IMHO there's something to be said for innovative, paradigm-defining[1] thinkers being more likely to accept frameworks that we in hindsight recognize as definitively disproven. Not to say alchemy was exactly an open question in Newtonian Britain, ofc -- but certainly not as resoundingly disproven as it is post-Darwin & Lavoisier

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/ , https://archive.org/details/thomas-s.-kuhn-the-structure-of-...