Continuity, Change, and Embodied Knowledge in the History of Chymistry.

If Homberg was mostly part of the "penumbra" of the Académie during Louvois's time in office, Homberg's was one of the first appointments made under Pontchartrain, who also directed the 1699 organizational reform. (p. 197) "We cannot raise chemistry", Venel complained half a century later, "to the level it deserves by demonstrating its philosophical side [...] we cannot do for chemistry what elegant machines, optics, and electricity have done for physics."[15] There is a sense in which both Homberg and Venel were right in these pronouncements. In this foundational conflict, whose origins predate Homberg's arrival at the Académie, those who envisioned chymistry as an integral part of natural philosophy, like Duclos and Homberg, are set against those who viewed it as an adjunct tool to medicine and pharmacy, like Denis Dodart. Contrary to its received image, the essence of chymistry is not "less neat and simple than the spirit of physics"; nor can physics be "superior" to a science that "can penetrate certain bodies of which physics knows only the surface and the outside shape."[14] Or, as Homberg put it in contrasting " I physique chimique i " ("chymical natural philosophy") and " I la physique i ", chymistry "easily explains its own operations in its own way and thereby knows more distinctly the substances it examines.". [Extracted from the article]