Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of Thought

Abstract

THIS series of fragmentary discussions extends over a vast area: Pythagoras and his philosophy, medicine and magic, bird superstitions, powder of sympathy, talismans, ceremonial magic, architectural symbolism, the Philosopher's Stone, the phallic element in alchemical doctrine, Roger Bacon, and the Cambridge Platonists. It is inevitable that a discussion of such varied subjects in a limited space is not likely to be fruitful, nor will the author's interpretations command universal acceptance. Thus we are told that “the alchemists regarded the Philosopher's Stone and the transmutation of the base metals into gold as the consummation of the proof of the doctrines of mystical theology as applied to chemical phenomena,” though some were influenced by more material objects. The premises from which they started were “the truth of mystical philosophy, which asserts that the objects of Nature are symbols of. spiritual verities. There is, I think, abundant evidence to show that alchemy was a more or less deliberate attempt to apply, according to the principles of analogy, the doctrines of religious mysticism to chemical and physical phenomena.” Of course, it is generally admitted that the idea of transmutation had a philosophical basis such as it was, and that alchemy to some extent unified and focussed chemical effort, but it was, to use Liebig's words, “never at any time anything different from chemistry.”

Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of Thought.

By H. Stanley Redgrove. Pp. xvi + 205 + 32 plates. (London: William Rider and Son, Ltd., 1920.) Price 10s. 6d. net.