Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
“Since you cannot invent substances, you are obliged to fall back on in-
venting names.” Another one is directed against their positivism: chem-
ists are as “stupid as a fact”. For our purposes, the most interesting attack
is unraveled in a brief dialogue between Japhet, the chemist, and Plan-
chette, the mechanical philosopher:
“I believe in the devil,” said the Baron Japhet, after a moment's silence.
“And I in God,” replied Planchette.
Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine
that requires an operator; for chemistry - that fiendish employment of
decomposing all things - the world is a gas endowed with the power of
movement.
We are now at the heart of the problem. The mechanical philosophy of
nature, that seventeenth-century child of natural theology, might be
powerless in its deeds, but at least it includes - according to Boyle and
Newton, it even strongly emphasized - the necessary existence of God.
Chemistry, on the other hand, has no need for God. According to Balzac,
the chemical worldview is materialism proper, because for chemists there
exists nothing else than matter with its own principle of motion, or self-
organizing matter, to use a term more fashionable nowadays.
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More-
over, not only do chemists explain the world without an operator God,
but according to Balzac, even worse, they also destroy His Creation by
“decomposing all things”. Thus, their atheistic worldview is comple-
mented by their fiendish practice - chemists are “God's antagonists”, as
Haug had already said before.
The nineteenth-century literature of various genres and countries is
full of both materialistic-atheistic and fiendishly destructive chemistry.
From the materialism-atheism genre, I will give but one prominent ex-
ample from Russia and then a general response from a U.S. chemist.
In Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's (1821-81)
Brothers Karama-
zov
(1879), Mitya Karamazov is charged with the murder of his father
and imprisoned. Although he regards himself to be innocent, he feels
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It is not clear what contemporary chemist Balzac actually had in mind concerning this
position of Stoic, Neo-Platonic, or Hermetic heritage, which has incidentally led
many Christians, such as Giordano Bruno, to the heresy of pantheism. Perhaps he
was referring to the physician Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), as he actu-
ally did in his
La Messe de l'Athée
(1836).
