Definition of "alembic"

Ideal beauty is not the mind’s creation: it is real beauty, refined and purified in the mind’s alembic, from the alloy which always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature.

1818, Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter 11

Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man.

1836, Emerson, Nature, Chapter 3

The great physiologist Schwann, for instance, who died in 1882, maintained that there was an insurmountable barrier between us and those whom Michelet calls our inferior brethren. To him animals were alembics and electric batteries; mechanics, physics, and chemistry could account for all their manifestations.

1886, Joseph Rémi Léopold Delbœuf, What May Animals Be Taught?

We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses —

1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow