Alchemy

...to concern myself with hidden methods, although they might perhaps be more successful. Why? You ask? They have not yet been proven by craftsmen. In order to be proven, they must be in the public eye for a long time. Therefore, they are not considered skillful if they are hidden. Those who are good and born with a liberal wit, in those things wherein they see me lacking, will either publish better things themselves or send them to me to be published in commentaries. I do not shun honest judgments of my labors, nor shall I be obstinate in defending errors. I shall learn from any legitimate advisor.

Certain things published with others lie easily open to impostures. Thus they seemed better suppressed than published further. But since a penalty is ready for impostures, and the magistrate is sufficiently vigilant in his duty—nay, since industrious craftsmen know the tests for them, and a single rule of judgment is applied—there is no reason for anyone to fear from that quarter. I wished to consult the interests of the good, not the bad. I have given good things, and I testify that they should be used well.

Care must be taken lest the unskilled, bold in medicating, apply that which belongs to the most circumspect and experienced physicians: as if an essence were made from sublimate and regulus, if a flower from antimony, if Turbith from Mercury, if laudanum from opium—you who are unskilled and imprudent in healing, do not easily permit the use of these things to yourself or to others; for although by rashness you may perhaps do good once or twice, yet you may err more thereafter. Noble medicines in the hand of a rash man are like a knife or a burning torch in the hand of a child or a madman.

Nor must I dread the sentence of those judges who will say that my work has brought it about that smiths, metallurgists, and other craftsmen, hitherto cast down from philosophical liberty into servile tasks, should have a safe place in Philosophy; since Chymistry is not only a servant of medicine, but also a more honorable part of physical contemplation, the mechanics will be carried up to the throne of Physics.

Yet I thought that one should not look to whom the labors have been entrusted, nor what servants the Philosophers used: Contemplation itself, contained in precepts, had to be recalled to its own art. And certainly, although the goldsmith has borrowed much from the Chymist, and the metallurgist much as well, yet both the skill of their operations is unequal, and those crafts are increased by many other things, so that thus...