The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment by Hjalmar Fors

By Hjalmar Fors

In the course of the 17th and eighteenth centuries, Europeans raised a couple of questions about the character of fact and located their solutions to be assorted from those who had chuffed their forebears. They discounted stories of witches, trolls, magic, and wonderful variations and as a substitute started taking a look somewhere else to provide an explanation for the realm round them. In The Limits of Matter, Hjalmar Fors investigates how conceptions of topic replaced throughout the Enlightenment and pins this crucial switch in ecu tradition to the formation of the fashionable self-discipline of chemistry.

Fors finds how, early within the eighteenth century, chemists started to view metals not because the constituents for “chrysopoeia”—or gold making—but as elemental components, or the fundamental construction blocks of subject. on the heart of this rising inspiration, argues Fors, was once the Bureau of Mines of the Swedish country, which observed the sensible and ecocnomic strength of those fabrics within the economies of mining and smelting.

By learning the chemists on the Swedish Bureau of Mines and their networks, and integrating their practices into the broader eu context, Fors illustrates how they and their successors performed an important function within the improvement of our smooth idea of topic and made an important contribution to the trendy ecu view of truth.

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Extra info for The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment (Synthesis)

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This position would change. As I indicated in the discussion of Cartesianism, a number of late seventeenthcentury thinkers began to assume a radical division, even a gulf, between the realm of spirit and the material world. Such notions caught hold strongly in the intellectual climate of England during the second half of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. Within this interpretative framework, access to the world of spirit, and contacts and intercourse with spirits were increasingly described as rare and singular events.

The “little man” spirit who could be seen only by his mother had appeared to give instructions when his brother was seriously ill. His father had foretold the destruction of his hometown, and benign forces had intervened to make sure that he married the right woman. We have seen how Hiärne’s worldview and knowledge were compatible with beliefs in magic and invisible beings, which were common in CHAPTER 2 28 early modern culture. But that these beliefs were common did not mean that they could be openly expressed.

They were engaged in pharmaceutical development of new medicines. They could be made responsible for the large-scale manufacture of goods in factory-like settings. And there was, of course, always that elusive possibility that the chymist literally would create gold and make all other types of productive activity unnecessary for his or her patron. Even in the many, many cases when no gains came out of the chymical experiments, the patronage of chymistry nevertheless reflected well on the monarch, prince, or nobleman who sponsored it.

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