Histories of Ancient Science and Mathematics

Chapter 7 Histories of Ancient Science and Mathematics

1 Curiosity and Erudition on Ancient Alchemy

In 1885 Marcelin Berthelot undertook a demanding task: a history of the ancient alchemy as an introduction to understanding the roots of modern chemistry. The latter was then a young science: it had emerged in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and therefore it had a short history. On the contrary, alchemy could rely on a long history that covered many centuries until the end of the eighteenth century. It is worth remarking that there was a tradition of research on the history of science in France: the mathematician Jean-Étienne Montucla had published Histoires des Mathématiques, whose first volume appeared in 1758, and the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly had published Histoire de l’Astronomie ancienne depuis son origine jusqu’à l’établissement de l’école d’Alexandrie in 1775, followed by Histoire de l’Astronomie moderne depuis la fondation de l’école d’Alexandrie jusqu’à l’époque de 1780 in two volumes in 1779, and other two volumes in 1782 and 1787.1 After Bailly, other histories of astronomy had appeared: the French astronomer Jean Baptiste Delambre had published a two-volume Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne in 1817, then Histoire de l’astronomie du moyen Age in 1819, and the two-volume Histoire de l’astronomie moderne in 1821. The first half of the nineteenth century also saw the publication of histories of natural sciences or life science in general by the authoritative naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier, and by the physician and naturalist Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville. Finally, a Histoire des Sciences médicales was published by the physician and historian of medicine Charles Daremberg in 1870: he was the first scholar to hold the Chair of History of Medicine at the Collège de France, a Chair that had been created in 1864 [Gusdorf 1966, pp. 89 91, and 103].

1 Gusdorf traced back the emergence of the history of science in France to Bernard le Bouyer de Fontanelle, around the turn of the eighteenth century, and the emergence of philosophy of history to Voltaire, after the turn of mid-century. He looked upon Fontanelle as the first scholar to have put forward a history of science as “a history of human esprit.” More in general, Gusdorf found that “the awareness of the historicity of human life and culture” had emerged in the eighteen century. It is certainly true, even though it was not a hegemonic cultural trend. In 1879, after the Revolution, Bailly was also mayor of Paris, but in 1793 he was guillotined because of his alleged conservatism [Gusdorf 1966, pp. 56-7, 65, 67, and 70].

Berthelot was an authoritative scientist and politician, and therefore could rely on the collaboration of other scholars in the fulfilment of his historical reconstruction. Historical, philosophical, and philological skills were required, and in some way that reconstruction was a collective enterprise. The result was a book wherein Berthelot’s naïve and radical positivism was softened by the ac- knowledgement of the existence of a neglected cultural tradition. He started from the statement that “a purely rational conception” could be traced back to the time of the ancient Greeks, and since then science had laid claim to “the material universe.” Nevertheless, the time interval between Greek rationalism and modern chemistry had been filled with a mixed practice where both magic and “a well-defined positive attitude” overlapped. In Comtian terms, that time could be qualified as “half-rationalist and half-mystic”: although chemistry was “probably the most positive among sciences,” it had emerged from a melting pot of sound observations and “extravagant imagination.” Alchemy was an in- termediate body of knowledge endowed with multifarious connections with the philosophical traditions that had gained hegemony in the first centuries of the Christian age. It rested upon a meta-theoretical commitment that was not uncommon in subsequent scientific practice: the hypothesis of “the unity of matter.” In other words, Berthelot acknowledged the existence of meaning- ful analogies between “the deep views of the first alchemists,” and modern conceptions on “the structure of matter” [Berthelot 1885, pp. VI-VII, IX, and XIV-XV].2 Berthelot divided the book into four parts: first the sources, and then the characters, which were followed by “facts and theories.” In the Introductions to the different parts and chapters we find Berthelot’s personal remarks and reflections, whereas many other information and passages reveal the specific skills, mainly philological skills, of the other scholars. He stressed the empirical component of chemistry, and the fact that its fast progress had contributed to the transformation of “material civilisation” in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, unlike other sciences such as “geometry and astronomy,” chemistry had not existed in ancient times: it was the result of a profound in- tellectual transformation of “the debris of a previous body of knowledge,” which he surprisingly qualified as scientific. In reality, the adjective appears less surprising when Berthelot remarked that the body of knowledge known as alchemy could rely on a wide domain of empirical practices and “practi-

2 Gusdorf remarked that Berthelot had started from the conception of alchemy as a false science that had faded away, and had left many pieces of theoretical debris of different value. Alchemy was looked upon as “a sort of mental archaeology” [Gusdorf 1966, p. 109].