If the authors of the “Suggestive Inquiry” and of “Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists” had considered the lives of the symbolists, as well as the nature of the symbols, their views would have been very much modified; they would have found that the true method of Hermetic interpretation lies in a middle course; but the errors which originated with merely typological investigations were intensified by a consideration of the great alchemical theorem, which, _par excellence_, is one of universal development, which acknowledges that every substance contains undeveloped resources and potentialities, and can be brought outward and forward into perfection. They applied their theory only to the development of metallic substances from a lower to a higher order, but we see by their writings that the grand hierophants of Oriental and Western alchemy alike were continually haunted by brief and imperfect glimpses of glorious possibilities for man, if the evolution of his nature were accomplished along the lines of their theory. Eugenius Philalethes enlarges on the infinite capacity of our spiritual nature and on the power of our soul’s imagination. “She has an absolute power in miraculous and more than natural transmutations,” and he clothes his doctrine of human evolution in the terminology of alchemical adepts. In one of the twelve treatises attributed to Sendivogius, there are the following remarkable passages:--“We know the composition of man in all respects, yet we cannot infuse the soul, which is out of the course of nature. Nature does not work before there be material given unto her....” The problem that all composites are subject to dissolution, and that man is composed of the four elements, and how, therefore, he could have been immortal in Paradise, is considered thus. “Paradise was and is a place created of the most pure elements, and of these man also was formed, and thus was consecrated to perpetuity of life. After his fall, he was driven into the corruptible elementated world, and nourished by corruptible elementated elements, which infected his past nature and generated disease and death. To the original creation of man in state immortal the ancient philosophers have likened their stone, and this immortality caused them to seek the stone, desiring to find the incorruptible elements which entered into the Adamic constitution. To them the Most High God revealed that a composition of such elements was in gold, for in animals it could not be had, seeing they must preserve their lives by corrupt elements; in vegetables also it is not, because in them is an inequality of the elements. And seeing all created things are inclined to multiplication, the philosophers propounded to themselves that they would make tryal of the possibility of nature in this mineral kingdom, which being discovered, they saw that THERE WERE INNUMERABLE OTHER SECRETS IN NATURE, OF WHICH, AS OF DIVINE SECRETS, THEY WROTE SPARINGLY.”