Book Chapter: Traditions of Analysis and Synthesis

[Paul Ferguson]

" An alchemical tradition going back to the High Middle Ages had already used a similar approach to the reduction to the pristine state to argue explicitly against a theory of mixture that had been championed by Thomas Aquinas in the second half of the thirteenth century. Basing himself largely on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, Thomas interpreted a famous passage of the Stagirite’s work, “mixture is the union of the altered miscibles” (328b22) in a very strong sense, where “union” was taken to mean that the four elements undergoing mixture lost their actual being and were reduced to the four elementary qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry, acting on the undifferentiated Aristotelian prime matter."

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.100...-76398-4_1