Chemical composition graduated order

The German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl, in particular, pointed out that a pure, natural resolution of bodies into their ultimate principles is not easily obtainable from the Chemistry of these days, and so can hardly be come at by Art. Only very rarely, he continued, are simple principles found in their purity. Taking into account the experimental obstacles to the actual separation of ultimate principles in a pure form, Stahl proposed a theory of a graduated order of chemical composition. Stahl s theory maintained the basic idea of the philosophy of principles—the causation of the perceptible properties of substances by irreducible qualities of a few chemical principles—and at the same time explained away the experimental difficulties of isolating the ultimate principles. According to Stahl, many natural bodies were not composed directly from the simplest elements or principles, but from more compound proximate principles, which could be further decomposed in one or more steps into the ultimate, most simple principles. He distinguished between mixts or pri-... 

The simultaneity of chemists collective acceptance of the StahUan theory of an order of chemical composition and their new interest in and classification of the compound proximate principles of plants is a coincidence that had important consequences. Stahl s theory reinforced a continuous development of chemists analytical practice, which in the decades before had been spurred mainly by chemists attempt to reconcile their analytical and pharmaceutical objectives. By the middle of the century, the theory of a graduated order of chemical composition lent a clear and distinctive voice to these earlier attempts. It was an important and new condition for the acceleration of an ontological shift, which may be easily overlooked when historical studies concentrate exclusively on events taking place in the laboratory. But there was a further condition, external to developments in the chemical laboratory, which contributed to this accelerated ontological shift. This third condition will be examined in detail in the next section. 

---