prescient than their contemned predecessors, the alchemists, who,
foolish and pretentious as they were, aspired at least to the formation
of something new.

It was, I think, the French chemist Berthelot who first clearly
perceived the double aspect of chemistry, for he defined it as "the
science of analysis _and synthesis_," of taking apart and of putting
together. The motto of chemistry, as of all the empirical sciences, is
_savoir c'est pouvoir_, to know in order to do. This is the pragmatic
test of all useful knowledge. Berthelot goes on to say:

Chemistry creates its object. This creative faculty, comparable
to that of art itself, distinguishes it essentially from the
natural and historical sciences.... These sciences do not
control their object. Thus they are too often condemned to an
eternal impotence in the search for truth of which they must
content themselves with possessing some few and often uncertain
fragments. On the contrary, the experimental sciences have the
power to realize their conjectures.... What they dream of that
they can manifest in actuality....

Chemistry possesses this creative faculty to a more eminent
degree than the other sciences because it penetrates more
profoundly and attains even to the natural elements of
existences.

Since Berthelot's time, that is, within the last fifty years, chemistry
has won its chief triumphs in the field of synthesis. Organic chemistry,
that is, the chemistry of the carbon compounds, so called because it was
formerly assumed, as Gerhardt says, that they could only be formed by