Chemist and Alchemist

Franz Hartmann · Confusing Words Series · 4 pages

Edited excerpts from chapter 6 of Franz Hartmann's With the Adepts, an Adventure among the Rosicrucians, in the second edition of 1910, set out as a two-column comparison so that each claim about the chemist faces its counterpart about the alchemist. The definition offered first is broad: the universal process by which all the processes of life take place is the unfoldment of Life, and he who can guide and control the power of Life is an alchemist, able to create new forms and to increase the substance of those forms.

The columns then run in parallel. The chemist creates nothing new but merely forms new combinations of the substances in his possession; the alchemist causes substance to attract corresponding elements from the invisible storehouse in nature, and to increase. The chemist deals with matter in which the principle of life is inactive, manifesting only as mechanical or chemical energy; the alchemist deals with the principle of life itself and causes living forms to come into existence. The illustration that closes the comparison is the one that makes it concrete: a chemist may turn sulphur into gas and back again, ending with exactly the quantity he began with, whereas the gardener who plants a seed and prepares the conditions for it to grow is an alchemist, because from one seed he obtains a thousand. The full text is in the Mystic Verse and Insights series.

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