Science Was Conceived by Alchemy

The list of names of the earliest great scientists is a list of names of alchemists. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Lavoisier, Boyle -- these and many more devoted their time to the pursuit of the Great Work. We tend to think of the Scientific Revolution as the time that alchemy was abandoned in favor of the scientific method, but this is not the case. Interest in alchemy continued through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, well in to the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a continuous movement of growing interest in Hermeticism and theosophy that begins with the founders of modern science and leads right up to the present day.

Science itself has two tendencies, speculative and operative, that remain in tension. The speculative tendency of science is to understand the world. The operative tendency is to experiment, create, and innovate. The former we have inherited from medieval scholasticism; to the latter most impute a mysterious origin. Alfred North Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World notes that the Scientific Revolution was a profoundly anti-rational development. It was an anti-scholastic movement that despaired of the use of metaphysics and insisted on appeals to detailed observations of "brute facts."

However, Whitehead was aware that the brute fact is a myth, a fairy-tale. When something (like a beast) is brute, it is speechless. But the facts of nature are always speaking to us. In a sense, they want to be discovered. Scholastic philosophy has always taught that essences naturally broadcast themselves to the outside world, and they disclose themselves to the senses and the intellect. Whitehead himself accounted for this universal truth by his theory of prehensions, or internal relations. This was an exaggerated view of the connectedness and communication between things in the universe: to Whitehead, the being of a thing just was its becoming in relation to others. These relations, both concrete and abstract, would come together in an actual occasion, the basic unit of concrete temporal reality. Whitehead held temporality and internal relation to be so fundamental to reality that he imputed them to God himself. He thus adhered to a process theology, which was to become a major trend in the 20th century, a theory that God and the world were internally related and freely informed one another's becoming.

These facts about Whitehead are easy to discover, as are the facts about G.W.F. Hegel, Henri Bergson, and the American pragmatists, who were in many ways his predecessors and allies. But what is less easy to discover -- at least within the structures of the modern academy -- is the source of the theory of internal relations and process theology. It is now known that the source is Hermetic theosophy as taught by the alchemists.

Science as it is presented to us today is a riddle. On the one hand, its aim is ostensibly knowledge. On the other, the laboratory is indispensable to it. The idea of achieving knowledge of first principles by eschewing metaphysical abstraction and fixing one's explanations to the level of the phenomena themselves seems incoherent on the face of it. I submit that the contradiction can only be resolved when we place the enterprise of science in the context of the Hermetic Great Work.

As Frances Yates wrote in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition:

The Greeks with their first class mathematical and scientific brains made many discoveries in mechanics and other applied sciences but they never took whole-heartedly, with all their powers, the momentous step which western man took at the beginning of the modern period of crossing the bridge between the theoretical and the practical, of going all out to apply knowledge to produce operations. Why was this? It was basically a matter of the will. Fundamentally, the Greeks did not want to operate. They regarded operations as base and mechanical, a degeneration from the only occupation worthy of the dignity of man, pure rational and philosophical speculation. The Middle Ages carried on this attitude in the form that theology is the crown of philosophy and the true end of man is contemplation; any wish to operate can only be inspired by the devil. Quite apart from the question of whether Renaissance magic could, or could not, lead on to genuinely scientific procedures, the real function of the Renaissance Magus in relation to the modern period (or so I see it) is that he changed the will. It was now dignified and important for man to operate; it was also religious and not contrary to the will of God that man, the great miracle, should exert his powers. It was this basic psychological reorientation towards a direction of the will which was neither Greek nor medieval in spirit, which made all the difference.