THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 646
his history of the theory of colours, when dealing with the alchemists, still alludes to these connections; he even interprets them by means of a kind of Kantianism: ‘If
those three sublime ideas most intimately related to one another, God, virtue and immortality, have been called the highest demands of reason, then there are clearly
three corresponding demands of a more sensory kind: gold, health and long life.’ Alchemy certainly did not find any gold, nor was it capable of finding this goal with its
fantastic process­methods. Nevertheless it can be justified not merely as a forerunner of modern chemistry, and even its more specific plan: the transmutation of metals
(elements) as a plan itself sounds by no means grotesque any more in the age of the splitting of the atom, and of the transfer of electrons in the elements. On the
contrary, it was grotesque that in the last century, in Darwin's century of the ‘transmutation of species’, the inorganic elements themselves were regarded as unshakable
and the wholly identical term ‘mutatio specierum’ (it first occurs in alchemy) was not understood at all. But above all, as has become obvious, the purpose of alchemy is
by no means exhausted by partial transmutations, at least not in the century shortly before the Enlightenment. Instead, the inscription on the gate of this disreputable
technological wishful dream ran, in a quite total fashion: Jehi Or, Let there be light; — this therefore lay in the horizon of the fantastic mutations. The vast majority of the
gold­cookers were undoubtedly searching for nothing other than a purse that is always full, and here fooled neither themselves nor others with anything much grander.
The enthusiasts in this area however, sitting in front of the same furnace, and also thoroughly inclined towards the prospect of as many ducats as they liked, also had in
mind another transfiguration of nature as a goal of metamorphosis.
Unregulated inventions and ‘Propositiones’ in the Baroque period
It was always possible to plan into the mere blue, arbitrarily and also shakily. But sounder technological dreams and those directed towards an extension of implements
appear only sparsely before 1500. However remarkable Roman plumbing, Chinese paper and gunpowder (only used for fireworks), and Egyptian cranes are: only with
the mandate under capitalism did larger technological projects also get under way. Admittedly, around 550 in Byzantium there are already plans for a ship with paddlewheels
which are moved by oxen at a capstan; but it never got further than the planning