Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies

369 Pages·1968·10.575 MB·English

by  Nathan Sivin

Chinese Alchemy:
Preliminary Studies
HARVARD MONOGRAPHS
IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Chinese Alchemy:
Preliminary Studies
NATHAN SIVIN
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1968
£if.
© Copyright 1968 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-27093
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by David Ford
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It's not that fast horses are rare,
but men who know enough to spot them
are few and far between.
-Han Yii

FOREWORD
THE DECADES since World War II have witnessed the rise
of the history of science as an academic subject, taking its
place in the curricula of our colleges, institutes of technology,
and universities. At the same time there has been an enormous
enlargement of that company of scholars who write on one or
another aspect of the history of science but whose primary pro-
fessional allegiance does not have its locus in the history of
science —among them scientists, philosophers, historians, so-
ciologists, and science teachers. As a consequence, the re-
sponsibilities for publication in this field have become so much
greater that new ways of disseminating the results of research
must be envisioned. Soon after the formal creation of a regu-
lar Department of the History of Science at Harvard Univer-
sity in the spring of 1966,* therefore, the group of faculty
members who had major or full-time commitments to the his-
tory of science decided to constitute themselves a committee t
to edit and publish (through Harvard University Press) a series
of book-length publications to be known as the Harvard Mon-
ographs in the History of Science.
It is the hope of the editors that the Harvard Monographs in
the History of Science may embrace the many varieties of
scholarly work now being pursued in this field. Thus, one re-
sult of our activities should be to disclose the essential unity
of common aims in such apparently dissimilar topics as: the
ancient exact sciences or alchemy in China and the growth of
* A program leading to the degrees of M. A. and Ph.D. had been in active
existence for some thirty years under a Committee on Higher Degrees in
the History of Science and Learning.
t Consisting of I. Bernard Cohen (chairman), Donald H. Fleming, Gerald
Holton, Ernst Mayr, Everett Mendelsohn, John E. Murdoch.
Foreword
concepts in modern physiology; the Chemical Revolution of
the eighteenth century and the history of the concept of force;
the changing role of science as a social institution and the de-
velopment of the main ideas of genetics; or the philosophic
background of scientific concepts and the design, manufacture,
and use of antique or modern scientific instruments. The de-
fining quality of all such works derives from a commonality
of method: the applications of historical inquiry to the hard
subject matter of science or its social and intellectual environ-
ment. If the history of science is in fact a discipline, and not
merely a collection of unrelated specialties, it stands apart from
other types of intellectual or social history in the control that
comes from the very scientific concepts, methods, theories,
techniques, observations, and experiments on which valid his-
tory of science must always be founded.
The historian of science must ask questions about truth or
falsity that other kinds of historians need not concern them-
selves with. Not only must he be familiar with simple matters
of scientific information, such as how heavy bodies actually
do fall in resisting mediums, or whether certain animals do or
do not exhibit particular traits, or whether a given equation can
or cannot be solved in a finite number of terms. Eventually he
must be able to know the solutions to more difficult problems:
such as whether a given scientific theory is or is not adequate
to deal with a given set of phenomena or data, perhaps being
able to make precise just where the limits of such adequacy
may lie. While, of course, the historical role of a set of scien-
tific concepts, scientific methods, or scientific theories is inde-
pendent of their present use, the historian of science knows
well that to understand fully the science of the past he must
command much of the science of the present. How different
this is from the arts! It has not been demonstrated that Joyce's
Ulysses helps us to have a better sense of Homer; but no one
doubts that an ignorance of Newtonian dynamics gravely re-
stricts the degree of critical understanding of the science of
viii
Foreword
Nicole Oresme and his contemporaries, or of Galileo and
Huygens.
The editors hope that this new series of monographs will
be of use to all scholars who are concerned with historical
problems, and also to practicing scientists. Many of the cur-
rent controversies in almost any branch of science cannot be
understood fully without a knowledge of the antecedent concepts
and theories. Even the actual phrases used in presenting argu-
ments may prove, in historical analysis, to have been inter-
preted incorrectly, or in a misleading fashion. Hence it can be
of practical importance to trace back the main concepts of our
present science to the original sources. Additionally, the max-
imum depth of understanding of any aspect of the interrela-
tions of science requires a historical perspective.
The first book in this series shows many of the features that
define the history of science as a discipline. For Dr. Nathan
Sivin has called upon a knowledge of chemistry (even to the
point of making special experiments) to reinforce his back-
ground in history, in Sinology, in alchemy, and in the history
of science in general. Only thus has he been able to master the
subject matter of alchemy in seventh-century China and to re-
late it to the main problems of the comparative study of the
forms the study of matter has taken in different cultures. While
the importance of understanding Chinese culture in all its
manifestations surely needs no underlining at the present time,
the major contribution of Dr. Sivin's book may very well be
to show other historians of science —and also scientists, Si-
nologists, and general historians — how a combination of li-
brary and laboratory methods of research gives new depth and
perspective to a little-known subject. The unique character of
Dr. Sivin's book comes from the fact that he is neither a Si-
nologist nor a chemist, but rather a historian of science who
is trained both in Sinology and in chemistry — first and fore-
most he is a historian of science.
Some particularly significant features of Dr. Sivin's book
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