William Newman's research has demonstrated the importance of medieval alchemy and early-modern chymistry to the development of modern science, and in particular, his recent work has shown the importance of experimental chymical atomism in the development of corpuscular theories in the seventeenth century. Conversely, following the work of Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Robert Siegfried, a group of historians of chemistry have demarcated the eighteenth-century understanding of elements and principles from earlier chymistry and alchemy, wherein, they argued, the principles were viewed as metaphysical and intangible. I have maintained elsewhere that early-modern chymistry was an art defined by the analysis and synthesis of materials to discover internal, sensible principles, and that this emphasis on tangible principles allowed chymists to defend the exceptionality of their discipline against competitors from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. In this paper I further explore the sensible nature of the chymical principles and question their alleged metaphysical status and the purported discontinuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The current understanding of metaphysical principles was based almost exclusively on the French textbook tradition, neglecting multiple other groups. I thus focus on several German chymists who developed an influential view of the chymical principles that grew from the adoption of corpuscular chymistry into academic medicine and natural philosophy. These chymists promoted an experimental and corpuscular understanding of nature that furthered the conceptual understanding of composition, the purity of substances, and affinity. Some chymists even argued directly against the notion that the chymical principles were metaphysical.

Corpuscular chymical tradition in Germany and the question of the metaphysical principles

246th National Meeting (2013)

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