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The Limits of Matter
Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment
By Hjalmar Fors The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-19504-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Edges of the Map
Intellectual battles over the nature of reality were fought all over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were an integral part of the cultural shift that is usually referred to as the Enlightenment. At the heart of the matter lay a massive change in Western epistemology. The people of this period raised many questions, and found their answers to be different from those that had satisfied their forebears. What are the limits of attainable knowledge? How should we proceed to understand the universe? What kinds of entities and forces may our world contain? The issues were not just philosophical. Debates raged in many arenas. There was the juridical question of whether the law should continue to punish witches who performed malevolent magic. There was the theological question of whether God still worked miracles in the modern world, and whether God and the Devil were aided in their work by legions of angels and demons. And what about the soul? Was it a spark of the divine or simply an innate ability to reason rationally? The debate also raged in physics, natural history, and alchemy/chemistry. How should physics explain phenomena such as action at a distance and telepathic communication of thoughts and emotions? How should natural historians discuss the various beasts—dragons, trolls, gnomes, and the like—that could not be killed, preserved, and displayed in natural history collections? Should alchemists and chemists abandon their quest for the philosophers' stone, and with it their hopes of transmuting lesser metals into gold?
Central to many of these discussions was the relationship between the realm of spirit (or imagination) and the realm of matter. Perceptions of matter changed radically as many influential Europeans turned their backs on witches, trolls, magic, and miraculous transformations. Whereas matter once had been seen as malleable, transmuting, and ever-changing, it would increasingly be treated as predictable and possible to systematize into stable categories.
This is a book about how the modern notion of materiality was established during the first half of the eighteenth century. It shows how alchemists and chemists contributed to Enlightenment discourse about matter by defining some objects as natural and others as out of the ordinary and probably nonexistent. In doing so, it pins an important epistemological change in European culture to the formation of the modern discipline of chemistry. When matter is redefined and given new boundaries, notions of the nonmaterial and of the spirit world change also. Hence, this book takes the debate about the Enlightenment, which has mostly been confined to fields such as the history of philosophy, theology, and physics, into a new arena. As Cyril Stanley Smith remarked in 1967: "until recently, it has been mainly chemists who have contributed to the understanding of the nature of matter." This book invites not only chemists into the debate, but also assayers, miners, mineralogists, and alchemists, that is, those who knew the most about the rocks, minerals, metals, and mines that comprise the flesh, bones, and internal cavities of the Earth itself.
The Early Modern Point of View: An Introduction
When studying the early modern period, present-day notions of reality should not be taken for granted. A whole range of phenomena that today would be considered supernatural or superstitious were considered epistemically unproblematic by early moderns. That is to say, they had a different view of what reality and God would permit to happen in the normal run of things. Examples of beliefs that were acceptable to most of them, but that are unacceptable to most of us, are that metallic transmutation was viable, that one could use magical techniques for enchantment and treasure finding, and that intercourse with the spirits of the dead and sentient nature-spirits (who were endowed with a form of reason) were not uncommon occurrences. Indeed, our distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena does not at all suffice to distinguish between what early modern people thought that nature would and would not allow. All of the above, as well as many other phenomena, were considered suitable objects of curious investigation by early modern natural philosophers. Not only where they thoroughly discussed, but they were considered important areas of investigation.
Historian of science Lorraine Daston has pointed out that the late seventeenth century delighted in inexplicable phenomena, variety, and surprise. This interest in all things apparently strange can be traced not only in tracts on natural philosophy but also in learned theories on magic and spirits, demonological tracts, court proceedings from witchcraft trials, and ethnographical accounts. There was plenty of room for this kind of inquiry in the realms of physics, chemistry/alchemy, and natural history. Daston claims that toward the turn of the eighteenth century, 1700, interest in these matters was becoming unfashionable. She persuasively argues that the fading of interest in curious phenomena happened through a shift of focus, precipitated by Enlightenment utilitarianism. As she puts it: "A new ethos of utility replaced the old one of curiosity ... the stabilization of physical phenomena [was understood] as the necessary, if not sufficient condition for practical applications." Utilitarian outlooks and a search for ingenious inventions, which carried the potential to improve society and yield economic benefits, replaced curiosity.
Indeed, just as Daston indicates, things such as trolls or magic ceased to command the curious attention of mid-eighteenth-century natural philosophers in the way they had a generation before. But there were also strong continuities. When one regards the subtext of enlightened utilitarian discourse, it is apparent that these objects of knowledge continued to have an importance. Increasingly categorized as superstitions outside of science, they were discussed nonetheless. The emerging ideology committed to the rationalization and commodification of both nature and culture needed the category of superstition as an object of ridicule. Superstition was opposed to rationality, and the superstitious was one of the major groups (along with artisans/craftsmen and others) that, allegedly, did not show an interest in making knowledge public and useful for the service and improvement of society. In the rhetoric of would-be reformers, useful knowledge, economic reform, rationality, and Enlightenment could be contrasted to allegedly useless enterprises and speculations, stagnation and superstition. This kind of utilitarian rhetoric was equally useful whether one sought to overthrow society, improve it, or simply advance one's own career.
Among the fields of early modern inquiry, the shift toward Enlightened utilitarianism was felt most strongly in the knowledge area of chemistry. In a very important sense, modern chemistry was born through this utilitarian transformation of its goals and outlook. During this period, chemistry transformed itself into a service science, facilitating state control and aiding in industrial development. It gained a place in society that it has held ever since. Simultaneously the quest for utility, and for the patronage of manufacturists, led chemists away from their art's long-term association with transmutation of metals and the quest for the philosophers' stone. This change was also central to chemistry's rejection of the strange and the curious.
Mechanical chemistry, as the new breed of chemists sometimes called their field, allowed the existence of no objects that could not be isolated and handled in the laboratory. In fact, the connection between chemistry's rejection of economically useless investigative areas and the stabilization and description of matter in the chemical laboratory is the key to understanding chemistry's part in eighteenth-century Enlightenment sentiments. It is the aim of this book to uncover this connection in the historical material, in order to show chemistry's contribution to the larger processes that transformed European society during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.
The most striking change that chemistry underwent during the first decades of the eighteenth century was the rejection of gold making, or chrysopoeia. Before this period, there was no broadly accepted demarcation between alchemy and chemistry—neither theoretically nor when it came to methods and goals—but in the eighteenth century alchemy and chemistry split in two. At this point, chemistry was joined to the utilitarian movement as outlined above and remodeled itself as a rational, useful enterprise at the service of society. Alchemy splintered off from the discourse of utility to which it previously had belonged and was used to designate the quest for the philosophers' stone, the art of metallic transmutation, and in particular the practice of gold making. As time passed, it became increasingly identified with irrationality and madness.
To avoid the anachronisms that come with the associations that were the outcome of this split, in this book I follow the usage of William Newman and Lawrence Principe in adopting the term chymistry to signify the unified pre-1720s tradition of alchemy and chemistry as a joint enterprise. Where it is necessary to distinguish between chymistry in general and the specific practice of manufacturing gold or other metals through transmutation, the term transmutative chymistry is used, not alchemy. Transmutative chymistry is, nevertheless, regarded as an integrated part of the enterprise of early modern chymistry as a whole. From chapter 4, however, which discusses events that took place from the 1730s and onward, the terms chemistry and alchemy are reintroduced because from about this time these terms begin to be routinely used in a sense roughly equivalent to contemporary usage.
Enlightenment Redefinitions of Nature
To change one's perceptions of nature is to engage in a process with both social and scientific aspects. Indeed, there is no way to separate the two. During large parts of the eighteenth century, the proper stance of the social and learned elite was widely held to be that of skepticism. These groups began to associate continuing belief in several entities and phenomena that previously had been acknowledged as within the bounds of nature, with the lower strata of society, foreigners, and the mentally ill. This attitude comes across clearly in a letter from the Swedish chemist and mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, written in 1758 to a friend. In a discussion of alchemy, Cronstedt stated that it should properly be seen as one out of three separate branches of "mystical" (i.e., secret) science, with the others being astrology and magic. As he put it: "[astrology and magic,] the two first parts of [mystical] Physics ... are out of fashion [and] persecuted, while the last, or alchemy, holds on to its good reputation ... I am, though, secretly convinced ... that alchemy is a daughter of magic, who carries a more fashionable dress than ... her loving mother, and thus can show herself in better company."
After this likening of alchemy to a woman dressing above her station, Cronstedt moved on to ascribe magic and astrology to the lower classes, in particular peasants and the ethnic minorities of Finns and Sami. Alchemy was described as still fashionable among better folk but pursued almost exclusively among the uneducated: belief in these disreputable "sciences" belonged mostly to bygone days or was ascribed to youthful folly. This left the views Cronstedt himself propagated safely in the hands of mature, upper-class men with an up-to-date education.
Thomas Gieryn has proposed that the act of ascribing different beliefs about nature to diverse social groups should be called boundary work and should be seen as a type of contest for credibility. The term designates a rhetorical activity conducted for the purpose of creating a boundary "between science and some less authoritative residual nonscience." In order to create and re-create, "the legitimate power to define the real," it is, Gieryn observes, necessary to engage in a number of social activities that involve a large number of actors, over long timespans. Through these activities, precise scientific arguments are replaced by broad comparisons between good and bad knowledge. Some practitioners are branded as unreliable, or even fraudulent, while others are considered reliable and honest. Certain ways to represent reality are marked as credible and others as irrelevant, problematic, or wrong. Through these processes, science is placed at the center of a set of positive associations and characteristics. Nonsciences and almost-sciences, on the other hand, are rejected and relegated to the status of unreliable or false pseudo-knowledge. This study uses Gieryn's general framework to explore the interplay between notions of materiality and immateriality among learned practitioners of chemistry and other knowledge holders engaged with the mining business.
Due attention to both publicly held stances and privately circulated texts permits one to pay attention both to the front stage and back stage of public statements of truth. Often, various seemingly noncompatible theoretical frameworks were used to discuss different types of phenomena, and statements of truth could differ according to contexts. It is necessary to pay proper attention to undercurrents of nonorthodox beliefs in discussions of curious phenomena among the learned. Spirit sightings, miraculous events, magic, the alien, strange, and weird did not just go away with the coming of the eighteenth century. In addition, when such objects were discussed seriously and earnestly, arguments could be surprisingly cautious, and final judgments were often withheld. The study of curiosities, anomalies, and apparent irrationalities never disappeared entirely, and many publicly held views were often paired with secret doubts or qualifications.
A central issue for the study is the social construction of metals as metallic elements, a historical process that has not been widely acknowledged in the history of science. Recently, Klein and Spary described metals as "materials" that were "painstakingly extracted from the earth" and that were uncontested as objects of inquiry. These authors also claim that theories of the ultimate structure of matter were of little concern to eighteenth-century "hybrid experts" on materials and had little influence on their practices of experimentation and observation. I disagree. As we will see, pre-eighteenth-century systems of knowledge did not simply assume that metals were raw materials to be collected and transformed into commodities. Metals were not materials in any modern sense of the word prior to the first half of the eighteenth century; they were constructed as such—assigned to that category—through the economizing language of mid-eighteenth-century chemistry. Furthermore, the redefinition of metals played an important role for the creation of chemistry: it happened partially through the merging of chymistry with natural history and the artisanal practice of assaying. Hence, these redefinitions of metals were conducted by precisely such hybrid experts as, Klein and Spary believe, were unconcerned with theories of matter. In this book, the process is inscribed into the story of how chemistry disassociated itself from alchemy in theory, practice, and rhetoric, and in the wider context of mining knowledge, and of Enlightenment thought about the limits of natural knowledge.
Decentralizing the Enlightenment
To understand how chemistry was a part of and contributed to Enlightenment thought, it is necessary to piece together again the shared European natural philosophy and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. National interest and the worship of individual genius have depicted intellectual endeavor as separate and particular. In fact the intellectual world of early modern Europe was much more cosmopolitan, integrated, and nonobservant of nation-states than most of us would think. Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between science and nation-states which nowadays often is taken for granted is a product of historic developments that to a large extent played out in the nineteenth century. If, as often has been done, one cuts away parts of the wide intellectual landscape of early modernity, one also understands much less about the remaining parts. This study pays much attention to people, places, and events normally relegated to the sidelines of narratives of Enlightenment knowledge production, for example, artisans, chymical adepts, spirits, witches, and mining administrators. This, I believe, will contribute to the redrawing of the map of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science. As historian of science Kapil Raj has persuasively argued, not individuals, institutions, or places should be considered centers of scientific change but the cultural contact zones that permit circulation of knowledge in the first place.
This book introduces one of the most productive contact zones of chymistry, mineralogy, and mining knowledge in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe: the Bureau of Mines (Bergskollegium) of the Swedish state. Sweden's rulers controlled Europe's largest (until ca. 1750) export-oriented iron industry and were highly dependent on the production of minerals. They took a firm grip on this flourishing mining business and actively encouraged mining officials to seek ways to improve it. The Bureau of Mines was turned into a tool for the systematic improvement of mining practices and the pursuit of mining knowledge. The aspect of the organization of primary interest here is its role in circulation of knowledge throughout early modern Europe, and the changes in natural philosophy, epistemology, and ideology that followed from this circulation. By following actors connected to the Bureau of Mines on their journeys, in their private discussions, and in their published papers, this book reintegrates the natural philosophy and knowledge practices performed at the Bureau of Mines into the European context to which it belongs. In doing so, it highlights an understudied and previously largely ignored actor within the development of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century learned knowledge as a whole.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Limits of Matter by Hjalmar Fors. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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