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Alchemy, Chemistry, and Metallurgy
Early Modern Matter Theory and the Metals
For early modern people who lived in a world assumed to have been created at the beginning of time by a divine Creator, it made a lot of sense to assume that natural objects existed in finite sets. God created a finite number of animals, plants, oceans, and continents as a stage, as it were. When the stage was built and the props arranged, the drama of Salvation could be played out. Speaking in very general terms, the metals known since classical antiquity, i.e., gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead, and mercury, were just minor stage props in this drama. But they, too, were part of it. They...
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Fors, H. (2020). Alchemy, Chemistry, and Metallurgy. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_468-1
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