Alchemy's Working Assumption, Not Just Its Metaphor

Hylozoism is not incidental to alchemical practice in this atlas but close to its precondition: an alchemist purifying and transforming metals toward gold was, on the hylozoist reading, working with substances that had their own developmental potential to be brought to maturity, much as a physician nurses a living body toward health, rather than merely rearranging dead matter by brute mechanical force. The same assumption underlies a great deal of folk herbalism and vitalist medicine, where a plant's healing power is treated as an active force in the plant itself rather than a set of inert chemical properties waiting to be extracted.

The position is easily confused with panpsychism, and older sources often run the two together, but they are not identical: panpsychism is a claim about experience or mentality being basic to matter, while hylozoism is the narrower, older claim that matter is alive, a distinction contemporary philosophy of mind draws more carefully than early modern natural philosophy did. Modern biology's success at explaining life in terms of ordinary chemistry, without needing to posit that ordinary matter is itself alive, is the single strongest reason the position now survives mainly in esoteric rather than scientific contexts.