Alchemy Web Site:
'The hermetic tradition has long been concerned with the relationship
between the inner world of our consciousness and the outer world of
nature, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the below and the
above, the material and the spiritual, the centric and the peripheral.
The hermetic world view held by such as Robert Fludd, pictured a great
chain of being linking our inner spark of consciousness with all the
facets of the Great World. There was a grand platonic metaphysical
clockwork, as it were, through which our inner world was linked by means
of a hierarchy of beings and planes to the highest unity of the
Divine. This view though comforting is philosophically unsound, and the
developments in thought since the early 17th century have made such a
hermetic world view untenable and philosophically naive. It is
impossible to try to argue the case for such an hermetic metaphysics
with anyone who has had a philosophical training, for they will quickly
and mercilessly reveal deep philosophical contradictions in this world
view. So do we now have to abandon such a beautiful and spiritual world
view and adopt the prevailing reductionist materialist conception of the
world which has become accepted in the intellectual tradition of the
West ?
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