Bo najwyższym szczęściem dzieci ludzkich

Jest jedynie osobowość

Johann Wolfgang Goethe     

Throughout much of the 20th century, the academic community had little patience with alchemists and their vain efforts to transmute base metals into gold. Any contemporary scholar who even dared to write about alchemy, historian Herbert Butterfield warned, would “become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.”