As everything in inorganic nature was supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemption and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the doctrine of the resurrection of the human body was by similar mystic jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and sublimation.

Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this--among them such leaders as Basil Valentine in the fifteenth century, Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van Helmont in the seventeenth.
The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of unreason from which this pseudo-science was developed.

One question largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was necessary for God to take the human form.

Thomas Aquinas answered that it was necessary, but William Occam and Duns Scotus answered that it was not; that God might have taken the form of a stone, or of a log, or of a beast.

The possibilities opened to wild substitutes for science by this sort of reasoning were infinite.