CHAPTER VI.
'Tis certain that this man has an estate of fifty thousand livres, and seems to be a person of very great accomplishments. But, then, if he's a Wizard, are wizards so devoutly given as this man seems to be? — In short, I could make neither head nor tail on't. — The Count de Gabalis, Translation affixed to the second edition of the "Rape of the Lock."
Of all the weaknesses which little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest.
Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of Alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher's Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by Alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher's Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present century has produced.[O 1] Man cannot contradict the Laws of Nature. But are all the laws of nature yet discovered?
- ↑ Mr Disraeli, in his Curiosities of Literature (article "Alchem"), after quoting the sanguine judgments of modern chemists
