Fiction: Zanoni

[Paul Ferguson]

“Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher’s Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions.”

Zanoni and its prequel Zicci by Edward Bulwer Lytton:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbook...tt/?st=pdf

Wiki's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bulwer-Lytton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanoni