The Golden Chain of Homer

25If you do not make your medicine thus, but remain with your extracted sulphur, you will bear the loss yourselves. Even if the best philosophers hold this opinion, I remain with nature, which does not join heterogeneous things or dregs together, as some suppose when they say: “Extract the soul and leave the body, for it is dregs.” Yes indeed—the dregs are in your head, not in the body! I say this: “Take the soul together with the body if you wish to cure the human body and spirit.” They contradict themselves. If the disease is in the blood or liquid parts, the soul cures it; accordingly, the body should cure the body in turn, and one spirit the other. Such follies have crept into the noble art, through which so many—I will not say a thousand, but countless people—have lost their possessions, died, and perished; who knows where their souls have gone? When someone has acquired through ten years’ labour a practical knack that he might perhaps have achieved in a quarter of an hour, had fate not stood in the way, he makes as much of it as if he had concentrated heaven and earth. He proclaims that there is no other way, and that even if an angel came from heaven and taught differently, it would be a lie—as if God did not have a thousand ways of helping! Yet they alone wish to be masters, and drag all other parables toward their own work. Paper, pen, and ink must immediately be fetched, and whole folios scribbled about one single thing to which the writer attaches an entire philosophy. These will contain nothing but hieroglyphics, perplexities, transpositions, and highest secrets of which the world is unworthy—yet they are written for the world. A few old recipes are then appended, entirely obscure besides, concerning the universal tincture and philosophers’ stone. In puzzling over them, many stake and spend possessions, property, money, indeed body and soul. But when the matter is examined in daylight, one often finds the writer’s arcanum openly in an old manuscript on the junk market. Then the treasure lies open and is little esteemed or wholly disregarded.