§ =22.= The alchemists regarded gold as the most perfect metal, silver being considered more perfect than the rest. The reason of this view is not difficult to understand: gold is the most beautiful of all the metals, and it retains its beauty without tarnishing; it resists the action of fire and most corrosive liquids, and is unaffected by sulphur; it was regarded, as we have pointed out above (see § 9), as symbolical of the regenerate man. Silver, on the other hand, is, indeed, a beautiful metal which wears well in a pure atmosphere and resists the action of fire; but it is attacked by certain corrosives (_e.g._, _aqua fortis_ or nitric acid) and also by sulphur. Through all the metals, from the one seed, Nature, according to the alchemists, works continuously up to gold; so that, in a sense, all other metals are gold in the making; their existence marks the staying of Nature’s powers; as “Eirenæus Philalethes” says: “All metallic seed is the seed of gold; for gold is the intention of Nature in regard to all metals. If the base metals are not gold, it is only through some accidental hindrance; they are all potentially gold.”[33] Or, as another alchemist puts it: “Since . . . the substance of the metals is _one_, and common to all, and since this substance is (either at once, or after laying aside in course of time the foreign and evil sulphur of the baser metals by a process of gradual digestion) changed by the virtue of its own indwelling sulphur into GOLD, which is the goal of all the metals, and the true intention of Nature--we are obliged to admit, and freely confess that in the mineral kingdom, as well as in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, Nature seeks and demands a gradual attainment of perfection, and a gradual approximation to the highest standard of purity and excellence.”[34] Such was the alchemistic view of the generation of the metals; a theory which is admittedly crude, but which, nevertheless, contains the germ of a great principle of the utmost importance, namely, the idea that all the varying forms of matter are evolved from some one primordial stuff--a principle of which chemical science lost sight for awhile, for its validity was unrecognised by Dalton’s Atomic Theory (at least, as enunciated by him), but which is being demonstrated, as we hope to show hereinafter, by recent scientific research. The alchemist was certainly a fantastic evolutionist, but he _was_ an evolutionist, and, moreover, he did not make the curious and paradoxical mistake of regarding the fact of evolution as explaining away the existence of God--the alchemist recognised the hand of the Divine in nature--and, although, in these days of modern science, we cannot accept his theory of the growth of metals, we can, nevertheless, appreciate and accept the fundamental germ-idea underlying it. [33] “EIRENÆUS PHILALETHES”: _The Metamorphosis of Metals_ (see _The Hermetic Museum_, vol. ii. p. 239).