On the other hand, there are others who will remain obdurate strangers to one another and refuse to unite in any way even through mechanical mixing and grinding, as oil and water shaken together will a moment later separate again.’

‘It needs little imagination,’ said Charlotte, ‘to see in these elementary forms people one has known; what they especially suggest is the social circles in which we live. But most similar of all to these inanimate things are the masses which stand over against one another in the world: the classes, the professions, the nobility and the third estate, the soldier and the civilian.’

‘And yet,’ Eduard replied, ‘just as these can be unified through laws and customs, so in our chemical world too there exist intermediaries for combining together those things which repulse one another.’

‘Thus,’ the Captain interposed, ‘we combine oil with water by means of alkaline salt.’

‘Not too fast with your lecture,’ said Charlotte. ‘Let me show that I am keeping up. Have we not already arrived at the affinities?’

‘Quite right,’ the Captain replied; ‘and we shall straight way go on to see exactly what they are and what their force consists in. Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance. Think only of lime, which evidences a great inclination, a decided desire for union with acids of every kind. As soon as our cabinet of chemicals arrives we will show you some very entertaining experiments which will give you a better idea of all this than words, names and technical terms.’

‘Let me confess,’ said Charlotte, ‘that when you call all these curious entities of yours affined, they appear to me to possess not so much an affinity of blood as an affinity of mind and soul. It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union. And so I shall wait to see how much of these mysterious effects you are going to reveal. Now I will not interrupt your reading further,’ she said, turning to Eduard, ‘and, being so much better instructed, I shall be listening to you with attention.’

‘Now you have summoned us up,’ Eduard said, ‘you cannot get away as easily as that: for the most complicated cases are in fact the most interesting. It is only when you consider these that you get to know the degrees of affinity, the closer and stronger, the more distant and weaker relationships; the affinities become interesting only when they bring about divorces.’

‘Does that doleful word, which one unhappily hears so often in society these days, also occur in natural science?’ Charlotte exclaimed.

‘To be sure,’ Eduard replied. ‘It even used to be a title of honour to chemists to call them artists in divorcing one thing from another.’*

‘Then it is not so any longer,’ Charlotte said, ‘and a very good thing too. Uniting is a greater art and a greater merit. An artist in unification in any subject would be welcomed the world over. – But now you are in the vein for once, let me hear of a few such cases.’

‘Let us then go straight ahead,’ said the Captain, ‘and connect this idea with what we have already defined and discussed. For example: what we call limestone is more or less pure calcium oxide intimately united with a thin acid known to us in a gaseous state. If you put a piece of this limestone into dilute sulphuric acid, the latter will seize on the lime and join with it to form calcium sulphate, or gypsum; that thin gaseous acid, on the other hand, escapes. Here there has occurred a separation and a new combination, and one then feels justified even in employing the term “elective affinity”, because it really does look as if one relationship was preferred to another and chosen instead of it.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Charlotte, ‘as I forgive the scientist, but I would never see a choice here but rather a natural necessity and indeed hardly that; for in the last resort it is perhaps only a matter of opportunity. Opportunity makes relationships just as much as it makes thieves; and where your natural substances are concerned, the choice seems to me to lie entirely in the hands of the chemist who brings these substances together. Once they have been brought together, though, God help them! In the present case I only feel sorry for the poor gaseous acid, which has to go off and drift around again in the void.’

‘All it has to do,’ the Captain replied, ‘is to join up with water and it will then, as a mineral spring, serve as a source of refreshment to sick and healthy alike.’

‘It is all very well for the gypsum to talk,’ said Charlotte; ‘the gypsum is now complete, a finished body, it has been taken care of; whereas that expelled substance may go through a very hard time before it again finds refuge.’

‘Unless I am much mistaken,’ said Eduard with a smile, ‘your remarks carry a double meaning. Confess it now! When all is said, I am in your eyes the lime which the Captain, as a sulphuric acid, has seized on, withdrawn from your charming company, and transformed into a stubborn gypsum.’

‘If your conscience prompts you to such reflections,’ Charlotte replied, ‘I have no need to worry. These figures of speech are pretty and amusing, and who does not like to play with analogies? But man is so very much elevated above those elements, and if he has in this instance been somewhat liberal with the fine words “choice” and “elective affinity”, it is well for him to turn and look within himself, and then consider truly what validity such expressions possess. I know, alas, of all too many cases in which an intimate and apparently indissoluble union between two beings has been broken up by a chance association with a third and one of the couple at first so fairly united driven out into the unknown.’

‘Chemists are far more gallant in this matter,’ said Eduard: ‘they introduce a fourth, so that no one shall go empty away.’

‘Yes indeed!’ the Captain added: ‘these cases are in fact the most significant and noteworthy of all; in them one can actually demonstrate attraction and relatedness, this as it were crosswise parting and uniting: where four entities, previously joined together in two pairs, are brought into contact, abandon their previous union, and join together afresh. In this relinquishment and seizing, in this fleeing and seeking, one really can believe one is witnessing a higher determination; one credits such entities with a species of will and choice, and regards the technical term “elective affinities” as entirely justified.’

‘Describe to me such a case,’ said Charlotte.

‘Description is inadequate,’ the Captain replied. ‘As I have already said, everything will become clearer and more acceptable once I can show you the experiments themselves. At present I should have to put you off with dreadful technical terms which would still give you no idea of what is happening. One has to have these entities before one’s eyes, and see how, although they appear to be lifeless, they are in fact perpetually ready to spring into activity; one has to watch sympathetically how they seek one another out, attract, seize, destroy, devour, consume one another, and then emerge again from this most intimate union in renewed, novel and unexpected shape: it is only then that one credits them with an eternal life, yes, with possessing mind and reason, because our own minds seem scarcely adequate to observing them properly and our understanding scarcely sufficient to comprehend them.’

‘I do not deny,’ said Eduard, ‘that anyone who has not become reconciled to it through immediate physical observation and comprehension must find the strange jargon troublesome, indeed ludicrous. Yet in the meantime we could easily express what we have been talking about by means of letters.’

‘Provided it does not seem pedantic,’ the Captain said, ‘I think I can briefly sum up in the language of signs. Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself at D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other’s partner.’

‘Now then!’ Eduard interposed: ‘until we see all this with our own eyes, let us look on this formula as a metaphor from which we may extract a lesson we can apply immediately to ourselves.