The beautiful alone Can be the object of our love. The greatest art is only to separate it from its tissue ... For it [the soul] nothing mortal suffices, Yea, the pleasure of the gods cannot diminish a thirst That only the fountain quenches. So my friends That which other mortals lures like a fly on the hook To sweet destruction Because of a lack of higher discriminative art Becomes for the truly wise A Pegasus to supramundane travel. But the poets usually speak only in figures. I will therefore rest satisfied with this one example. The service of having rediscovered the intrinsic value of alchemy over and above its chemical and physical phase, is to be ascribed probably to the American, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who published his views on the alchemists in the book, “Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists,” that appeared in Boston in 1857, and to the Frenchman, N. Landur, a writer on the scientific periodical “L’Institut,” who wrote in 1868 in similar vein [in the organ “L’Institut,” 1st Section, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 273 ff.], though I do not know whether he wrote with knowledge of the American work. Landur’s observations are reported by Kopp (Alch., II, p. 192), but he does not rightly value their worth. It need not be a reproach to him. He undertook as a chemical specialist a work that would have required quite as much a psychologist, a philosopher or a theologian. The discoveries made by the acute Hitchcock are so important for our analysis, that a complete exposition of them cannot be dispensed with. I should like better to refer to Hitchcock’s book if it were not practically inaccessible. We have heard that the greatest stumbling block for the uninitiated into the hermetic art lay in the determination of the true subject, the prima materia. The authors mentioned it by a hundred names; and the gold seeking toilers were therefore misled in a hundred ways. Hitchcock with a single word furnishes us the key to the understanding of the hermetic masters, when he says: The subject is man. We can also avail ourselves of a play on words and say the subject or substance is the subject.