Fire science principles

Heat and fire were chemistry s most powerful tools. We saw in Chapter 3 how for Stahl, heat was an instrument and fire a principle or substance. As the eighteenth century progressed, Rouelle s more complex view—in which heat could be here an instrument, there a principle, and sometimes both at once— began to transform chemistry and to bring the science of heat and the phlogiston theory to the forefront of chemical debate. Chemical theory underwent radical change, not for the first time and not without keeping one foot in its past, and chemical apparatus also were altered. 

The connection between First Matter and the protyles is obvious. It remains for me to deal with the concept of the Four Elements. These are often thought to denote the hot, cold, moist and dry principles or qualities of bodies but we may also suppose that the elements, earth, water, air, and fire, represent respectively the solid, liquid, gaseous, and what may be called incandescent-gaseous states of matter, although this is by no means a satisfactory or complete interpretation. It must be confessed that the subject of the elements is a difficult one, and I have not yet found explanations for it in the language of modem science. (1913, 43-44)... 

Over the last 500 years, science has progressed at an accelerating pace from the beginnings of mathematical generality to a full set of conservation principles needed to address most problems. Yet fire, one of the earliest tools of mankind, needed the last 50 years to give it mathematical expression. Fire is indeed complex and that surely helped to retard its scientific development. But first, what is fire How shall we define it ... 

All scientists agree that chemistry is the basis of life and with that preamble it seems almost certain that the first cells one sees in the Hadean stones are the first ones on earth their ancestors were the heat- and light-driven bio-reactors. The Darwinians see the same cells but because the (in principle unprovable) single origin is a creed of the model, they postulate that a single ancestor must have lived much earlier and mutated into all of the cells that are visible at this horizon. At this point the old hypothesis is defeated by the researchers in planetary sciences who do not see any biology-time before the time of the first massive invasion of the earth crust by cells. The hell fire of global accretion was too close for descent with variation . 

By this we gain the idea that Sulphur and Mercury are really invisible principles, operating in the Mixt, and while it is often portrayed as a "love of the elements" it is manifestly a fight for mastery between opposite principles (Here note that AHBA, Love is 13, which is also the number of AIB, to violate, to asperse, to act as an enemy), that is, of heat and cold, dryness and moisture. (Here recall the words of the Kybalion "opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree extremes meet all truths are but half-truths all paradoxes may be reconciled.") The heat and dryness eventually conquer the cold and moisture, so that what was liquid passes permanently into a dry state, but in the by process the potency of the Fire principle is sublimated and intensified to a degree unknown to modern science. 

With a clarity of mind which cannot be too much admired, Lavoisier saw what had to be done to create a modern science ot chemistry out of the chaotic legacy in which were jumbled the Greek doctrine ot elements, old Stoic vestiges of fire and flux, Paracelsian principles ot salt, sultur and mercury, aclchemistical distillations and purifications, mineralogical lore, and die proliteration of laboratory discoveries of his own time. And to clear his mind - perhaps, too, to fix it - he wrote down in his laboratory register what he meant to do tor the rest of his life. ... 

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