Alchemy as Studies of Life

and Matter
Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early
Modern Chymistry

By Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang*

ABSTRACT

Early modern alchemy studied both matter and life, much like today’s life sciences. What
material life is and how it comes about intrigued alchemists. Many found the answer by
assuming a vital principle that served as the source and cause of life. Recent literature has
presented important cases in which vitalist formulations incorporated corpuscular or
mechanical elements that were characteristic of the New Science and other cases in which
vitalist thinking influenced important figures of the Scientific Revolution. Not merely
speculative, vitalist ideas also motivated chymical practice. The unity of life science and
material science that is found in many formulations of Renaissance alchemy disintegrated
in Georg Ernst Stahl’s version of post-Cartesian vitalism.

S CIENTISTS RECENTLY HAILED A LANDMARK. They synthesized a previously

nonexistent cell by replacing the genome of a natural bacterial cell with one manu-
factured in a test tube.1 The procedure of cutting and grafting DNA is not new. What
makes this synthetic cell extraordinary is its ability to reproduce itself. It is life, and—most
remarkable of all—it is man-made life!
The twenty-first century seems to be dominated by such interest in life. New disciplines
in the life sciences—cellular biology, molecular biology, biophysics, molecular evolu-
tionary biology, bioinformatics, and so forth—have rapidly emerged and (at least as
judged by the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of
Health) are now supported by more funding than the physical sciences. Seeking to unravel
the mystery of life, these disciplines assume that the key to the secrets of life lies in

* Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 130 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang District,
Taipei City, 11529, Taiwan; kchang@sinica.edu.te.
1 Nicholas Wade, “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell,’” New York Times, 20 May 2010,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html.

Isis, 2011, 102:322–329

©2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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matter—be it DNA, genome, or chromosome. They are as much material sciences as life S
sciences.
This interest parallels that of a previous age in which the study of matter was likewise
very much a study of life and in which alchemy played a prominent role in the investi-
gation of both. Theorists and practitioners of alchemy often investigated problems in
mining and metallurgy, but many were equally interested in pharmacy and medicine.
Twentieth-century scholars like Karl Sudhoff, Walter Pagel, and Allen Debus have
understood the significance of such dual interests. Each has seized on both the chemical
and the medical side of alchemical thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
result of which has been to promote a “chemical philosophy” whose foundations rested in
medicine.2 In their view, early modern alchemy assumed that the same vital principles
underlay the workings of life and the processes of matter. Early modern alchemy was thus
a material science and a life science at once.
More recently, however, opinions concerning the precise role of vitalism in the history
of alchemy have become less unanimous. The works of Larry Principe and William
Newman, for instance, question the general characterization of alchemy as universally
vitalist. Newman emphasizes the lack of vitalist elements in pseudo-Geberian matter
theory, while Principe has presented Gaston DuClo’s purely nonvitalist account of trans-
mutation. Nevertheless, neither author wants to dismiss vitalism out of hand as irrelevant
to late medieval and early modern theories of matter. Newman even faults anyone “who
is accustomed to seeing the seventeenth century as a period when the ‘mechanical
philosophy’ flourished at the expense of older vitalistic theories.”3
Other authors have focused less on matter per se in discussions of alchemy and more
on life, viewing alchemy as a study of life itself. Publications by Antonio Clericuzio and
Hiro Hirai demonstrate the breadth and vigor of vitalist alchemy, while Jole Shackelford
and Didier Kahn detail the systematization and trajectories of Paracelsian alchemy in the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pamela Smith has analyzed vitalist motivations
in Johann Rudolf Glauber’s chymical practice.4
The on-again, off-again relationship to vitalism in the recent historiography of alchemy
shows the complexity of vitalism in early modern chymistry. This essay will examine a

2 Karl Sudhoff, Paracelsus: Ein deutsches Lebensbild aus den Tagen der Renaissance (Leipzig: Bibliogra-

phisches Institut, 1936); Theophrast von Hohenheim Gen. Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, ed. Sudhoff (Munich/
Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1929); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of
the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel: Karger, 1982); Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and
Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London:
Oldbourne, 1965); Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977); Debus, The French Paracel-
sians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); and Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton,
Mass.: Science History Publications, 2001).
3 William R. Newman, The Summa perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Study

(Leiden/New York: Brill, 1991); Lawrence M. Principe, “Diversity in Alchemy: The Case of Gaston ‘Claveus’
DuClo, a Scholastic Mercurialist Chrysopoeian,” in Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific
Revolution, ed. Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Press, 1998), pp.
181–200; and Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific
Revolution (Chciago/London: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 148 –149 (quotation).
4 Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the

Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); Hiro Hirai, Le concept de semence dans les théories de la
matière à la Renaissance: De Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); Didier Kahn, Alchimie
et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567–1625) (Geneva: Droz, 2007); and Pamela H. Smith,
The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2004),
pp. 165–181.

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324 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 2 (2011)

few cases in which vitalist formulations of alchemy incorporated corpuscular or mechan-

ical elements that were characteristic of the “new science” and several cases in which they
influenced important figures of the Scientific Revolution. It will also show that vitalist
ideas had more than a theoretical role; they motivated alchemists’ practice as well. Toward
the end it will draw attention to the transformation of Renaissance vitalism in the works
of Georg Ernst Stahl (1659 –1734), as his redefinition of vitalism broke the bond between
chemistry and medicine. While the previous characterization of early modern alchemy as
universally vitalistic is rightly questioned by recent literature, the newly uncovered
significance of Renaissance vitalism in studies of nature invites reconsideration of its
place in early modern alchemy. Such reconsideration will shed light on the varied
descriptions of life and matter, and indeed the diversity of science, in the early modern
period.
Vitalist theories in the Renaissance can be characterized in terms of either cosmic
vitalism or immanent vitalism. The cosmic version featured a universal spirit permeating
and enlivening all things in the geocosmos. It had its ancient models in Plato’s world-soul
and Stoic pneuma, while Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) became its influential proponent in
the Renaissance. Immanent vitalism, on the other hand, presumed a principle of life that
was intrinsic to matter. As Hirai shows, this immanent principle was considered to be a
soul, a spirit, or a form and was very often visualized as a “seed” implanted in the basic
unit of the living substance. These two forms of vitalism often coexisted in different
formulations. Either or both were conspicuous in the works of many well-known alche-
mists, including Paracelsus (1493–1541), Peter Severinus (1542–1602), Joseph Duchesne
(ca. 1544 –1609), Michael Sendivogius (1566 –1636), Oswald Croll (ca. 1560 –1608), Jean
d’Espagnet (1564 –1637), Joan Baptista Van Helmont (1579 –1644), Robert Fludd (1574 –
1637), and Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604 –1670).5
Although alchemical vitalism came up against the mechanical philosophy or corpus-
cularianism on various fronts, the two were not always in conflict, as the example of Peter
Severinus, a systematizer and popularizer of Paracelsian teachings, shows. An advocate of
the semina theory, Severinus regarded the operation of semina as “a mechanical process”
(mechanicus processus) guided by “mechanical knowledge” (scientia mechanica). “Me-
chanical” in this case refers to the activity of a mechanicus—that is, a craftsman or
workman—so that the archeus, or agent, of the seed worked at the “atomic level,” just as
the mechanic did in the workshop. That notion was echoed in Francis Bacon’s description
of the mechanic’s, or maker’s, knowledge: internalized operational skills that produced
regularity in the process of fabrication. The regularity of the mechanic’s knowledge (that
is, scientia), Shackelford argues, is what Robert Boyle, like Severinus, demanded from
seminal principles in his early writings. Indeed, as J. A. Bennett suggests, it is from this
understanding of mechanics’ knowledge that the mechanical philosophy ultimately de-
rived.6

5 For studies on the vital spirit see Allen G. Debus, “Chemistry and the Quest for a Material Spirit of Life in

the Seventeenth Century,” in Spiritus: IV Colloquio Internazionale del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, Roma, 7–9
gennaio 1983, ed. M. Fattori and M. Bianchi (Rome: Ateneo, 1984), pp. 245–263; Antonio Clericuzio, “Spiritus
vitalis: Studio sulle teorie fisiologiche da Fernel a Boyle,” Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, 1988,
2:33– 84; and Clericuzio, “The Internal Laboratory: The Chemical Reinterpretation of Medical Spirits in England
(1650 – 80),” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Piyo Rattansi and
Clericuzio (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 51– 83. For the semina theory see Hirai, Concept de semence dans les
théories de la matière à la Renaissance.
6 Jole Shackelford, “Seeds with a Mechanical Purpose: Severinus’ Semina and Seventeenth-Century Matter

Theory,” in Reading the Book of Nature, ed. Debus and Walton (cit. n. 3), pp. 15– 44, esp. pp. 22–23; and J. A.

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Van Helmont also integrated vitalism and nonvitalist corpuscularianism in his theory of S
matter, employing, as Newman observes, pseudo-Geberian matter theory in his discussion
of the difference between the superfluous and intrinsic sulfur of mercury and applying the
scholastic theory of minima naturalia, the smallest natural parts out of which all things are
composed, to his idea of chemical combination. While both scholastic and Geberian
matter theory were devoid of vitalism, Van Helmont postulated that semina dwelling in
matter served as the center of actualization. In chemical processes, this principle of life
and actualization worked through their hosts, the ferments, to break down matter into
minima naturalia (which he identified as “atoms”) and then to imbue them with new
qualities.7 In Van Helmont’s formulation, therefore, the vital principle—semina—per-
sisted, like forms, as the source of material qualities in a world picture filled by corpuscles.
Andreas Libavius (1555–1616) and Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) serve as two other
examples in which the semina theory and corpuscularianism were accommodated to each
other. Libavius, though often viewed as a vehement foe of Paracelsian alchemy, accepted
the semina theory to reconcile Democritean atomism and Aristotelian hylozoism: he
viewed semina as atoms manifesting unbreakable unions of secret first principles (prin-
cipia prima). Received from the heavens, they determined and supplied particular qual-
ities to physical things and worked on the elements to bring about the generation and
corruption of the physical world. Later, as Christoph Lüthy notes, Sennert explicitly
quoted Severinus’s statement that “generation is nothing else but the progression of the
seeds from its sources, abysses, and vital principles onto this worldly stage.”8 Sennert
wanted to improve Severinus’s teaching about semina by removing the inexplicable
abysses. His solution was to propose atomic particles and their constellations as the
carriers of specific forms and seeds.
The relationship between vitalism and mechanism went through further evolution in the
works of Boyle. Studying manuscripts and published works from the 1650s and early
1660s, Clericuzio has shown that Boyle conceived of corpuscles as endowed with seminal
or “plastic” powers that caused generation and guided the growth of animals, vegetables,
and minerals. Originally seeking to refute such a vitalist depiction, Peter Anstey also
traced the development of Boyle’s ideas about seminal principles. His finding was that in
the 1650s and early 1660s Boyle was indeed a committed vitalist, believing that rainwater
and air contained seminal principles and that seeds or seed-like entities caused the
formation of some minerals. Gradually, however, he became more skeptical, and in the
early 1670s he almost gave up the vitalist elements in material explanations, except for
those related to the generation of metalline bodies, plants, and animals. He seemed certain
that the generation of crystals and metals had nothing to do with seminal principles, but
he left undecided the question of whether the generation of animals and plants could be
explained by mechanical means alone.9

Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science, 1986, 24:1–28. On
Bacon’s and Boyle’s conceptions of the mechanic’s knowledge Shackelford cites works by Malcolm Oster, J. A.
Bennett, and Antonio Pérez-Ramos: Shackelford, “Seeds with a Mechanical Purpose,” pp. 41, 43.
7 William R. Newman, “The Corpuscular Theory of J. B. Van Helmont and Its Medieval Sources,” Vivarium:

Journal for Medieval Philosophy and the Intellectual Life of the Middle Ages, 1993, 31:161–191, esp. pp.
174 –181.
8 William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific

Revolution (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 76 –78 (on Libavius); and Christoph Lüthy, “Seeds
Sprouting Everywhere,” Annals of Science, 2007, 64:411– 420, on p. 418.
9 Clericuzio, Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles (cit. n. 4), pp. 125–127, 148; and Peter R. Anstey, “Boyle

on Seminal Principles,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2002,
33:597– 630, esp. pp. 616, 619 – 623, 628.

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326 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 2 (2011)

Lest one think that vitalism was only about words and not about works—to use the
terms in the title of Tara Nummedal’s contribution to this Focus section—it must be
pointed out that vitalist concerns also guided alchemists’ practical work. Their practice in
healing and chemical operations often involved the collection, extraction, and manipula-
tion of the supposed cosmic vital spirit and specific semina by chemical means. Alche-
mists often tried to distill or condense them in the form of fluid, which they called “spirit,”
or—increasingly in the seventeenth century—in the form of salt. As Pamela Smith has
shown, Glauber’s belief in the identity of his sal mirabile as the crystallization of the
universal vital spirit was integral to his study, production, and even marketing of his salt.10
Vitalism was accepted not only by alchemists, but also by figures not commonly seen
as alchemists. The materialist philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the Prague
professor of medicine Johannes Marcus Marci (1595–1667), and the physicians William
Harvey (1578 –1657) and Francis Glisson (1599 –1677) are all examples.11 So was Ath-
anasius Kircher (1602–1680), a prominent virtuoso usually seen as opposed to alchemy.
Examining his Mundus subterraneus (1664 –1665), Hirai has revealed vitalist elements in
Kircher’s thinking that exhibit strong Paracelsian characteristics. Kircher postulated the
“seed of nature,” identifying it as a spiritus that mediates between the Creator and his
creatures. As the “universal seed of things,” it gives form, figure, and color to natural
beings. It is identical, he suggests, with “‘the world’s soul’ of Plato, ‘the entelecheia’ or
‘the moving power of all things’ of Aristotle . . . and . . . Hermetists’ ‘seed of Nature.’”
Particularly alchemical is what Kircher supposes to be the seed’s salnio-sulfuro-mercurial
nature, an unambiguous reference to the Paracelsian tria prima—salt, sulfur, and mercury.
He even interprets an important passage in Aristotle’s work on the generation of animals
and plants in terms of the three principles. For Kircher, however, the cause of the
generation of mineral crystals cannot properly be called plastic or seminal. Instead, he
explains, they are generated by the juxtaposition of similar corpuscles owing to a saline
power that is only “akin” to a plastic one.12 In spite of his caution in the application of
plastic power to minerals, however, Kircher’s world picture relied heavily on an alchem-
ical reading of vitalism.
The cases discussed so far demonstrate the complex intermingling of vitalism with
different threads of early modern thought and practice, while that of Georg Ernst Stahl
(1659 –1734) signals that alchemical vitalism underwent a remarkable shift in the early
eighteenth century. Trained in 1680 –1684 in the medical faculty at Jena, a stronghold of
chemical medicine that propagated alchemical doctrines, Stahl became interested in the
work of Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682), who embraced the vitalist cosmos and

10 Smith, Body of the Artisan (cit. n. 4), pp. 165–181.

11 On Gassendi see Hirai, Concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance (cit. n. 4), pp.
463– 491. On Marci see Margaret D. Garber, “Transitioning from Transubstantiation to Transmutation: Catholic
Anxieties over Chymical Matter Theory at the University of Prague,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the
History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science
History Publications, 2007), pp. 61–76. On vitalist ideas in Harvey see Walter Pagel, William Harvey’s
Biological Ideas: Selected Aspects and Historical Background (New York: Hafner, 1967); and Pagel, New Light
on William Harvey (Basel: Karger, 1976). On Glisson see Guido Giglioni, “Anatomist Atheist? The ‘Hylozo-
istic’ Foundations of Francis Glisson’s Anatomical Research,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in
Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), pp. 115–135; and Giglioni, “Francis Glisson’s Notion
of Confoederatio Naturae in the Context of Hylozoistic Corpuscularianism,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences,
2002, 55:239 –262.
12 Hiro Hirai, “Kircher’s Chemical Interpretation of the Creation and Spontaneous Generation,” in Chymists

and Chymistry, ed. Principe, pp. 77– 87, on pp. 79 – 83, 85 (referring to Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals
3:11).

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semina and whose Physica subterranea (1669) was clearly inspired by Kircher’s Mundus S
subterraneus.13 A self-professed follower of Becher, Stahl not only asserted his allegiance
to the famed German alchemist but also connected himself to the tradition of vitalist
alchemy. His disavowal of this allegiance late in his career redefined alchemical vitalism
as well as his relationship to alchemy itself.
Though he confirmed his belief in chrysopoeia (i.e., gold making) in his early chemical
textbook, Stahl became critical of chrysopoetic alchemy from the late 1710s. As Newman
and Principe point out, he was one of the first early Enlightenment figures to formulate a
distinction between chymie (chemistry) and alchymie (alchemy)—although Libavius had
done something similar more than a century earlier. Chemistry, Stahl maintained, was the
rational and well-grounded study of material change, while alchemy was a confused,
futile, and often deceptive undertaking.14 Despite his continued praise of the mechanistic
elements in Becher’s theory of matter, especially as represented in his Physica subterra-
nea, Stahl came to speak critically of the alchemical ideas contained in Becher’s early
work, Natur-Kündigung der Metallen (1661). He denied any celestial influence on the
growth of subterranean deposits, dismissed ideas of metallic and mineral seeds, and
rejected the possibility of an alchemical tincture that transformed base metals into gold.15
Ruling out vital seeds intrinsic to matter as well as a cosmic spirit outside the body, his
criticism of alchemy left no room for either cosmic or immanent vitalism. An alchemist
turned critic, Stahl articulated the vitalism of a new age, one that set chemistry apart from
medicine and thereby dissolved a unity that had been a staple of vitalist alchemy.
Stahl was educated at a time when mechanism was rising to dominance in the physical
sciences, and his intellectual starting point can be said to be halfway between mechanism
and Renaissance vitalism. He accepted a largely mechanistic view of material qualities as
the result of the size, shape, and interlocking of particles.16 On the other hand, responding
to René Descartes’s formulation of the world that denied the need to explain what made
life possible, he insisted on the necessity of a vital principle, the immaterial soul, that
conserved the human body. The soul knew biological purposes and goals, while matter
followed mechanical laws blindly. Therefore it could only be the soul that directed the
material body, composed of internal organs, glands, small parts, and fluids, to fulfill the
ends of life by maintaining regular organic functions and initiating spontaneous bodily
reactions to fend off external threats. To the extent that medicine had to attend to the realm
of organic purposes, it could not rely on the material sciences, such as chemistry and
physics, alone.
Stahl’s vitalism, whose great influence on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
vitalism is well documented, thus marked a radical shift in chymical cosmology and

13 J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961–1970), Vol. 2, p. 645.

14 William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a
Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine, 1998, 3:32– 65. See also Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang,
“Georg Ernst Stahl’s Alchemical Publications: Anachronism, Reading Market, and a Scientific Lineage Rede-
fined,” in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. Principe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 23– 43,
esp. pp. 33–37. On Libavius see Bruce T. Moran, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy:
Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fire (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications,
2007), pp. 40 – 41 (I thank Bruce Moran for this reference).
15 Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, “From Vitalistic Cosmos to Materialistic World: The Lineage of Johann Joachim

Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl and the Shift of Early Modern Cosmology,” in Chymists and Chymistry, ed.
Principe (cit. n. 11), pp. 215–225, esp. pp. 220 –221.
16 Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, “Fermentation, Phlogiston, and Matter Theory: Chemistry and Natural Philosophy

in Georg Ernst Stahl’s Zymotechnia Fundamentalis,” Early Sci. Med., 2002, 7:31– 64.

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328 FOCUS—ISIS, 102 : 2 (2011)

redefined the relationship between chemistry and medicine.17 The vitalist cosmology
inherent in the work of Paracelsus, Severinus, Van Helmont, Kircher, and Becher joined
the celestial and the terrestrial worlds as a living cosmos that embraced animate and
inanimate beings as individual species of life. Stahl’s theory of life and matter, in contrast,
drew a boundary between the heavens and the earth and between lifeless matter and the
living being. After Stahl, vitalists never reclaimed the inorganic world as their territory.
The vital principle was forever localized in the organism and vitalism confined to the life
sciences.18 For post-Stahlian vitalists, life science and material science studied distinct
realms of nature.
While recent literature on alchemy in the early modern period justly questions the
general vitalist characterization of alchemy, it has also expanded recognition of the
presence and significance of vitalist discussion during the same period. Even though
resolute mechanists like Descartes wanted to banish questions about the nature and cause
of life from scientific investigations, the explanation of life remained a difficult and
intriguing topic for all who studied nature, including devout mechanists. In the tug of war
between mechanism and vitalism that continued in the centuries following the Renais-
sance, it was, ironically, the mechanists who sometimes put principles of vitalism back
into matter.19 Mechanism had its limits and, as in Boyle’s agony over the cause of life,
invited vitalist speculation. Instead of diverting attention from vitalism in early modern
alchemy, the ample resources provided by recent literature warrant fresh studies concern-
ing the complexity and transformation of vitalism. We have just seen examples of its
conjunction with mechanism, corpuscularianism, and artisanal practice and of the pres-
ence of vitalist elements in teachings, like those of Libavius, Kircher, and Boyle, that are
often supposed to have been hostile to alchemy.
In his contribution to this Focus section, “Alchemy Restored,” Principe calls our
attention to the fact that “chymical transformations frequently and easily carried linkages
for their authors with ideas in theology, literature, mythology, and other fields.” Indeed,
one cannot fully understand the words and works of Paracelsus and Glauber without
coming to terms with their religion, mysticism, and search for the source of life. This essay

17 For Stahl’s influence on Montpellier vitalism see B. J. Gottlieb, “Bedeutung und Auswirkungen des

hallischen Professors und kgl. preuss. Leibarztes Georg Ernst Stahl auf den Vitalismus des XVIII. Jahrhunderts,
insbesondere auf die Schule von Montpellier,” Nova Acta Leopoldina, 1943, N.S., 12:425–503; Roselyne Rey,
Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France de la deuxième moitié de 18e siècle à la fin du Premier
Empire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000); and Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism
in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). For his influence on German Natur-
philosophie see Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: Univ. California Press,
2005), pp. 75– 83, 125–139.
18 The only attempt to sketch all the phases of vitalism seems to be Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of

Vitalism (London: Macmillan, 1914). For studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vitalism see the works
by Rey, Williams, and Reill cited in note 17, above; and the essays in Guido Cimino and François Duchesneau,
eds., Vitalisms: From Haller to the Cell Theory: Proceedings of the Zaragoza Symposium (Florence: Olschki,
1997). Besides Driesch, Henri Bergson presented another vitalist formulation in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; see Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the
Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
19 In his effort to materialize the soul, Julien Offray de La Mettrie gave matter an innate force (which he

identified as irritability), from which all vital actions derived; see Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine,
Philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, N.C./London: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), p. 160. Denis Diderot likewise
granted a vital force (“sensibility” was his term) to all material in the universe; see Elizabeth L. Haigh, “The Vital
Principle of Paul Joseph Barthez: The Clash between Monism and Dualism,” Medical History, 1977, 21:1–14,
esp. pp. 7– 8.

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echoes Principe’s call by suggesting that such a holistic approach is not complete without S
recognizing the biomedical interest of alchemy.
Would recognition of alchemists’ interest in medicine make alchemy a less worthy
subject within the history of science? Today we are witnessing an inverse form of vitalism.
Medicine again is chemistry, although science no longer assumes any spiritual causes and
steers well clear of the soul. In the Renaissance the vital principle, as the first principle of
all things, united chemistry and medicine. Today it is the material compound that governs
both sciences. Many would see this as the outcome of the materialization of nature by
mechanists since the Scientific Revolution. Yet an idea held dear by Renaissance vital-
ists—that life unfolds according to a plan implanted in the inner seed of the fundamental
unit of organic matter—is no longer myth, but confirmed science. Scientists have, in their
own structures of explanation, found the semina that alchemists sought—the DNA or
genomes that dwell at the kernel of the organic material (i.e., the cellular nucleus). In so
doing they continue the early modern alchemists’ urge to identify, extract, and manipulate
the principles of life.

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