The influence of alchemical and other esoteric ideas in the rise of modern science was a topic of lively discussion during the last century, thanks largely to the contributions of historians like Frances Yates and Allen Debus but assisted by the close textual studies of cultural historians like Stanton Linden and Antoine Faivre. Lioba Wagner’s doctoral study of the “contribution” (Viefalt) of alchemy to the scientific writings of Paracelsus, Boyle, and Newton (2008) is now available as an account of the “formation” (Entstehung) of their ideas in the friction between two different world views: Hermetic and mechanistic. For each of these very different writers, the investigation follows the same course, moving from their philosophical assumptions to the principles on which they founded their natural science and from there to the methods they employed in their research of nature and to pluralistic trends in their findings.

What links the three authors is a common interest in alchemy. Paracelsus (1493–1541) regarded it as the fourth pillar of medicine, along with astronomy, philosophy, and virtue. Boyle (1627–91) was always “the skeptical chymist” (the title of his 1661 classic), calling for open communication among investigators and reproducible results. Meanwhile, Newton (1643–1727) worked through the allegories in older alchemical texts just as he tried to work out the chronology of biblical prophecies. All three kept laboratories whenever they could, and the last two exchanged notes. With all three, there are elements of both magical and mechanical thinking, but in quite different configurations. Paracelsus fully embraced the magical belief in occult influences, such as the magnetic attraction between certain planets, plants, and metals; while Boyle tried to place older speculations in the new corpuscular theory of matter; and Newton sought a modern, mechanistic explanation for the relations of heavenly bodies to the earth, formulating laws of gravity that have yet to be disproven.

For all their differences, Paracelsus and Newton were both apocalyptic thinkers who thought that the advances in learning to which they contributed were signs that the millennium was fast approaching. Boyle was a more orthodox Christian, but they all belonged to a Christendom that expected revelations. The chief difference is that Paracelsus accepted any information he could use; indeed, he liked to say that he learned more from hangmen and fortune-tellers than he could from most physicians. On the other hand, Boyle and Newton developed strict rules of evidence, at least for their publications. Both belonged to the Royal Society of London, founded after the English Revolution with the goal of making scientific knowledge more systematic and accessible. One of the society’s rules from the outset was that there would be no discussion of perpetual motion, the squaring of the circle, or the philosophers’ stone. That did not stop members from making alchemical experiments of their own, simply from bringing them forward in the name of science.

There is ongoing debate between the so-called internalists, who wish to write the history of a science like chemistry on its own terms, separate from related disciplines, and externalists, who prefer to draw comparisons across disciplines. Although Wagner does not use the terms, she clearly sides with the externalists. However, she stops well short of the extreme position taken by Michel Foucault, who found more similarities among scientists working within the episteme of a time period than among those pursuing the same science in various periods (Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des science humaines [1966]). Indeed, her conclusions do not greatly differ from those reached in Charles Webster’s Eddington lectures (From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science [1982]), where Boyle is treated as a transitional figure.

While Wagner refers to Foucault, and more briefly to the philosophers of science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, she draws most extensively on Paul Feyerabend, who denied that there could be universal rules in science (Against Method [1975]). Feyerabend famously argued that “anything goes” when a scientific thinker wants to support a hypothesis, and Wagner’s doctoral supervisor, Klaus Fischer, celebrated his “methodological anarchism” in an influential book (Konventionalismus oder Realismus?: vom logischen Positivismus zum methodologischen Anarchismus [1980]). Wagner has followed in Fischer’s footsteps while suggesting why alchemy could productively coexist with newer ideas, whether they be the doctrine of signatures for Paracelsus, the corpuscular theory of matter for Boyle, or the corpuscular makeup of light for Newton. Just as laboratory experiments were said to have useful byproducts like Benedictine liqueur, alchemy turns out to have promoted the new science, whether it was directed to medicines with Paracelsus, material compositions with Boyle, or celestial movements with Newton.

Wagner reaches four conclusions about the role of alchemy in early modern science: that it served as a sort of chemical contrast medium (Kontrastmittel) to sharpen conventional research and led to new formulations in the sciences — in medicine with Paracelsus, chemistry and physics with Boyle, and physics and astrophysics with Newton; that it provided an external perspective on these emerging disciplines; that it placed the emphasis on facts rather than theory; and that it offered new paradigms or explanatory patterns (Erklärungsmuster, 259–60). Cutting across disciplines and focusing on the philosophy of science, her study offers an interesting counterpart to more internalist studies of alchemy, such as Lawrence Principe’s remarkably informative book on The Secrets of Alchemy (2012).