Another recent writer on the subject, my friend the late Mr ABDUL-ALI, has remarked that "he thought that, in the mind of the alchemist at least, there was something more than analogy between metallic and psychic transformations, and that the whole subject might well be assigned to the doctrinal category of ineffable and transcendent Oneness. This Oneness comprehended all--soul and body, spirit and matter, mystic visions and waking life--and the sharp metaphysical distinction between the mental and the non-mental realms, so prominent during the history of philosophy, was not regarded by these early investigators in the sphere of nature. There was the sentiment, perhaps only dimly experienced, that not only the law, but the substance of the Universe, was one; that mind was everywhere in contact with its own kindred; and that metallic transmutation would, somehow, so to speak, signalise and seal a hidden transmutation of the soul."(1) (1) SIJIL ABDUL-ALI, in _The Journal of the Alchemical Society_, vol. ii. (1914), p. 102. I am to a large extent in agreement with this view. Mr ABDUL-ALI quarrels with the term "analogy," and, if it is held to imply any merely superficial resemblance, it certainly is not adequate to my own needs, though I know not what other word to use. SWEDENBORG'S term "correspondence" would be better for my purpose, as standing for an essential connection between spirit and matter, arising out of the causal relationship of the one to the other. But if SWEDENBORG believed that matter and spirit were most intimately related, he nevertheless had a very precise idea of their distinctness, which he formulated in his Doctrine of Degrees--a very exact metaphysical doctrine indeed. The alchemists, on the other hand, had no such clear ideas on the subject. It would be even more absurd to attribute to them a Cartesian dualism. To their ways of thinking, it was by no means impossible to grasp the spiritual essences of things by what we should now call chemical manipulations. For them a gas was still a ghost and air a spirit. One could quote pages in support of this, but I will content myself with a few words from the _Turba_--the antiquity of the book makes it of value, and anyway it is near at hand. "Permanent water," whatever that may be, being pounded with the body, we are told, "by the will of God it turns that body into spirit." And in another place we read that "the Philosophers have said: Except ye turn bodies into not-bodies, and incorporeal things into bodies, ye have not yet discovered the rule of operation."(1a) No one who could write like this, and believe it, could hold matter and spirit as altogether distinct. But it is equally obvious that the injunction to convert body into spirit is meaningless if spirit and body are held to be identical. I have been criticised for crediting the alchemists "with the philosophic acumen of Hegel,"(1b) but that is just what I think one ought to avoid doing. At the same time, however,