[98] For a critical examination of Materialism, the reader is referred to the present writer’s Matter, Spirit and the Cosmos (Rider, 1910), especially Chapters I. and IV.
[99] W. Ostwald: “Faraday Lecture,” Journal of the Chemical Society, vol. lxxxv. (1904), pp. 506 et seq. See also W. Ostwald: The Fundamental Principles of Chemistry (translated by H. W. Morse, 1909), especially Chapters VI., VII. and VIII.
[100] For an account of this singular phenomenon, see Prof. Jean Perrin: Brownian Movement and Molecular Reality (translated from the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 8me Séries, September, 1909, by F. Soddy, M.A., F.R.S., 1910).
[CHAPTER VII]
MODERN ALCHEMY
“Modern Alchemy.”
§ 85. Correctly speaking, there is no such thing as “Modern Alchemy”; not that Mysticism is dead, or that men no longer seek to apply the principles of Mysticism to phenomena on the physical plane, but they do so after another manner from that of the alchemists. A new science, however, is born amongst us, closely related on the one hand to Chemistry, on the other to Physics, but dealing with changes more profound and reactions more deeply seated than are dealt with by either of these; a science as yet without a name, unless it be the not altogether satisfactory one of “Radioactivity.” It is this science, or, perhaps we should say, a certain aspect of it, to which we refer (it may be fantastically) by the expression “Modern Alchemy”: the aptness of the title we hope to make plain in the course of the present chapter.