unprecedented periods ? There is no proof of the necessity of death except universal and unbroken experi- ence, and one morsel of evidence against it,—namely, the absence, in the case of all conscious creatures, of a fixed terminal period of life. Many animals live double the usual lives of their own kind. Some one man must have lived longer than anybody else ; and if so, to say he could have lived twice as long, or have avoided death altogether till the conditions of life on the planet altered, is not a contra- diction in terms. Considering that some men have health throughout long lives ; that there arc healthy plaoes, for instance Bloemfontein, where some invalids recover as if by magic ; and that certain conditions of hygiene really have lengthened life, we rather wonder that somebody does not invent and find believers in a true Elixir of the old kind. It would be only, so to speak, quinine exalted to the n-th power. The desire for life is a passion with many—though we have a suspicion that it decays slightly as the centuries roll on, and that we may reach what Mr. Louis Stevenson describes as the attitude of mind among natives of the Marquesas, who prefer, when they can afford it, to sleep habitually in their coffins—and with that, and the scientific credulity generated by such con- siderations as we have quoted, the Elixir ought to be marketable. It is not so, however, in any tempting degree. The discoverers and the quacks alike shrink from promising even long-pro- tracted life to be secured through a drug ; and as they could hardly be brought to book for the failure of their nostrum, even our patient Stipendiaries declining to wait a generation or two to test a quack's good faith, the reason must be that nobody would believe the promise. That is curious, con- sidering the natural impulse of each man to consider that he will go on living, the tendency of certain forms of insanity to produce the impression of deathlessness—vide the history of religious imposture passim—and the undoubted fact that in centuries not so far back, most intelligent and even illustrious men thought an Elixir of Life among the most possible of discoveries. There must have been a change in men's minds about the plausibility of such promises.
We do not quite see, we confess, the reason for the change, for it is certainly not the general spread of the sceptical spirit. There is a great deal more materialistic credulity than ever, and many more people to be credulous, as well as incredulous, —a fact we are a little apt to omit from our reflections. Nor will any one who looks round him allege that there has been the slightest decrease either in greed, or in the desire to buy health at any price whatever. We suppose people trust the voice of experience a little more than they did, because, owing to the spread of positive knowledge, they are a little more certain than they were that it is universal ; but the main reason that occurs to us is this. We live in a moment when the great mass of credulity, as well as a great mass of thought,
has been directed once more towards the old problem of the Whence and Whither, and specially to the inquiry whether the veil between the seen and the unseen can or cannot be broken. What is called ' Spiritualism, besides provoking inquiry in many thoughtful minds, has swept up in its net most of the minds which might from natural tendency have been inclined to believe in the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Parae,elsus betakes himself to Brocton, on a nobler if not a more hopeful quest; and Cagliostro preaches, not of transmutation, but of visits from Mahatmas. Godwin in our day would have made his hero a theosophist, not an alchemist, and have painted him as Mr. Isaacs, not as St. Leon. There is something besides this, however, and we are not quite certain that it is not accident, which has deprived a world eager for that sort of excitement, of a sensa- tion which in Paris in Louis XVI.'s reign was exceedingly frequent. We shall hear of a great many Mr. Harrises yet, and possibly of many apparently intellectual men who pro- mise their disciples boundless wealth and illimitable years, and who though they cannot give them, will still acquire some sort of ascendency among a group. The unwise among us are not so much wiser than Asiatics, and the descendant of the Old Man of the Mountain who built his ascendency on a pro- mise of a present and tangible paradise, still lives in Bombay, and is still the dictator of a sect. Could not somebody profess to reveal a secret of health or of gold-getting, handed carefully down from father to son through the House of Hassan-ben- Sabah ?
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