Alchemy: Ancient and Modern

§ 103. We have shown that modern science indicates the essential truth of alchemistic doctrine, and our task is ended. Writing in 1904, Sir William Ramsay said: “If these hypotheses [concerning the possibility of causing the atoms of ordinary elements to absorb energy] are just, then the transmutations of the elements no longer appears an idle dream. The philosopher’s stone will have been discovered, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may lead to that other goal of the philosophers of the dark ages—the elixir vitæ. For the action of living cells is also dependent on the nature and direction of the energy which they contain; and who can say that it will be impossible to control their action, when the means of imparting and controlling energy shall have been investigated?”[131] Whatever may be the final verdict concerning his own experiments, those of Sir Ernest Rutherford, referred to in the Preface to the present edition, demonstrate the fact of transmutation; and it is worth noticing how many of the alchemists’ obscure descriptions of their Magistery well apply to that marvellous something which we call Energy, the true “First Matter” of the Universe. And of the other problem, the Elixir Vitæ, who knows?