The Future of Alchemy

Charles Froebel’s short but interesting essay The Future od Alchemy was published in Popular Science Monthly magazine in March 1874.«The chemistry of to-day is, in part a science searching for forms of truth; in part an art pursuing the objects of the useful. The scientific chemist seeks and discovers realities of fact; the technical chemist produces realities of matter; neither of them endeavors to give existence to material ideals. But though man may thus unconsciously serve the inscrutable power through which all is that is, and all is what it is, yet of nobler mood is he who, feeling his heart swell in sympathy with her purpose—the creation of ultimate universal perfection—persists in constant faith to work her ends. Of such noble mood, and of such conscious purpose, must be the future alchemist. His work—the reformation of the crude earth, and air, and waters, that surround us, in the image of his chemical ideals, the production of untold varieties of the Philosopher’s Stone—is not to be accomplished in a lifetime, or a century, but demands the continued labor of infinite generations».