I - Alchemy

Summary

It requires some effort of the imagination to picture the young Goethe retiring to the attic of his father's staid middle-class house, with its engravings of classical Rome and its solid respectable furniture, to occupy himself with fantastic furnaces and retorts, mysterious salts and crystals, and recipes for acquiring the Elixir of Life. But such is the account which he himself gives in his autobiography. This apparently superstitious seclusion becomes the more surprising when one recalls that this was the epoch of Lavoisier and Priestley, the age of Enlightenment not only in the artistic world of Winckelmann and Lessing, but also in the scientific sphere. One might have supposed that Goethe's first steps in science would have been more in keeping with the times. The fact is however that alchemy, although fast dying out, was still able to command some attention even among serious men of science. In the previous century it was still in a flourishing condition, and the attack delivered by Robert Boyle in his Sceptical Chymist, published in 1661, had little effect until much later. Scientists, while making great strides in some fields by the use of empirical observation, could not wholly give up their belief in the value of traditional methods of scientific research. Newton himself was no exception: the surviving manuscripts or transcripts on alchemy written in his own hand amount to some 650,000 words, a remarkable testimony to the tenacity of the old faith.