Any substance heated with the alkahest is first decomposed into its proximate ingredients (the tria prima), and upon further heating is reduced to water. As such, the alkahest promised to be the ultimate means of carrying out chymical analyses—a crucial means of gaining knowledge for Van Helmont and his followers. “There is no more certain genus of acquiring knowledge,” he wrote, “than when one knows what is contained in a thing and how much of it there is.”62 By stopping the process at the right point, and distilling off the alkahest, the “first essence” (ens primum) of the dissolved
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