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Reconstructing the Natural Philosopher

Stephen Gaukroger

in The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685

The development of the persona of the natural philosopher is the key to understanding how natural philosophy becomes inserted into European culture in the 16th and 17th centuries. This chapter shows ... More

The development of the persona of the natural philosopher is the key to understanding how natural philosophy becomes inserted into European culture in the 16th and 17th centuries. This chapter shows in detail that notions of truth and justification turn just as much on conceptions of intellectual honesty as they do on notions of method. It looks primarily at the standing of the natural philosopher in Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Royal Society apologists, focusing on claims that the natural philosopher requires a kind of intellectual honesty lacking in scholastic natural philosophy. This is closely tied in with one of the distinctive features of early-modern natural philosophy: that questions that had earlier been seen in terms of truth are now discussed instead in terms of impartiality and objectivity.Less

Reworking Reasonableness: The Authoritative Testimony of Nature

Douglas John Casson

in Liberating Judgment: Fanatics, Skeptics, and John Locke's Politics of Probability

This chapter demonstrates how Locke's gradual move away from his early political positions parallels his encounter with a new notion of reasonableness based on probable judgment. This shift took ... More

This chapter demonstrates how Locke's gradual move away from his early political positions parallels his encounter with a new notion of reasonableness based on probable judgment. This shift took place as Locke became involved with a group of researchers surrounding Robert Boyle who were adopting a “new probability” linked to the evidential testimony of natural signs or nondemonstrable facts. Although their vocabulary grew from medieval notions of probability, these experimentalists unwittingly secularized practical rationality in a way that transformed scientific, religious, and political justification. This shift hinged on an assumption that evidence presented to the senses can be seen as a natural deliverance emanating from an ultimately inaccessible, yet divinely ordained structure of order.Less

Robert Boyle's Loose Notes

Richard Yeo

in Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

This chapter discusses Robert Boyle's mode of note-taking and his ideas about the relationships between notes, memory, and the communication of scientific information. Like other early modern ... More

This chapter discusses Robert Boyle's mode of note-taking and his ideas about the relationships between notes, memory, and the communication of scientific information. Like other early modern virtuosi, Boyle made copious notes comprising both textual extracts and empirical information, but he did not maintain large commonplace books of the kind recommended by the humanists; nor did he publicize an account of his note-taking methods. Boyle relied on what he called ‘loose notes, but also kept such notes in ‘workdiaries’, sometimes conceived as ‘centuries’, or sets of 100 entries, as also used by Francis Bacon. In this way, his notes played the dual function of both prompting memory and relieving it. Boyle relied on both memory and notes as prompts to recollection, and as ways of securing the steps of a train of thought or argument. However, he also believed that some of his loose notes could be useful to others.Less

An Empiricism of Imperceptible Entities

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

Chapter 2 explores a difficulty that links the natural philosophy and physico-theology of the early Royal Society—the challenge of making imperceptible entities accessible to sensory experience. In ... More

Chapter 2 explores a difficulty that links the natural philosophy and physico-theology of the early Royal Society—the challenge of making imperceptible entities accessible to sensory experience. In natural philosophy, those entities were imperceptibly small and almost infinitely numerous atoms. In physico-theology, meanwhile, the entity in question was an immaterial God, both immaterial and infinite. The chapter explores this difficulty by turning to crucial works of neurophysiology such as Thomas Willis’s Cerebri Anatome (1664), and to texts by Robert Boyle exploring the possibility of learning about things beyond human understanding—his Discourse of Things Above Reason (1681) and Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (1675). In so doing, the chapter shows that physico-theology was by no means only an apologetic discourse. Rather, it was one part of an empirical science deeply concerned with making the activity of imperceptible spirits accessible to the bodily organs of sensation and cognition. At the same time, it shows that Boyle and others believed that the representational strategies they used to make imperceptible entities accessible to the senses should provoke pleasure. For them, the provocation of sensory and imaginative pleasure was central to the work of empiricism.Less

Corpuscular Effluvia: Between Imagination and Experiment

Catherine Wilson

in Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

This chapter presents an example of the manner in which the purely hypothetical atom of the ancients was introduced into the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society. Lucretius had posited that ... More

This chapter presents an example of the manner in which the purely hypothetical atom of the ancients was introduced into the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society. Lucretius had posited that the ambient air contained a mixture of toxic and salubrious particles that were taken in by the human body, explaining contagious illness and poisoning. Both Robert Boyle and John Mayow devised experiments with the aim of ascertaining the characteristics and powers of these invisible particles. Mayow's intelligent and prescient speculations regarding the vital component in the atmosphere, the ‘aerial niter’, were however repudiated by Boyle as inconsistent with the pure form of corpuscularianism Boyle himself advocated.Less

Optics and Matter: Newton, Boyle, and Scholastic Mixture Theory

William R. Newman

in Newton the Alchemist

This chapter provides a sustained treatment of the self-styled English “naturalist” Robert Boyle, and his contribution to Newton's optical research. It is little appreciated that Boyle's analytical ... More

This chapter provides a sustained treatment of the self-styled English “naturalist” Robert Boyle, and his contribution to Newton's optical research. It is little appreciated that Boyle's analytical approach to chymistry had a profound impact on Newton's optics in the second half of the 1660s, the period that Newton considered “the prime of my age for invention.” It is argued that Newton transferred Boyle's analysis and resynthesis or “redintegration” of materials such as niter to the realm of light. The chapter also establishes the influence of Boyle's chymistry on Newton's experimental methodology, and presents Boyle's and Newton's work against the backdrop of scholastic matter theory and optics in order to underscore the epoch-making character of the new color theory, which resulted in the overthrow of two millennia of research on the subject.Less

“Other Air”: Boyle’s Spring, Milton’s Fall, and the Making of Literary Atmosphere

Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

in Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794

This chapter examines the works of Robert Boyle and John Milton in an exploration of the definition of literary atmosphere. A closer study of Paradise Lost reveals that Adam and Eve’s loss of Eden ... More

This chapter examines the works of Robert Boyle and John Milton in an exploration of the definition of literary atmosphere. A closer study of Paradise Lost reveals that Adam and Eve’s loss of Eden also resulted in a loss of “pure” air. Satan is portrayed as having experienced Eve’s “air” in an atmospheric sense, and Milton invokes this experience of air repeatedly—which in the end creates both an obstruction and a condition of experience. In effect, Milton’s work and “air” are the result of an age of literary experiment that would cohere with a larger body of new experiments in natural philosophy. In the case of Boyle, his purpose was to show that matter was all there was to it, endowing air with physical attributes of weight through a visualizing machine: the air pump. The chapter explores, then, how Milton and Boyle influenced the discussion that brought forth the making of literary atmosphere.Less

Rival Memories: John Beale and Robert Boyle on Empirical Information

Richard Yeo

in Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

This chapter considers Robert Boyle's views on memory and note-taking in the light of his relationship with Samuel Hartlib, and especially as revealed in his correspondence in the 1660s with John ... More

This chapter considers Robert Boyle's views on memory and note-taking in the light of his relationship with Samuel Hartlib, and especially as revealed in his correspondence in the 1660s with John Beale. The young Boyle thought and wrote about the mental and moral cultivation of the mind, independent of the use of notes. He was therefore potentially receptive to Beale's emphasis on memory training, and on abbreviation, reduction and systematic display of information. However, Boyle was suspicious of premature systems and also aware of the need for rich empirical detail gathered over a lifetime. Moreover, in Boyle's case, deep personal memory consolidated by his episodic memory, enriched his scientific thinking.Less

A Final Interlude: Newton and Boyle

William R. Newman

in Newton the Alchemist

Robert Boyle was one of the most famous scientists in Britain, known for his experimental expertise and for his prominent role in the Royal Society, and also a semicloseted seeker of the ... More

Robert Boyle was one of the most famous scientists in Britain, known for his experimental expertise and for his prominent role in the Royal Society, and also a semicloseted seeker of the philosophers' stone. This chapter considers Newton's relationship with Boyle in the light of both men's attempts to arrive at a “sophic mercury” that would in principle dissolve gold into its primordial constituents and make it possible for the noble metal to “ferment,” as Newton says in his short text of 1692, De natura acidorum. The two major English representatives of public science in the seventeenth century had very different ideas about the path to chrysopoeia, though both, in the end, were alchemists in the fullest sense of the term.Less

Spinoza, Science, and the Scientists

Jonathan I. Israel

in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750

The most important and exceptional element in Spinoza's scientific thought is simply that natural philosophy, or science, is of universal applicability and that there is no reserved area beyond it. ... More

The most important and exceptional element in Spinoza's scientific thought is simply that natural philosophy, or science, is of universal applicability and that there is no reserved area beyond it. This implied a stark contrast between Spinoza's scientific rationality and that of every other leading philosopher and scientist of the age, not least Descartes. Various contemporaries attested to Spinoza's skill in preparing lenses and building microscopes and telescopes. Among those most aware of Spinoza's work with microscopes was the preeminent scientist of the Dutch Golden Age, Christian Huygens. Below the surface, the barely suppressed rivalry between Huygens and Spinoza extended far beyond lenses and microscopes. For both men, the central issue in science at the time was to revise and refine Descartes' laws of motion and mechanics. Another central strand of Spinoza's scientific thought is his critique of Boyle. Spinoza relegated observation and experiment to the secondary role of confirming or contradicting hypotheses, and it was on this ground that he was drawn into criticizing Boyle and the empiricism of the Royal Society.Less

The Young Thaumaturge

William R. Newman

in Newton the Alchemist

This chapter examines the young Newton from his education at the Free Grammar School in Grantham during the 1650s up to his student years at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in 1661, in order to ... More

This chapter examines the young Newton from his education at the Free Grammar School in Grantham during the 1650s up to his student years at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in 1661, in order to see how his interest in chymistry originated and developed. The standard view is that Newton was stimulated to his early interest in chymistry by the works of Robert Boyle. However, the recent discovery of an anonymous and hitherto unexamined manuscript, Treatise of Chymistry, provides new evidence showing that Newton was already compiling chymical dictionaries before reading Boyle's works on the subject. The chapter also considers what could be Newton's earliest notes on chrysopoeia, namely, his abstracts and summaries of the works attributed to the supposed fifteenth-century Benedictine Basilius Valentinus. Finally, it attempts to pin down some of the early contacts in Cambridge and London who transmitted the manuscripts and other texts to Newton that provided a major part of his alchemical knowledge.Less

Boyle, Sennert, and the Mechanical Philosophy

in Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution

The matter-theory of the physicist refers to the very corpuscularian philosophy to which Boyle devoted his life's work, the explanation of phenomena in terms of matter and motion at the microlevel. ... More

The matter-theory of the physicist refers to the very corpuscularian philosophy to which Boyle devoted his life's work, the explanation of phenomena in terms of matter and motion at the microlevel. Although Boyle's mechanical philosophy certainly owed a heavy debt to other thinkers in the “new science,” particularly Gassendi and Descartes, the fact is that the main experimental support for Boyle's matter theory flowed in a direct line from the scholastic alchemical tradition articulated and refined by Daniel Sennert. This chapter shows that Boyle relied on Sennert's reductions to the pristine state in two quite different, though related, ways. First, the Sennertian examples of metals simply dissolved in acids and then reduced or metals combined with other substances and then restored to their former state by reduction, provided Boyle with the necessary evidence to make the claim that “minima of their own genus” really did exist in nature. Second, he extends the reduction to the pristine state to form an integral part of his program of revealing the mechanical origins of “particular qualities.” The chapter also shows how the British naturalist has reformulated the Sennertian reductio in pristinum statum to become an important weapon in his antihylomorphic arsenal.Less

Robert Boyle: Experience as Paideia

in Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition

This chapter examines the views and works of Robert Boyle related to the limits and perfection of reason and his view of experience as paideia. It contends that Boyle's dynamic approach to knowledge ... More

This chapter examines the views and works of Robert Boyle related to the limits and perfection of reason and his view of experience as paideia. It contends that Boyle's dynamic approach to knowledge is at the same time a dynamic approach to the human faculties which emphasizes their educability and progress conjointly with an awareness of their limits. This chapter also suggests that Boyle's concern with the state and possibilities of human faculties is the framework of his approach to the questions of the limits of reason and of certain knowledge.Less

Physico-Theology, Natural Philosophy, and Sensory Experience

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

This chapter reassesses the relationship between physico-theology—the main body of works in which philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, and John Ray advanced claims about how nature ... More

This chapter reassesses the relationship between physico-theology—the main body of works in which philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, and John Ray advanced claims about how nature should be experienced—and their empirical approach to the study of nature. For the most part, physico-theology has been interpreted as an apologetic discourse, intended to deflect accusations of religious impropriety leveled against practitioners of the new philosophy. By contrast, this chapter shows that physico-theology and natural philosophy had a lot in common. Moreover, it shows that Ray and his contemporaries saw the two practices as components of a broader project of empirical knowledge production. The chapter concludes by suggesting that it is time to take the affective and moral claims of physico-theology more seriously, considering the possibility that they were integral to the aims of the empirical natural philosophy practiced by many of the Royal Society’s leading members. In addition, it proposes that the rhetoric characteristic of much physico-theology was crucial to the representational practices of natural philosophy. The chapter suggests, in other words, that the pleasurable rhetoric of physico-theology had a far greater role in the explanatory practices of empiricism than has so far been recognized.Less

Second Sight in Scotland: Boyle’S Legacy and its Transformation

Michael Hunter

in The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment

This chapter considers changing attitudes during the long eighteenth century to second sight — the uncanny ability of certain individuals to foresee the future — in Scotland. This was a topic which ... More

This chapter considers changing attitudes during the long eighteenth century to second sight — the uncanny ability of certain individuals to foresee the future — in Scotland. This was a topic which fascinated Boyle in the late seventeenth century. This chapter illustrates how his enquiries on the subject began a tradition of empirical study of the phenomenon which continued into the eighteenth century. But then a change came, and by about 1800 the possibility of second sight was increasingly rejected among English and Scottish intellectuals on the grounds that it was incompatible with the ‘principles’ by which the universe operated. In parallel with this, however, a separate tradition emerged in which second sight and related phenomena were deemed appropriate for imaginative interpretation by poets and others, which is significant in itself.Less

Studying Nature

in Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition

This chapter examines how regimen idea informs inquirers' positions relative to the study of nature, with its natural philosophical and natural theological dimensions. The focuses of the analysis is ... More

This chapter examines how regimen idea informs inquirers' positions relative to the study of nature, with its natural philosophical and natural theological dimensions. The focuses of the analysis is on the figure of the inquirer into nature rather than on natural philosophical methodology and the natural theological argument. This chapter suggests that an approach from the point of view of the inquirer can add important dimensions to methodology and argument and evaluates how this concept applies to Robert Boyle and John Locke's general concern with the rightful conduct of the understanding. It also contends that experimental methodology and physico-theology are construed as transformative exercises for the inquirer's mind.Less

Robert Boyle, Christian Virtuoso

Victor Nuovo

in John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso

Boyle gave the vocation of a Christian virtuoso its name and exemplified its character in his life. Following Bacon, he affirmed the priority of natural philosophy, and, like Bacon, he prescribed ... More

Boyle gave the vocation of a Christian virtuoso its name and exemplified its character in his life. Following Bacon, he affirmed the priority of natural philosophy, and, like Bacon, he prescribed that it be practiced through experimental methods and that it found its explanations either directly upon perceived causes or upon causal hypotheses inferred from experimental practice or trials of nature, chief among them the mechanical or ‘atomicall’ philosophy. In his book The Christian Virtuoso, he prescribed that the study of nature was complemented and completed by the study of Holy Scripture, and he imagined a form of intellectual life in which the scope of natural reason was enlarged by revelation, which in turn was confirmed through trials or experiments of faith.Less

Natural Philosophy and the Cultivation of Taste

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

This chapter discusses the stylistic qualities of the verbal descriptions written by key members of the early Royal Society. It argues that those descriptions were intended to produce pleasurable ... More

This chapter discusses the stylistic qualities of the verbal descriptions written by key members of the early Royal Society. It argues that those descriptions were intended to produce pleasurable effects that were both bodily and spiritual. The chapter makes this case by focusing on the stylistic qualities of Thomas Willis's anatomical description of the brain and nerves, Cerebri Anatome (1664). Moreover, it interprets Willis's descriptive style by turning to texts that evince a wider contemporary interest in the role that neurophysiology could play in explaining the pleasurable effects of rhetoric, including Robert Boyle’s Some Considerations Touching the Style of the H. Scriptures (1661) and the influential English translation of Bernard Lamy’s De l’art de Parler (1675). The chapter concludes by showing that the stylistic strategies used by WIllis and others were understood to have powerful therapeutic effects, literally shaping the organs of sensation and cognition in a way that made them better suited to the pleasurable acquisition of insights about nature. The program of moral and intellectual regeneration promised by key members of the early Royal Society therefore took substantial form in the bodily transformations that could accompany the attentive enjoyment of descriptions of plants and animals.Less