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This relatively slender book, in company with other recent scholarship that reconsiders what "everybody knows" about the history of science, promises to revolutionize the received understanding of the Scientific Revolution and the mechanical philosophy and experimentalism that characterized it. Newman is well aware that "alchemy" was an umbrella for a wide range of practices and pursuits, not all of which are pertinent to his argument. His dispute is with historians past and present who have denigrated alchemy tout court and who have failed to acknowledge its role in the development of modern science. They have told the story of the adoption of the mechanical philosophy as the recovery in the Latin West—supposedly in the 16th and 17th centuries—of the ancient views of atoms propounded by Democritus and Lucretius. In this account, these classical ideas were usefully modified by thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, whom these historians have regarded as proto-physicists. To be sure, Robert Boyle is in their pantheon, but he has been characterized as bringing physical thinking to chemistry, or as having a split personality divided between a modern chemistry self and an alchemical self.
To refute this received opinion, Newman conducts a guided tour through the matter theories of half a dozen thinkers, showing in specific detail bloodlines from alchemy to modern chemistry. While Boyle and Thomas Aquinas will be familiar to most readers, the others—Geber, Thomas Erastus, Andreas Libavius, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and Daniel Sennert—will be new to readers not familiar with science in the middle of the past millennium. They are for the most part thinkers who were once important, but who have been left out of historical accounts because they simply don't fit the reigning narrative.
This tour demands of the reader a genuine curiosity about matter theories and the mental agility to imagine a time when chemical operations were not necessarily assumed to reveal something about the nature of matter. It requires understanding the meaning of scientific words in use today in rather different ways (much as C. S. Lewis illumined in Studies in Words). In an intriguing "Note on Terminology," Newman explains, for example, that "atom" did not necessarily mean absolute indivisibility as in classical theories; nor does "atom" imply indivisibility today. But early modern thinkers used a variety of related terms such as "corpuscle" and "molecule"—not surprisingly, without universally agreed upon definitions. Newman also points out that "mixture" and "compound" once meant almost the opposite of their meanings today.
Another potential surprise for the reader may be that there were, so to speak, at least two Aristotles. There was the familiar one of substance, forms, the four elements, and the four qualities. But there was also the less familiar one of minima, the smallest particles that exhibit the characteristics of a particular material. And in his Meteorologia, Aristotle presented mechanical sorts of explanations in which earth's exhalations condensed to form all the meteorological effects, or, if trapped in the earth, all the metals.
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