A New Light of Alchemy

1Many wise and highly learned men wrote extensively about making the philosophers’ stone many centuries ago—indeed, according to Hermes, before the Flood. They left us so many writings that, unless nature daily performed things we could believe in, hardly anyone would now think that nature truly existed. Earlier ages did not have so many inventors of things; our predecessors considered nothing beyond nature herself and what nature could do. Although they kept simply to nature’s path, they discovered things that we, occupied with so many pursuits, could scarcely have imagined by our own ingenuity. This happens because nature and the generation of things in the world now seem commonplace and simple to us. We therefore direct our minds toward things that cannot, or can scarcely, be done, instead of toward things already known. The result is that we find it easier to devise subtleties and imagine things that the philosophers themselves would not have known than to reach nature’s true course and the philosophers’ meaning. Human nature is so constituted that it neglects what it knows and always seeks something else; this applies still more to human ingenuity, to which nature is subject. For example, you see that when any craftsman has reached the highest perfection of his craft, he seeks something else, misuses his craft, or stops altogether.