The difference between Alchemy and Chemistry is largely that the Alchemists gave consideration to consciousness when attempting their experiments. This is in sharp contrast to our own world where consciousness is to us as the claim that all Galileo saw in his telescope was dust on the lens.
A few fair places to beginning reading about this would be Filtered and Reflections: Perspectives on Reality, a Princeton publication. Brian O’Leary’s The Second Coming of Science is another good source. Frances A. Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and (ironically) the The Kingkiller Chronicles – as it covers most forms of magic from outside view of it.
A notable difference in the Tyrian world from our own is that they didn’t have to make a major break from their religions to enter the modern age. So, we don’t see any psuedo-sciences that much like Psychology, Behavioral ‘Science’, Sociology, etc trying to be more than a philosophy iterating that people are automatons through jargon babble.
This difference probably evolved because our civilization is based on the Western mode away from religious dogma into proof by experimentation. This effort was driven by the need to seek the idea of divinity that dominated European ideas of the 15th century with a direct access to that divinity through the study of nature itself. Formerly, all access to divinity came through a temple, church, and etc. Ascalon was shaped this way, as well as much of Tyria. Ashford Abby required Monks like Mhenlo to behave as conduits for the divinity. This created the issue of the middle man, the Dark Ages, various forms of tyrannies, the Inquisition, and eventually the split from strict Catholicism into varying religious sects and what would eventually be Alchemy and still later Science.
Alchemy was pretty interesting if you’re reading primary sources. The belief there was that divinity had set about making the universe, but we its progenitors and equal. It celebrated the presence of nature as both a work of divinity and a work of Art. This included the idea that we are ourselves divine and so could shape the world as we so devised because it would inevitably lead to a greater concourse with the divinity. In short, the divinity had made the world, but only began it. It was up to us to finish it. Alchemy collapsed in the late 1500s when it was discovered the Hermetic tradition was not 3000 years old, as had been believed, but rather of late Roman era (though still possibly Egyptian).
At this point the European world was left to decide if it would detract itself back into the model of some Christian dogma or persist on ahead. Newton himself was an alchemist and took the practice quite seriously. Einstein, too, made a lot of use from old Alchemy texts as the trappings of language were less restrictive than modern modalities and so afforded a greater latitude and brevity of inspection than a contemporary dialog might.
Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) by Johann Goethe is a good (if dry) example of the results. Europe refused to retract its consciousness back into the dogma of religious authority and anyway could not return to it having removed most of the obscurity religion afforded upon the grossly ignorant. The population was too large and traveling too often to hold themselves locked into a view that what terminated at the edge of their farm was ’ god’s country ’ and began the providence of demons and savages: that now had to be demonstrated (joke).
Tyria has avoided most of this by fortune of actually having a few more exotic things than our own world. It’s quite interesting that, if I’m not mistaken, the historian Herodotus actually set out to disprove the existence of Dragons only to return home with claims that had found them.
By contrast our world is mostly undergoing a process of elective extinction. Most of the super fauna are going, wiped out by whatever hit the Earth 12,000 years ago and the changes that brought. Our species has not reached any sort of equilibrium with itself. We have no clue about ourselves and actively attempt to stop any progress toward this despite a wealth of information that has been persistent with us since Eleusis.
Again, by contrast, Tyrians persistently have not suffered on a world of continuous hostility. The races are often challenged by external forces (other races typically), but the planet and its immediate environment itself hasn’t tried to kill them so persistently as Earth has. The Asura have largely stopped internal conflicts and don’t demonstrate any consciousness toward saying “That Asura is from Big Eyes Asura while this is Purple Skin Tribe! Die Big Eyes Asura!” Krytans demonstrate this constantly with the Nobles’ disregards for the Commoners under threat from Centaurs. In short, most of the other races have found a way to withhold themselves from this behavior through isolating it into a kind of eccentricity. For example, the Sons of Svanir of behaving nearly-human as they try to wipe out everyone so as to mimic the behavior of the strongest creature they’ve come across: Jormag. It’s only nearly human though as to be truly human they would have to have arbitrarily determined that everyone else to be an ‘other’ and proceed from there.
“Otherness” doesn’t really show up that much in Tyria today either. In older Tyria we saw that a lot, especially in Nightfall, but we were playing as humans for all of that. Most of the other races were merely trying to survive us in some form.
Civilization necessarily created those structures which eliminated, wherever possible, any cognizance to the idea of ideas having impact on the external world as this could detract from the effort of having
In summary, Tyria really hasn’t gone through the same persistent climate of trauma that Earth puts us through daily. Tyria has been more about trying to reach some sort of equilibrium with the environment than dominance of it. In brevity, Tyria is a world that favors cooperative-consciousness whereas Earth is largely a world favoring a dominator-consciousness. It doesn’t necessarily come out that one is more or less utopian than the other; just radically different in very subtle ways.
Science, therefore, didn’t really need to “take place” on Tyria. I posted a bit on why I think this last night. Essentially Tyrians didn’t have Descartes and John Locke, so they never were forced into the slump we’re climbing out of with regards to our own interpretations and use of consciousness.
