Friedrichstadt Leisure or the Chemical Tantalus

It is by no means necessary to be prolix concerning these matters now: for salable wine has no need of a hanging ivy sign. From the review of these journals, we know concerning what object the learned men in the corners of the world are occupied, and a stimulus is added to men accomplished in erudition, so that they might also direct their mind toward laudable efforts, illustrating the literary Republic.

In such a supply and review of the labors of learned Men, no science and art at all has so few cultivators of itself as true and solid Chemistry: in a list of six hundred authors in the theater, not a single Chemist is presented, so that it is a wonder that this art is estimated up and down; when yet this art, looked at in itself, is of such a wide and diffuse tract that those who wish to reduce it into the form of an art undertake a labor similar to as if they wished to count the grains of the shore of the sands. Chemistry is an art of such a kind that it cannot be enclosed in the circles of precepts and rules, and then it would experience the same fate as Physics has experienced. For after it was enclosed by the fate of definitions, it obtained an unhappy success. It was in a much better state in the time of Aristotle, and it is also much better cultivated if only the phenomena of nature are commemorated, than if we bind the course of nature to precepts born in the brains of men. Some proceed in the same way with Chemistry. For just as it has hitherto been impossible for the entire learned world, though it be Argus and Oedipus, to recount the mysteries of the generation of animals, insects, vegetables, and fungi univocally and equivocally, and the modes and variations of the mysteries by which nature commends itself: with a similar rite, Chemistry also diffuses itself. So that we cannot circumscribe its economy: it is equally impossible to reduce Chemistry into the form of an art, and to drag it, as it were, bound in chains, or even unwilling. The number of those who follow what is hitherto received and reduced into the form of an art is long, but the knowledge of true Chemistry and of more sublime cultivation is completely exiled from men due to the scarcity of writers and cultivators, and because this requires more labor, industry, and expense than that which is reduced into the form of an art, which is that of the students of the pharmaceutical art. For there are in this sublime Chemistry innumerable objects and a multiplex context of those objects, all of which clearly reject the form of an art. Added to this are the most curious Meletemata meditations/studies and