Reason & Logic Quote by William Temple

Temple’s jab lands because it refuses to argue on alchemy’s own terms. He demotes it by analogy: alchemy in “natural philosophy” is to science what religious “enthusiasm” is to theology - not heresy exactly, but a fever of certainty that outruns method. The phrase “looked upon” signals a cultivated, patrician distance; he isn’t diagnosing an error so much as a social pathology. Alchemy isn’t merely wrong, it’s a distraction with collateral damage.

The subtext is about credibility and governance. Seventeenth-century Europe was churning with new institutions of knowledge (the Royal Society, experimentalism) while still haunted by older dreams of transmutation, secret wisdom, and quick riches. By pairing alchemy with enthusiasm - a term often used pejoratively for ecstatic, destabilizing religious fervor - Temple frames both as forms of intellectual populism: seductive, unregulated, and resistant to sober arbitration. Each promises access to hidden power without the slow disciplines that legitimate authority: experiment in the lab, doctrine in the church.

“T troubled the world” is the political tell. Temple is less concerned with private belief than with public consequences: wasted fortunes, credulous patrons, charlatans, sectarian agitation. “Much to the same purpose” is the clincher of dry contempt, implying the net outcome is noise, not knowledge; heat without light. The line works because it flatters the reader into a community of the sensible, making skepticism feel like not just a stance, but a civic virtue.