Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir > Quotes

“For thousands of years before men had any accurate and exact knowledge of the changes of material things, they had thought about these changes, regarded them as revelations of spiritual truths, built on them theories of things in heaven and earth (and a good many things in neither), and used them in manufactures, arts, and handicrafts, especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced.”
― M. M. Pattison Muir, The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

“The history of science may be described as the history of the attempts, and the failures, of men "to see things as they are." "Nothing is harder," said the Latin poet Lucretius, "than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, what straightway the mind adds on of itself." Observations”
― M.M. Pattison Muir, The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

“Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.”
― M. M. Pattison Muir, The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

“That the attribution, by the alchemists, of moral virtues and vices to natural things was in keeping with some deep-seated tendency of human nature, is shown by the persistence of some of their methods of stating the properties of substances: we still speak of "perfect and imperfect gases," "noble and base metals," "good and bad conductors of electricity," and "laws governing natural phenomena.”
― M.M. Pattison Muir, History of Alchemy