THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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thus it is closest to the ‘materia prima’. Sulphur or the essence of brimstone consists of air and fire, an active masculine entity, it gives metals their colour, and above all
their combustibility and transformability. Finally sal, the essence of salt, causes the calcinability and also the hardness and brittleness of metals; very old, magical high
evaluations, even touched on in the New Testament (‘salt of the earth’), occasionally even linked ‘Sal philosophicum’ with the philosopher's stone (cf. the healing
powder ‘with a decidedly alkaline taste’ in Goethe's ‘Poetry and Truth’, book eight). But more crucial than all this was the belief that with the ‘materia prima’ and with
the mixture of the three other basic components metals were not yet exhausted, not yet at the end of their being. Chemistry itself, until towards the end of the eighteenth
century, believed in the three basic components of metals cited above (even ‘phlogiston’ or ‘thermal matter’, first disposed of by Lavoisier, still has sulphur as one of its
ancestors); only, they were not struck by the flash or the will­o'­the­wisp of gold. Thus alchemy further added to the three basic components the highest ‘essence’ or
the germ of gold which presses in all common metals, hindered in growth, an ‘entelechy’ which is not yet actualized. Like the featureless ‘materia prima’, the idea of the
‘entelechy of gold’ also went back to Aristotle, in an admittedly monstrous overwhelming of all other natural entelechies of species and genus. Aristotle had only called
motion an ‘unfinished entelechy’, but for him there lay in matter itself the possibility of every higher form which is next in order; but then ‘all matter is potentially gold,
just as the egg is an unhatched bird’. This gold­entelechy was to be promoted and liberated by the ‘red lion’, the ‘red tincture’, the ‘grand elixir’, the ‘magisterium
magnum’, which all means the same as the philosopher's stone. Welling's ‘Opus mago­cabalisticum’ of 1735 (the same which the young Goethe read with Fräulein von
Klettenberg, the ‘beautiful soul’)* says the following on this point: ‘The philosophers’ stone is a substance which is skilfully composed of a highly refined animated
mercurio and its living gold and combined together by means of a prolonged heating in such a way that it can never be separated again, in which form it can immediately
produce, refine and tinct the other metals in such a way that they are raised into the nature of the purest gold.’ At least descriptions of this fabulous stone exist, and in
fact by very famous men; the descriptions
* Cf. Goethe's ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’. On her death the character of Aurelie leaves behind a document entitled ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele’ —
‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’. This was intended by Goethe as a posthumous tribute to his friend Susanne von Klettenberg.