Now the philosopher's stone, to take a familiar example, was not a stone at all.

The word was no more than a symbol, and covered a search for one of the great secrets--the origin of life, or the nature of matter, or the attainment of immortality.
They seem to us to have taken a very roundabout route in their investigations, but their object was often very much the same as that of every chemist and biologist of the present day.

Take alchemy, again, which is supposed by people generally to have been nothing but an attempt to turn the baser metals into gold.

According to the Rosicrucians, who may be supposed to have known something about it, alchemy was the science of guiding the invisible processes of life for the purpose of attaining certain results in both the physical and spiritual spheres.

Chemistry deals with inanimate substances, alchemy with the principle of life itself.