Plato, pseudo

The traditions of the ancient pagan schools and their literature were, however, preserved and cultivated especially by the Syrian scholars who took refuge in Persia, after the closing of the Alexandrian schools, and there founded and maintained schools modeled after the Alexandrian. By these scholars, the classical works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Dioscorides and others, and of some early chemical and alchemical writers, as the pseudo-Democritus and Zosimos, were preserved and translated into Syrian. Astronomy, astrology, medicine, alchemy, were among the subjects taught in their schools. 

When Mendel eff announced the Periodic Table of the Elements, he frankly stated, It has been evolved independently of any conception as to the nature of the elements. It does not in the least originate in the idea of a unique matter and it has no historical connection with that relic of the torments of classical thought/ He was alluding to the ancient idea of the unity of all matter. Plato had said Matter is one." Sporadically, this idea of a primordial substance from which everything else originated had been enunciated by philosophers and pseudo-scientists. The world paid little attention to their abstract conclusions. 

Muslim rulers also patronized Alexandrian refugee scholars, and they had the works of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, pseudo-Democritus, Zosimos, and others translated into Arabic. In this way Arabs came into contact with the practice of alchemy and quickly made it their own. The main contribution of the Arabs to alchemy was to tone down the mystical and to take an approach more akin to the practical approach of the early Alexandrian alchemists. Perhaps the Arabs felt less compelled to invoke magic to attain results because they were as interested in the process as in the goal. Whatever the reason, the alchemy eventually inherited by Europe used methods that had come back down to earth. 

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