The Bloomsbury Companion to Robert Boyle

Jan-Erik Jones

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350029361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Robert Boyle, well known in scientific circles, has still not received the credit he deserves in philosophy. A leader in experimental philosophy, his interests range from morality and philosophy of religion to epistemology and the philosophy of science. The Bloomsbury Companion to Robert Boyle brings together the latest work on the lesser known aspects of Boyle's philosophy, alongside some of his best known views, and surveys the full range of his philosophy for the first time. Situating Boyle within the philosophical and scientific traditions and introducing his zeal for experiment and commitment to the improvement of humanity, chapters reveal how crucial chemistry and alchemy are to his philosophy of science. They take up the metaphysical and ontological consequences of his philosophy and discuss his influence in the 17th and 18th centuries. Highlighting the importance of his moral theory and theological commitments for his philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology, chapters show how they motivate Boyle's philosophical positions and practices.
For students or researchers looking to better understand Boyle's contribution to philosophy The Bloomsbury Companion to Robert Boyle is a comprehensive and invaluable guide. By taking into account the last thirty years of scholarship and pointing towards the next thirty years it presents the best of the current research on Boyle's philosophy and significance today.

1

Boyle’s Baconianism

Harriet Knight

Boyle has long been understood as Francis Bacon’s intellectual heir. The early Royal Society deferred to Bacon as its inspiration and made Boyle its contemporary hero with elaborate celebrations of him in print as a ‘Noble Searcher after Nature’: he was presented as ‘the principal exemplar of the Society’s experimental policy’ (Hunter 2015: 53). Boyle’s correspondent John Beale suggested, as a Cambridge professor had said when reading Bacon’s Advancement of Learning for the first time, ‘that he must burn his old bookes & begin his newe ABC; So would Ld. Bacon now say, if he should arise to see this progresse in a single Person’ (Hall and Hall 1965–86: 13: 386). This extravagance is typical of Beale, but the sense of Boyle as Bacon’s inheritor was general. The ‘congratulatory poem’ to Boyle included in the Latin edition of his Forms and Qualities links the two: ‘heaven has blessed us with two of heaven’s greatest gifts, on the one hand Bacon, who restored and repaired everything, and on the other Boyle, whose name will forever be sacred’ (Works, 5: 489). In 1712, John Hughes, writing in The Spectator, characterized Boyle ‘designed by Nature to succeed to the Labours and Enquiries’ of Bacon, and having ‘filled up those Plans and Out-Lines of Science, which his Predecessor had sketched out’ (5 December 1712: 554). Peter Shaw’s eighteenth-century systematized editions of Bacon and Boyle imply that these were the two crucial natural philosophers of their generations.

Linking Bacon and Boyle has not always been seen as complimentary, however. Graham Rees documents the changes in Bacon’s intellectual reputation, and in particular the ‘astonishing’ and undeserved twentieth-century discredit which left his reputation ‘reduced to rags’, with the adjective ‘Baconian’ used by Kuhn, Popper and others to condemn much seventeenth-century work as ‘pre-paradigmatic, fact collecting, and natural-historical’ (Rees and Wakely 2004: xxxvi, xxxii). For Popper, Bacon creates a ‘myth of a scientific method that starts from observation and experiment and then proceeds to theories’ and rejects hypothesis, and in this context some mid-twentieth-century Boyle scholars attempted to separate Boyle from Bacon, in order to preserve him from charges of naïve empiricism (Popper 1959: 279). Richard S. Westfall argues that Boyle exceeded Bacon’s empirical ‘disorganized collection of heterogeneous observations’, defying the ‘Baconian’ contention that ‘scientific truth would emerge almost automatically from the full collection of facts’ requiring only ‘a natural history, which anyone would be able to collect’, and relying instead on hypothesis. ‘Boyle set reason above sense’ (1956: 70, 67). Here Boyle’s intellectual value is proved by his supposed rejection of Baconianism, understood as narrowly empirical.

Bacon’s rehabilitation involved showing the complexity of his attitude to experiment and distinguishing strands of Baconianism. Hugh Trevor-Roper codified a distinction between ‘vulgar’, and ‘pure’ Baconianism: the former, associated with Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, is characterized as ‘fragmented’ and ‘uncontrolled’. By contrast, members of the Royal Society, ‘Wilkins and Petty, Boyle and Wren’, transform this ‘vulgar Baconianism’, ‘elevat[e it] again into the pure Baconianism of Bacon’ (1967: 258, 289). Similarly, and explicitly revising Popper, Mary Horton (1973) and Peter Urbach (1982) both document Bacon’s emphasis on the factual but present this as only the preliminary phase of his work. Dorothea Krook had made a similar argument in the 1950s, suggesting that Bacon himself transcended, rather than exemplifying the expansive, disorderly empirical approach. For her, the early Royal Society had tended to reduce Bacon’s philosophy to a ‘bare empiricism that minimizes almost out of existence its rationalist aspect’; in which the ‘discovery of ‘axioms’ … seems to matter much less than the accumulation of facts’. Krook praises Boyle as an ‘honourable exception’ to this and as a true Baconian, because he advocates applying reason to data (1955: 267). More recently, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have sought to distance Bacon from mainstream Royal Society Baconianism, claiming that in his natural history information was ‘immediately put to work in the investigation of causes’ through tabulation and classification, whereas in the Royal Society, matters of fact ‘were as often as not left to float free both of a motivating causal inquiry or a unifying causal explanation’ (1998: 231). The unstable definition of Baconianism has led to some scholars deeming Boyle too rational and others too empirical to be true to Bacon’s work, with strong value judgements implied in making or denying the connection (Sargent 1986: 473, 469). In recent Boyle scholarship, therefore, there has been an attempt to return to the works to fully document the links themselves: taking on the topic in 2008 Anstey and Hunter explained the occasion of their essay, ‘No one since Peter Shaw’s treatment of the subject in 1733 … has mapped the precise contours of Boyle’s Baconianism’ (2008: 86).

One of the obstacles to mapping these contours lies in the breadth of interests, methods and attitudes characterized as ‘Baconian’. Rees emphasizes the range of positions held by ‘Bacon’s supporters’ in the seventeenth century:

most claimed to be in favour of some or all of the following: negotium rather than otium, an experimental, natural-historical, and broadly inductive approach to the natural sciences; the institutionalization of science and of the means of gathering, collating, and communicating knowledge; planned, co-operative research; rational ‘utilitarian’, and technological solutions to social problems. Likewise, they claimed to be against some or all of these: useless erudition, premature system building, metaphysical speculation, superstition, theological controversy, undue reliance on unaided reason, Aristotelianism, and anything that smacked of scholasticism. (Rees and Wakely 2004: xxiv)

For Boyle, the crucial threads are the experimental natural historical approach, the pursuit of a model of planned, cooperative research and the application of technological solutions to practical problems. On the significance of the first, Anstey has called the philosophy of experiment ‘developed in England by Francis Bacon and … further elaborat[ed] at the hands of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke’ ‘the most elaborate, nuanced and influential account of experiment in the period’ (2014: 104). The third, the beneficent application of technology, is discussed in depth in Michael Hunter’s essay in this collection, as is the question of Boyle’s use of the romance form in imitation of New Atlantis, and these will therefore not be considered in detail here, although the former is clearly a crucial strand of Boyle’s Baconian inheritance. This chapter will document Bacon’s significance for Boyle and consider the impact on Boyle’s reputation of their connection, as well as showing how his manuscripts and printed books offer material evidence of his Baconian impulses.

1. Boyle’s explicit engagements with Bacon

It is firstly helpful to consider the duration and depth of Bacon’s influence upon Boyle. Discussing Boyle’s early intellectual development, Hunter has shown that Boyle was engaged with ethical and religious issues before he underwent a ‘real conversion experience’ to investigating nature by experimental means in 1649 (2015: 36). Boyle’s Baconianism (certainly in its sophisticated form) is an even later development, occurring under the auspices of the Royal Society in the 1660s. Moreover, Hunter questions the assumption that Boyle was leading the Royal Society in terms of the promotion and development of Bacon’s legacy. Rather, he sees the process by which Boyle and the Royal Society developed their Baconianism as a reciprocal influence or synergy (2015: 53–80).

Although it may have been a relatively late development, there is ample evidence that once acquired, Boyle’s Baconianism was profound and significant. Bacon is repeatedly referenced in early Royal Society publications: Sprat’s History calls him the ‘one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprize’, and Royal Society secretary Henry Oldenburg regularly invokes him when explaining the remit to new correspondents, ‘It is a great part of our purpose to put together such a Natural History as our illustrious Bacon designed’ (1667: 35; 1965–86, 4: 422). While Webster (1976) has seen early Royal Society invocations of Bacon as a publicity stunt, and Wood (1980) has argued that Sprat’s references to him are mere polemic, Lynch has shown that his influence was crucial. Systematically named in the Society’s charter, meeting minutes and earliest published works, ‘Bacon’s influence was the primary touchstone for the early Royal Society’ (2005: 173–4).

In Boyle’s works, the frequent explicit references to Bacon suggest he was a primary touchstone here too. Boyle uses a series of flattering epithets, demonstrating the connection which he sought to draw between them. Bacon is ‘Illustrious’, ‘judicious’ and ‘justly famous’ (Works, 3: 50; 4: 546; 8: 344). He is variously ‘so great and so candid’, a ‘Great and Solid’ philosopher; the ‘great Ornament and Guide of Philosophical Historians of Nature’, ‘one of the first and greatest Experimental Philosophers of our Age’, ‘one of the wisest of men & solidest of Filosofers’ and ‘the great Architect of Experimental History’ (Works, 2: 78; 3: 271; 4: 213; 11: 293; 13: 157; 11: 312). While other thinkers are praised by Boyle (e.g. he draws up two pantheons of philosophers and one of theologians, both of which feature Bacon), no other figure is referred to so frequently or in such glowing terms (Works, 13: 190, 197; 8: 88).

Boyle also uses Bacon to frame his works. Baconian epigraphs adorn the title pages of Colours (1664) and Cold (1665), Essays of Effluviums (1673) and Blood (1684) as well as Reason and Religion (1675). Boyle’s works also engage directly with Bacon’s. In places his references take the form of quoted tags which prove a familiarity with the works but where the application feels commonplace: for example in Effluviums, needing the concept of universalizability, he refers the reader to Bacon: ‘or, in the phrase of our Verulam speaking of heat, in ordine ad Universum’ (Works, 7: 364). Similarly, he twice quotes the aphorism that little philosophy leads to atheism but a ‘full draught’ of it returns the reader to God (Works, 3: 271; 13: 157). Elsewhere, the references are more deeply engaged: for example he cites specific Baconian experiments, variously qualifying, or reauthorizing, or adding to these. In Certain Physiological Essays, he specifically presents his work as a test of Bacon’s ‘unlikely truth’ that spirit of wine will float on oil of almonds. He first found the opposite result in various witnessed trials, but his ‘tenderness of the reputation’ of Bacon led to experiments with higher grade of purity and a successful replication of Bacon’s result (Works, 2: 78). Much later in his career, in Salt Water Sweeten’d (1683), he records that Bacon had ‘Learnedly’ claimed that there were no health problems associated with desalinated water, but that Boyle’s tests recorded here were necessary because of the scepticism of ‘invidious persons, who are no well-wishers to Ingeneous Designs’ (Works, 9: 430). Elsewhere he contradicts, rather than reconfirming: in Certain Physiological Essays he records an experiment with egg, referencing Novum Organum, but contesting Bacon’s analysis and suggesting a new cause, ‘I shall willingly confess he has assign’d the cause ingeniously, but must doubt whether he have done it truly’ (Works, 2: 170).

Most significant are Boyle’s engagements with Baconian methodology. In both Reason and Religion (1675) and Things above Reason (1681), he summarizes Bacon’s idea of ‘Idols’ at considerable length (around one thousand words in the former) (Works, 8: 256–7; 9: 382). He also applies Baconian terminology: in his Defence against Linus he uses ‘Experimentum Crucis’ to refer to Bacon’s concept of the ‘crucial instance’, and refers it to him ‘(to speak with our Illustrious Verulam)’ (Works, 3: 50). Similarly, in Usefulness he uses and glosses ‘Lucriferousness’: those who ‘impartially consider the Luciferousness (if I may speak in my Lord of St Albans Stile)’ will realize that valuable remedies have been dismissed too easily, while in the post script to Blood he refers to the need for an appendix of ‘designed Experiments’ which have not been tried but should be ‘(to which ’tis probable our excellent Verulam would have given the title of Historia Designata)’ (Works, 3: 229; 10: 96). In the second tome of Usefulness, Boyle goes further, questioning rather than simply repeating a Baconian distinction,

For though that famous Distinction, introduc’d by the Lord Verulam, whereby Experiments are sorted into Luciferous and Fructiferous, may be (if rightly understood) of commendable Use; yet it would much mislead those that should so understand it, as i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Text
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Boyle’s Baconianism
• 2 Boyle’s Influence on Locke
• 3 Boyle’s Chemistry
• 4 Boyle’s Epistemology:
• 5 Boyle on Explanation and Causality
• 6 Boyle on Qualities
• 7 Boyle’s Natural Kind Realism
• 8 Boyle’s Moral Philosophy
• 9 Boyle’s Philosophy of Religion
• 10 Boyle on the Application of Science
• Index
• Copyright Page