[Zeno]

My pleasure reading of late is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, LL.D, first published in London in 1841.

Instead of a review I will post the excerpt below. It is from the first few paragraphs that introduce a chapter titled: The Alchymists. I have retained the original punctuation and spellings.

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Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended, more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes. But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace these latter is our present object. Vast as the subject appears, it is easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without being wearisome, and render its study both instructive and amusing.

Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of the future – the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shews his antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his craving curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come.


The first has led many to imagine that they might find means to avoid death, or, failing in this, that they might, nevertheless, so prolong existence as to reckon it by centuries instead of units. From this sprang the search, so long continued and still pursued, for the elixir vitae, or water of life, which has led thousands to pretend to it and millions to believe in it. From the second sprang the search for the philosopher’s stone, which was to create plenty by changing all metals into gold; and from the third, the false sciences of astrology, divination, and their divisions of necromancy, chiromancy, augury, with all their train of signs, portents, and omens.

In tracing the career of the erring philosophers, or the willful cheats, who have encouraged or preyed upon the credulity of mankind, it will simplify and elucidate the subject, if we divide it into three classes: the first comprising alchymists, or those in general who have devoted themselves to the discovering of the philosopher’s stone and the water of life; the second comprising astrologers, necromancers, sorcerers, geomancers, and all those who pretended to discover futurity; and the third consisting of the dealers of charms, amulets, philters, universal-panacea mongers, touches for the evil, seventh sons of a seventh son, sympathetic-powder compounders, homoeopathists, animal magnetizers, and all the motley tribe of quacks, empirics, and charlatans.

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I wonder if those last few sentences describe some of the posters on 2+2 and why this specific forum came into being. But that is another thread - To be started by someone other than me.


Hemingway as been mentioned and I highly recomend The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Finca Vigia Edition.

-Zeno