The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 6: Science gets organized

Robert Boyle

The star of the new Royal Society was Robert Boyle. Boyle possessed a number of significant advantages for the study of natural philosophy. He was rich, and able to maintain assistants and a laboratory with expensive equipment such as the air-pump. His aristocratic social standing and respected personal character put his word beyond doubt.

Although not interested in day-to-day politics, Boyle was in favor at Charles’s court, and received several prestigious and lucrative appointments. In addition to his many contributions to Philosophical Transactions, hardly a year went by without the publication of at least one Boyle book. His ability to finance the translations of his works into Latin gave him a higher European profile than other contemporary English scientists.

In addition to Boyle’s own authorized editions, his works were frequently plagiarized and pirated. Boyle’s publications covered chemistry, physics, medicine, natural theology and religion. His most influential text in chemistry, The Skeptical Chymist (1661) is a prolix and confusing work patched together from manuscripts.

Its principal purposes were to attack the positions held by some contemporary chemists and alchemists and to raise the intellectual and social status of chemistry, until then a discipline many natural philosophers despised.

Boyle attacked both those chemists who had too pragmatic and technological an approach and those who erected vast cosmological systems on a chemical basis. Boyle did not reject all alchemy but distinguished between alchemical traditions. Paracelsians bore the brunt of his attack, whereas he admired many traditional alchemists who concentrated on making gold.

Another chemical work, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) introduced an early version of the litmus test for distinguishing acids and alkalis.

Boyle’s “corpuscularian” matter theory had roots in both atomism and alchemy. Tiny particles of matter coalesced to form corpuscles, the basic building blocks of material substances. The properties of matter, including chemical properties, were explained by the nature and structure of these corpuscles.

Interaction between corpuscles was largely mechanical, but, unlike Descartes, Boyle did not believe that all material interactions could be explained strictly in mechanical terms. Boyle was very suspicious of all-encompassing systems like Aristotelianism, Paracelsianism, or Cartesianism. Rather than system-building, Boyle investigated particular phenomena through experiment and the gathering of observations in the Baconian tradition.

Experiment in particular obsessed Boyle. He believed that experimenters, unlike arrogant system-builders, approached nature with proper humility.

The piece of experimental equipment with which Boyle was most identified was the air-pump. Hooke built one for him that represented the state of the art in air-pump manufacture. Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (1660) recounted a number of air-pump experiments.

This led to a controversy, one of the very few involving Boyle, with the mechanical philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In the course of this dispute Boyle published for the first time what came to be known as “Boyle’s Law,” that the pressure exerted by air varied inversely with its volume. Boyle’s Law was not originally discovered by Boyle but Boyle verified it with the aid of Hooke. Boyle also became a champion of the existence of vacuum, which in England was often referred to as the “vacuum Boylianum.”

Boyle was a devout Christian who established the Boyle Lectures to defend Christianity from the alleged onslaughts of Deists and Atheists. He rebutted slurs that natural philosophy led to atheism in works such as The Christian Virtuoso (1690), written to show that there was no conflict between religion and experimental philosophy. Oster includes writings by Boyle as documents 8.5, 8.6 and 8.7. What does Boyle see as the purposes of science?