Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

  • William R. Newman
University of Chicago Press: 2004. 352 pp. $30, £21 0226577120 | ISBN: 0-226-57712-0
Artificial intelligence? Alchemists sought to create life in the form of a homunculus, like that in Goethe's Faust. Credit: AKG-IMAGES/GOETHEANUM/STUTEN

There is nothing new under the sun, or so we are told. People worry about the artificial and the synthetic, as opposed to the natural; they pay extra for organic food, are concerned about genetic modification, and pontificate about bioethics, stem-cell research and cloning. All these things seem very modern, the fruit of progress in biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics; the oldest example would seem to be Justus Liebig's advocacy of inorganic fertilizers in the hungry 1840s.

Not long before that, his friend Friedrich Wöhler had synthesized urea, in an attempt to provide evidence for atoms and their rearrangement, rather than to break down the organic/inorganic distinction. Processes and conditions in living organisms are very different from those in test-tubes, however, so although the end product might be the same, he did not replicate the reaction that creates urea in organisms. Human artfulness was still limited; perhaps nature was not after all a laboratory.

William Newman shows that debates about simulating, replicating and perfecting nature go back much further than this, however. Whereas we come to these debates through modern chemistry and biology, medieval and early modern authors approached them through alchemy. Modern chemists tend to look at alchemy askance, as delusion, confidence trickery or occultism, leading to disgrace, beggary and early death. But some, Michael Faraday among them, had a degree of sympathy with the idea that all the metals could not be irreducibly different indestructible entities, and Ernest Rutherford cheerfully referred to his work as modern alchemy. Newman is prominent among the historians of science who have shown how important alchemy was as part of the serious ‘chymistry’ of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and their contemporaries. In this book, he looks at the divide between ‘art’, which used to mean anything productive involving artifice and forethought, and ‘nature’, as illuminated in discussions of, and laboratory and clinical practice in, alchemy.

If something were to be made from base metal that had all the properties of gold, would it be gold? Or is there some essence that distinguishes the natural from the ersatz? Are ‘species’, whether of metals or of creatures, God-given and immutable?

Astronomy, contemplating the starry heavens, was well-suited to natural theology, for God could be praised for His wisdom and grandeur. But alchemy, and the practical spin-offs that led to pigments, drugs and distillates, including alcohol, seemed to be an attempt to improve the world; God had left it to us to discover oil paints, milk of magnesia and whisky. We were (perhaps) better off as a result, but the natural theologian might be uneasy at the busy chymists' activities. And when naturally occurring substances were apparently made artificially, some were sceptical about whether they were exactly the same. Alchemists claimed that the processes by which gold was supposed to be generated in the bowels of the Earth were merely speeded up in their furnaces, but critics were not convinced, some seeing devilment lying behind any apparently successful transmutation.

Alchemists were not simply fixated on gold; they also sought not only to prolong life, but to synthesize it. Newman explores two routes to this end. The first was based on Jewish stories about the golem, made like Adam from the dust and brought to life (and destroyed when necessary) through Hebrew words. A golem lacked a rational soul, and so was not human. The other tradition was a kind of male parthenogenesis, in which women (the source of flesh and blood) could be bypassed and a homunculus grown in a glass vessel from semen. The homunculus often appeared in alchemical pictures, and most famously in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Faust. The homunculus was a spirit, unable to survive outside his flask; but from within it he could expound wisdom that was unavailable to ordinary mortals weighed down by their bodies. In this connection, Newman provides an interesting section on Paracelsus, the genius or charlatan who brought chymistry into medicine, with his sexual hang-ups and fascination with phoenix-like ‘rebirths’ through fire.

The ethical problems facing Newman's cast of characters were hypothetical — after all, alchemy didn't work. But in an age of test-tube babies, Dolly the sheep and a vast array of synthetic chemicals, they are real enough.

Newman ends with a learned discussion of experiment — emphasizing that alchemy was an investigative science, carried on in the laboratory rather than the armchair — from medieval times up to Francis Bacon, Boyle, Newton and Margaret Cavendish. We meet artisans such as Bernard Palissy (who was ‘making’ fossils), as well as scholastic logicians. We are reminded that the ‘scientific revolution’ was not simply a matter of a new astronomy and a new physics. Rather, it was heavily dependent on the experimental tradition and critical thinking about analysis and synthesis. Alchemy would ultimately give birth not to a homunculus, but to the new chemistry.