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John Henry: Robert Boyle and Cosmical Qualities
Robert Boyle and Cosmical Qualities
by John Henry
Previously published as "Boyle and Cosmical Qualities", in Robert
Boyle Reconsidered, edited by Michael Hunter (© Cambridge University
Press, 1994), pp. 119-38.
Boyle published his Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things in
1671 (although its imprimatur is dated November 3 1669), as a kind of
sequel to the Origin of Forms and Qualities of 1666, but unlike
the latter work these tracts have attracted very little scholarly attention.
If they have been noticed at all they have been given a seemingly unproblematic
mechanistic interpretation. Boyle defines "systematical or cosmical" qualities
as those qualities of a body which do not derive from the sizes, shapes
and motions of its constituent particles, but
depend upon some unheeded relations and impressions which these bodies
owe to the determinate fabrick of the grand system or world they are
part of.
"A system [of the world] so constituted as ours is", Boyle wrote, "whose
fabrick is such that there may be divers unheeded agents, which, by unperceived
means, may have great operations upon the body we consider", can give
rise to special attributes of that body.[1] It
is by no means immediately clear what Boyle has in mind here, but, relying
upon standard assumptions about the nature of the mechanical philosophy
and about Boyle's status as a leading mechanist, it might seem reasonable
to suppose that Boyle is merely extending the discussion in the Origin
of Forms and Qualities about the power of a key to open a lock.[2]
Boyle's point in his discussion of locks and their keys is that the
power of a key to open a lock becomes the "main part of the notion and
description" of that key. The result is that the ability of the key to
open the lock is "looked upon as a peculiar faculty and power in the
key" even though there is no real or physical entity corresponding to
this power. The key is simply a specially shaped piece of metal designed
to be able to turn through the wards of a lock and draw back its bolt.
The power of the key, in other words, derives from the arrangement of
the system of the lock, and this power, therefore, could be said to be "a
systematic quality" of the key (though Boyle does not use this phraseology
in the earlier work). A stark physical description of the shape and size
of the key is, of course, perfectly true and in a purely physical sense
is all there is to be said about the qualities of the key. Nevertheless,
Boyle points out, such a description misses the crucial point about it
- its ability to open a particular lock. The systematic quality of the
key, therefore, should be acknowledged as an important element in its
make-up.[3]
According to this interpretation, then, systematic or cosmical qualities
are to be seen as complex extensions of this idea, based on the lock-key
analogy, which was first put forward, after all, in Boyle's preceding
book. The analogy in the Origin of Forms and Qualities was applied
to comparatively simple natural examples, the solubility of gold in aqua
regia, the poisonous properties of ground glass, and the way bodies appear
to be coloured. It would seem that the aim of the tract on Systematical
or Cosmical Qualities was merely to indicate how the mysterious qualities
of some bodies may similarly be seen as epiphenomena of the way they
interact with their surroundings. In spite of seemingly occult appearances
and experiences, Boyle wished to explain, the real physical qualities
of these bodies derive ultimately from the mechanical affections of size,
shape and motion.
If Boyle's Cosmical Qualities has failed to attract any special
attention it is almost certainly due to the fact that he expounds his
views on these qualities in such a way that there seems to be no significant
advance on what was explained in the Origin of Forms and Qualities.
The examples he gives in the course of the essay are easily explained
in mechanistic terms. A wedge will not cleave unless it is hit by a hammer,
a knife will not attract a needle unless excited by a magnet. A smoothly
polished slab of marble can be used to pick up another piece of polished
marble, even one heavier than itself, because the pieces of marble adhere "by
virtue of the fabrick of the world, which gives the ambient air fluidity
and weight". Other examples tell of the magnetization of a piece of iron
by heating it and letting it cool while the iron is orientated north-south,
or of the change of a piece of paper from opacity to translucence merely
by soaking it with oil or "even a fit kind of grease". The speed of a
ship under sail can be increased by wetting the sail, we are told, and
common tartar which stays dry in the air and is only dissolved in water
with difficulty is changed by moderate calcining, so that it spontaneously
turns into that liquor which chemists call tartar per deliquium. Glass
which is heated and then cooled too quickly cracks because "the subtle
bodies that are in it" cannot find a passage of escape, but if it is
cooled slowly the glass is able to settle into the appropriate texture.[4]
So, if there is nothing here that could not have been included in the
earlier work on the Origin of Forms and Qualities, why does Boyle
want to give them a special designation as cosmical qualities? A closer
look makes it clear that, whatever our own superficial responses to Cosmical
Qualities might be, Boyle himself believes that there is more to
be said than anything which was covered in the Origin of Forms:
I have in the Origin of Forms touched upon this subject already,
but otherwise than I am now about to do: for whereas that which I principally
(and yet but transiently) take notice of is, that one body being surrounded
with other bodies, is manifestly wrought on by means of those among whom
it is placed; that which I chiefly in this discourse consider, is the
impressions that a body may receive, or the power it may acquire from
those vulgarly unknown or at least unheeded agents by which it is affected,
not only upon the account of its own peculiar texture or disposition,
but by virtue of the general fabrick of the world.[5]
This is still puzzling, however. With the exception of the example
of magnetizing an iron bar by cooling it in alignment with the earth's
magnetic flux, it is difficult to see why the general fabric of the world
has to be invoked to explain Boyle's specific examples. Boyle himself
describes the action of oil on paper in terms of its action on the pores
in the paper, straightening and widening them to allow light particles
through, while water on a sail causes the fibres of the cloth to swell
and make the sail less permeable by the wind. He has already given an
account of the adherence of two polished marble plates in his Continuation
of New Experiments... touching the Spring and Weight of the Air (1669)
without feeling the need to explain the fluidity and weight of the air
in terms of "the fabrick of the world", and the behaviour of tartar,
though inexplicable to Boyle and his contemporaries in any precise way,
surely did not demand an explanation on a cosmic scale.
Certainly, all these examples cannot simply be explained in terms of
what Frederick J. O'Toole has referred to as "non-relational inherent
properties", that is to say, in terms of the sizes, shapes and motions
of the primary corpuscles of nature and the "texture" or precise way
in which these primary corpuscles are combined to constitute the particular
bodies in question. It seems clear enough that these examples can only
be explained by recourse to what O'Toole calls "non-inherent relational
properties".[6] But these relational properties are, as O'Toole's analysis
makes clear, simply those properties which Boyle did describe in the Origin
of Forms, namely those which depend upon, or are functions of, the "peculiar
texture or disposition" of the relevant bodies, whose situations make
it clear that they are "manifestly wrought on" by one another. It seems
that we have to go beyond O'Toole's account if we wish to understand
what Boyle meant when he suggested that there are powers and capacities
of bodies which can only be understood
not barely upon the score of these qualities that are presumed to be
evidently inherent in it, nor of the respects it has to those other particular
bodies to which it seems to be manifestly related, but upon the account
of a system so constituted as our world is.[7]
It is my contention that Boyle intended in the Cosmical Qualities to
provide hints towards what was effectively a new concept of qualities
but failed to fully explicate what he meant by them. Furthermore, it
is quite possible that Boyle's "failure" in this regard was not accident
but design. In what follows, therefore, I hope to show that there are
sufficient indications in Cosmical Qualities that Boyle did have
in mind something which is rather less compatible not only with O'Toole's
analysis of the matter theory of the mechanical philosophy, but also
with all standard accounts of the mechanical philosophy.[8] In
addition I will try to reconstruct just what it was that Boyle only hinted
at and to offer some tentative suggestions as to why he chose to obscure
his own conception.
In the very opening paragraph of Cosmical Qualities Boyle seems
to undermine any suggestion that such qualities are merely to be seen
in terms of the key/lock analogy. The qualities of most bodies, he declares, "do
for the most part consist in relations, upon whose account one body is
fitted to act upon others or disposed to be acted upon by them". He then
gives clear examples of the key/lock format, such as the ability of quicksilver
to dissolve gold and silver. As we have already seen, however, he immediately
tells us that his intention in his new book is to go beyond this to consider
qualities which derive from the fact that bodies belong to "a system
so constituted as our world is". The fabric of our world, Boyle goes
on,
is such that there may be divers unheeded agents, which, by unperceived
means, may have great operations upon the body we consider, and work
such changes in it, and enable it to work such changes on other bodies,
as are rather to be ascribed to some unheeded agents than to those other
bodies with which the body proposed is taken notice of...[9]
The real subjects of the tract, then, not brought out by the examples,
are these "unheeded agents" which work "by unperceived means". This is
confirmed in the opening paragraph of "Cosmical Suspicions", described
as an Appendix to the discussion of cosmical qualities, which suggests
that "there may be... peculiar sorts of corpuscles that have yet no distinct
name, which may discover peculiar faculties and ways of working."[10] It
is perfectly clear from this statement that what Boyle is proposing cannot
be fitted into our standard conceptions of the mechanical philosophy.
The corpuscles themselves are said to have their own unique faculties
and ways of working. These are obviously not inert particles which work
only by impact and other contact actions to give the appearance of having
powers and faculties, like the power to turn a lock, or the faculty of
pulsification of the heart and arteries.
The inescapable conclusion is that these qualities are occult, and
this is confirmed by Boyle's efforts to forestall criticism of his new
conception:
least you should think that under the name of Cosmicall Qualities I
should introduce Chimaeras into Naturall Philosophy I must betimes advertise
you, that you will meet with divers Particulars in the following Discourse,
fit to show that these Qualities are not meerly fictitious qualities:
but such, whose Existence I can manifest, not only by considerations
not absurd, but also by real Experiments and Physical Phaenomena.[11]
The vocabulary here suggests that Boyle thought of cosmical qualities
as occult qualities. In the rhetoric of the new philosophy the occult
qualities all too frequently invoked by scholastic philosophers were
dismissed as "fictitious" or as mere "Chimaeras". The experimental philosopher
could escape these charges, however, by insisting that the qualities
he discussed could be made manifest by their effects. When Leibniz described
Newton's gravitational attraction as "a chimerical thing, a scholastic
occult quality", Newton rebutted the charge by insisting that gravity
was a manifest quality whose cause only was occult.[12] It would seem from Boyle's apology that cosmical
qualities were not, therefore, to be seen as mere epiphenomena of the
mechanical arrangement of the world system (analogous to the power of
the key to turn a lock). If they were Boyle would scarcely have felt
the need to enter into the rhetoric of occult versus manifest qualities.
The fact that he did discuss cosmical qualities in these terms is a clear
indication that he considered them as occult qualities whose reality
could be demonstrated, experimentally, by the manifest nature of their
effects.
Boyle's tract on Cosmical Qualities and its appendix cannot
consistently be regarded as a work which adheres to strictly mechanistic
precepts. Although the specific examples which Boyle gives in Cosmical
Qualities do seem compatible with mechanistic readings, Boyle continually
intimates that what he really intends to "excite [our] curiosity and
attention about", as he puts it,[13] are "unheeded
agents" which work by "unperceived means", and which are hitherto unknown
particles acting not merely by impact but by various occult means. The
putative existence of such unknown particles is one of Boyle's main considerations
in developing his notion of cosmical qualities. There are "certain subtle
bodies in the world", he suggests, "that are ready to insinuate themselves
into the pores of any body disposed to admit their action, or by some
other way affect it", and it is the action of these subtle bodies which
give rise to the cosmical qualities of the bodies into which they have
entered.[14] These agents are, Boyle
proposes, "unobserved sorts of effluvia in the air" which are as unknown
now as the "swarm of steams moving in a determinate course betwixt the
north and the south" were before Gilbert demonstrated that the earth
was a giant magnet.[15] Although this
last image might seem to suggest that Boyle is returning to standard
mechanistic explanations in terms of streams (or steams) of effluvia,
it is more likely, in view of his talk of "unperceived means" of action
and "peculiar faculties and ways of working", that Boyle was thinking
of magnetism as an exemplar of something which was not, pace Descartes,
entirely amenable to strictly mechanistic explanations. As Boyle wrote
for his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things,
There are a great many things which... cannot with any convenience
be immediately deduced from the first and simplest principles; namely,
matter and motion; but must be derived from subordinate principles; such
as gravity, fermentation, springiness, magnetism etc.[16]
By the same token, as he wrote in an intended "Essay of various Degrees
or kinds of the Knowledge of natural things":
[it would] be backward to reject or despise all explications that are
not immediately deduced from the shape, bigness and motion of atoms or
other insensible particles of matter... [for those who] pretend to explicate
every phenomenon by deducing it from the mechanical affections of atoms
undertake a harder task than they imagine.[17]
Further support for this interpretation can be seen in the otherwise
inexplicable fact that Boyle also speculates, in Cosmical Suspicions,
that
there may be a greater number even of the more general laws than have
yet been distinctly enumerated, so I think that when we speak of the
established laws of nature... they may be justly and commodiously enough
distinguished; some of them being general rules that have a very great
reach, and are of greater affinity to laws more properly so-called, and
others seeming not so much to be general rules or laws, as the customs
of nature in this or that peculiar part of the world; of which there
may be a greater number, and those may have a greater influence on many
phaenomena of nature than we are wont to imagine.
A little later Boyle reiterates this extraordinary idea, saying,
I have some time suspected that there may be in the terrestrial globe
itself, and the ambient atmosphere, divers, whether laws or customs of
nature, that belong to this orb, and may be denominated from it, and
seemed to have been either unknown to, or overseen by both scholastical
and mathematical writers.[18]
Leaving aside the interesting proposed distinction between laws and
customs of nature, it seems undeniable that Boyle is expressing dissatisfaction
here with the extremely restricted, "distinctly enumerated" laws of nature
of Descartes' Principia philosophiae. Certainly, Descartes is
the principal "mathematical writer" that Boyle has in mind, and it seems
clear that Boyle has been led by his own "notions and observations" to
doubt whether all physical phenomena can be explained by Descartes' three
mechanistic laws of nature and his seven rules of impact.[19]
Whether it is true or not that Boyle's chosen examples of cosmical
qualities do not adequately represent what he really had in mind, there
is little we can do to explicate his meaning. What we can do, however,
albeit to a limited extent, is to try to uncover what Boyle was thinking
of when he wrote of those "unheeded agents", those "peculiar sorts of
particles" with "peculiar faculties and ways of working" which were held
to produce cosmical qualities in other bodies. Boyle himself provides
a clue to the nature of these agents when he tells us in chapter 2 of Cosmical
Qualities that there are three main bodies in the fabric of the world "whose
more unobserved operations" have the most influence on cosmical qualities.
These three are the subterraneal parts of the globe, the stars and aether
about them, and the atmosphere or air we live in.[20] He
then tells us that experimental observations on each of these are to
be dealt with in other tracts. A moment's inspection reveals that he
does not mean the other tracts published with Cosmical Qualities.
These deal only with the temperature of subterraneal and submarine regions,
together with some hearsay reports about the bottom of the sea. If we
wish to discover what these bodies are, therefore, we will have to search
elsewhere in Boyle's output.
For guidance let us take those three bodies or groups of bodies in
turn, the subterraneal parts of the globe, the atmosphere around us,
and the stars and aether. With regard to the first of these Boyle has
little to say beyond a few scattered speculations. In the Cosmical
Suspicions itself he points to the evidence for "slow internal change" in "the
mass of the earth", such as the change of magnetic variation, and concludes
that
there may be agents that we know not of, that have a power to give
the internal parts of the terrestrial globe itself a motion; of which
we cannot yet certainly tell according to what laws it is regulated,
or so much as whether it be constantly regulated by certain laws or no.[21]
Similar speculations are reiterated in the Appendix to Hidden Qualities
of the Air, "Of Celestial and Aerial Magnets":
there may be in those vast internal parts of the earth, whose thin
crust only has been here and there dug into by men, considerable masses
of matter, that may have periodical revolutions, or accensions, or eustations,
or fermentations, or, in short, some other notable commotions, whose
effluvia and effects may have operations yet unobserved, on the atmosphere,
and on some particular bodies exposed to it; though these periods may
be perhaps either altogether irregular, or have some kind of regularity
differing from what one would expect.[22]
Boyle also suggests that the great irregularity observed in the weight
of the atmosphere must derive "for the most part from subterraneal steams",
while the very variable and inconstant phenomenon of luminosity in the
sea may also derive from "some cosmical law or custom of the terrestrial
globe".[23] "Some subterraneal changes" are also suspected
as the cause of new epidemic diseases (he mentions syphilis and rickets)
which "invade whole countries (and sometimes greater portions of the
earth)".[24] Elsewhere, however, Boyle
suggests that subterranean effluvia can make a region more healthy. "For
in some places", Boyle writes,
the air is observed to be much more healthy, than the manifest qualities
of it would make one expect: and in divers of these cases I see no cause,
to which such a happy constitution may more probably be ascribed, than
to friendly effluvia sent up from the soil into the air.[25]
The "subterraneal parts of the globe" only really appear in Boyle's
speculations, it seems, as a source for putative effluvia in the atmosphere
which are held to have otherwise inexplicable effects. This brings us,
therefore, to the second of Boyle's suggested influences on cosmical
qualities, the atmosphere around us. On this topic the obvious source
is Boyle's Suspicions about the Hidden Qualities of the Air. We
can tell we are on the right track from the fact that Boyle opens with
another apology for discussing occult qualities. Boyle tells us that
this tract was originally intended for a collection on the natural history
of the air but he now published it separately even though
if I had more consulted my own Reputation, I should least of all have
suffer'd this Title to appear, there being none of the rest, that was
not less conjectural.[26]
One of the most significant of these conjectures for our purposes is
the suggestion that some bodies "may be Receptacles, if not also Attractives
of the Sydereal, and other Exotic Effluviums that rove up and down in
our Air".[27] Here we have the ingredients hinted at in Cosmical
Qualities, exotic effluvia which operate in an occult way. It would
seem that Boyle wished to prove the truth of his comment in Cosmical
Suspicions that "it [is] not time misspent to consider whether there
may not be other, and even unobserved sorts of effluvia in the air".[28]
The first such attractive to spring to Boyle's mind is the so-called "Philosophical
Magnet" of the alchemists which is said to attract and corporify the
Universal Spirit or the Spirit of the World. Boyle dismisses these ideas
as "abstrusities" but goes on to say that we may make use of the word "Magnet" in
this context "without avowing the receiv'd Doctrine of Attraction".[29] What follows is a typically Boylean piece
of trying to have one's cake and eat it (or denying occult qualities
and recurring to them). We are first of all told that when Boyle uses
the word "Magnet" he does not mean "a body that can properly attract
our foreign Effluviums", but merely a body that is "fitted to detain
and join with them, when... they happen'd to accost the magnet". But
the following paragraph throws all such caution to the wind:
And, without receding from the Corpuscularian Principles, we may allow
some of the bodies we speak of, a greater resemblance to Magnets, than
what I have been mentioning. For not only such a Magnet may upon the
bare account of adhesion by Juxtaposition or Contact, detain the Effluviums
that would glide along it, but these may be the more firmly arrested
by a kind of precipitating faculty that the Magnet may have in reference
to such Effluviums; which, if I had time, I could illustrate by some
Instances; nay I dare not deny it to be possible, but that in some Circumstances
of time or place one of our Magnets may, as it were, fetch in such steams
as would indeed pass near it, but would not otherwise come to touch it.
On which occasion I remember, I have in certain cases been able to make
some bodies, not all of them Electrical, attract (as they speak) without
being excited by rubbing, &c. far less light bodies, than the Effluviums
we are speaking of.[30]
Boyle concludes that he has hereby demonstrated that without meddling
in "the mystical theories of the chymists", "one may discourse like a
Naturalist about Magnets of Celestial and other Emanations that appear
not to have been consider'd, not to say, thought of, either by the Scholastic,
or even the Mechanical, Philosophers".[31]
The main theme, then, of Hidden Qualities of the Air is that
various phenomena (usually chemical) are actually brought about by the "operations
of the Air", or rather by some previously unremarked effluvia in the
air which operate not merely by force of impact, as would be required
by Cartesian dogma, but by some other means. In another example, Boyle
writes:
The Difficulty we find of keeping Flame and Fire alive, though but
for a little time, without Air, makes me sometimes prone to suspect,
that there may be dispers'd through the rest of the Amosphere some odd
substance, either of a Solar, or Astral, or some other exotic, nature,
on whose account the Air is so necessary to the subsistence of Flame;
which Necessity I have found to be greater, and less dependent upon the
manifest Attributes of the air, than Naturalists seem to have observed.[32]
But we do not have to leave it there. Boyle returned time and again
to experiments on the nature and usefulness of the air throughout his
career, and in one of his very last works, The General History of
the Air of 1692 (finally prepared for the press by John Locke after
Boyle's death), Boyle presented another speculative account of the operations
of the air. Moreover, because this essay deals with "Celestial Influences
or Effluviums in the Air" it brings us to the third of Boyle's candidate
bodies for producing cosmical qualities, the stars and the aether.
The essay in question, however, which is explicitly described as an "Apology
for Astrology", was not written by Boyle himself. A Latin translation
of this work has been recently discovered by Antonio Clericuzio among
the Hartlib Papers, and it is clear from this that the author was in
fact Boyle's friend and colleague, and the man who introduced Boyle to
the pleasures and usefulness of natural philosophy, Benjamin Worsley.[33] We
know from a letter of John Locke's to Boyle, written in October 1691,
and from Locke's "Advertisement of the Publisher to the Reader" prefixed
to the General History of the Air, that Boyle himself compiled
the materials which were to be included in this miscellany, but we still
have to be circumspect in our assessment of the significance of this
particular contribution to the work.[34] We
cannot assume that Boyle wholeheartedly endorsed every detail of Worsley's
account, but it seems clear from the fact that Boyle chose to include
it that he was, at least for the most part, in sympathy with his late
friend's attempt to explain the nature of celestial influences on the
earth. Other, much shorter, extracts from other works (by Pascal and
Casati, for example) suggest that Boyle's History of the Air is
not an indiscriminate hotchpotch of all things pertaining to the air,
but a presentation only of those things which Boyle took to be particularly
significant in attempts to understand the nature of the air. Boyle wrote
in the Preface of his conviction "that scarce any Truth, whether Historical
or Doctrinal, that relates to so important a subject as the Air, is unfit
to be preserv'd", so it seems reasonable to conclude that Worsley's "Apology
for Astrology" seemed to Boyle to contain at least some important truths.[35] Indeed,
in the Preface Boyle went so far as to say that his "collections of particulars" were
intended to afford "some specimens of what I should have thought requisite
to do upon particular subjects, If I would have ventured upon such a
task, as to write a natural history of the air."[36] Moreover,
the significance of Worsley's essay for Boyle would seem to be underscored
by the fact that in 1691 he remembered the relevance to a natural history
of the air of a speculative essay written by his former colleague in
1657.
Although it has to be admitted that the work is very unlike anything
Boyle himself wrote, it is still possible to discern resonances with
some of Boyle's own more speculative pieces. In particular, I believe
it is as close as we can get to gleaning what Boyle had in mind when
he spoke of the role of the stars and aether about them in the operations
of cosmical qualities, and what he had in mind when he wrote of "odd
substance[s], either of a Solar, or Astral, or some other exotic, nature" dispersed
through the atmosphere. In Cosmical Suspicions Boyle wrote that
we have very little knowledge of "what communication" the earth has "with
the other Globes we call Stars, and with the Interstellar parts of Heaven" but
he expressed an intention to "elsewhere make it probable that there may
be some Commerce or other".[37] Boyle never did return to this topic, but perhaps it is
true to say that, at the end of his life, he allowed Worsley to speak
for him. Accordingly, we shall now turn to a brief look at the main themes
of Worsley's posthumous contribution to Boyle's General History of
the Air.
Worsley begins by insisting that "it may... still be certain, that
these celestial bodies... may have a power to cause such and such motions,
changes, and alterations [on the earth]" in spite of the
superstition and paganism incident to this kind of doctrine... the
imposture, ignorance and want of learning generally observed in the persons
professing this kind of knowledge,... the manifest mistakes and uncertainty
that there is in predictions of this nature,... and the inexplicableness
of the way or manner they come to affect one another.[38]
Predictably perhaps, Worsley's professed certainty is based upon "undeniable
experiments" and "undoubted observations" but he clearly believes there
is scope for development of these ideas, since he calls for a theory
of the planets "upon such grounds as are indubitably demonstrable", without
which "it is impossible we should assert their [the planets'] several
aspects, and the mutual influences and virtues they have... one upon
another".[39]
The principal means by which the planets and stars operate on the earth
is light, but there are evidently many different kinds of light:
we say, that every planet hath its own proper light: and as the light
of the sun is one thing, the light of the moon another, so every planet
hath its distinct light, differing from all the other. Now we must either
say, that this light is a bare quality and that the utmost use and end
of it is only to illuminate; or that there is no light but is accompanied
further with some power, virtue or tincture, that is proper to it.; which
if granted it will inform us then, that every light hath its own property,
its own tincture and colour, its own specific virtue and power...
It follows, therefore, that
those eminent stars and planets, that are in the heavens, are not to
be considered by us as sluggish, inenergetical bodies, or as if they
were set only to be as bare candles to us, but as bodies full of proper
motion, of peculiar operation, and of life...
There is no suggestion of action at a distance in this, Worsley points
out, because the virtue or power of the planet is transmitted with "its
light, and is the real property of its light".[40]
Worsley's next move is to explain how these virtues affect the earth.
Firstly, the air is affected, being "moved, stirred, altered, and impressed
by these properties, virtues and lights, as penetrating each part of
it".[41] Secondly, various spirits which are held to be constituents
of all mixed bodies, are also affected:
as our spirits, and the spirits likewise of all mixed bodies, are really
of an aerious, etherial, luminous production and composition; these spirits
therefore of ours, and the spirits of all other bodies, must necessarily
no less suffer an impression from the same lights, and cannot be less
subject to an alteration, motion, agitation, and infection through them
and by them, than the other, viz the air: but rather as our spirits are
more near and more analogous to the nature of light than the air, so
they must be more prone and easy to be impressed than it.[42]
These spirits now take on an indispensable role in the workings of
the world, and are said to be "the only principles of energy, power,
force and life, in all bodies wherein they are", but these in their turn,
as we have just seen, derive their properties from the truly cosmic phenomenon
of light. Here then we seem to have a clear statement of what Boyle only
hinted at when he wrote of "the impressions that a body may receive,
or the power it may acquire from those vulgarly unknown or at least unheeded
agents by which it is thus affected... by virtue of the general fabrick
of the world".[43] Magnetism, for example, can be seen as a cosmic quality
because
the earth, which is not only enlightened, warmed, cherished and fructified
by the power, virtue, and influence of the sun, but hath its proper magnetical
planetary virtue also fermented, stirred, agitated and awakened in it;...
and together with this magnetic planetary property of the earth, which
is stirred and raised by the sun, are awakened also the seminal dispositions,
odours and ferments that are lodged in and proper unto, particular regions
or places...[44]
Again, this reference to properties of the earth which are seemingly
confined to particular regions or places, echoes the concern in Cosmical
Suspicions that as well as laws of nature we should also consider "the
customs of nature in this or that peculiar part of the world".[45]
It is perhaps worth considering briefly some of the likely sources
for Worsley's "Celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air". One possible
source is Francis Bacon's speculative philosophy, described by its modern
rediscoverer, Graham Rees, as Bacon's semi-Paracelsian cosmology. It
is a feature of this philosophy that all mixed bodies contain a spirit
of an aerious, aetherial or luminous nature and it is these spirits which
are solely responsible for the activity and operations of those bodies,
their matter being totally inert. Rees himself has argued that Bacon's
speculative philosophy was almost entirely overlooked by Bacon's contemporaries
and immediately succeeding generations, and it is possible that the similarities
between Bacon and Worsley simply derive from a common interest in, and
knowledge of, Paracelsian ideas. But equally, it may be that Rees has
been too hasty in reaching his conclusion.[46] Thema
coeli, the work in which Bacon most clearly expounded these ideas,
was published by Isaac Gruter in 1653 and it seems unlikely, given their
admiration for Bacon, that Worsley and others in Hartlib's circle would
not have seized the opportunity to read it.
The idea that the air is penetrated throughout by these celestial lights
and that these in turn effect our spirits is also reminiscent of ideas
in the medical tradition. William Harvey, for example, wrote in his De
generatione animalium (1651) that there was in blood a spirit which
corresponded to the element of the stars. "The blood therefore is a spirit",
he went on,
by reason of its most excellent powers and virtues. It is also celestial
because in that spirit is housed a nature that is the soul, analogous
to the element of the stars, and this is something bearing an analogy
with the heavens as being the instrument and deputy of heaven.[47]
If there is a similarity here, there is also a clear parallel with
Boyle's talk of "sydereal", "celestial", "solar, or astral" effluvia
in the air in his Hidden Qualities of the Air.
Perhaps the most obvious source of Worsley's speculations in his "Apology
for Astrology" is the Neoplatonic tradition usually referred to as "light
metaphysics". In this tradition light was regarded as the formal and
efficient cause by which God brought about the Creation. The ability
of light to diffuse itself instantaneously in all directions was invoked
by light metaphysicians as the fundamental formative action in the universe.
As light spread itself out from the centre it took with it the unformed prima
materia which God had created. Since the diffusion of light defined
the three dimensions of space, it also gave form to the unformed matter,
so producing all the individual and separate bodies of the universe.
Light, then, is the first corporeal form of the universe, from which
all other forms are derived, and it is the original physical cause of
all development and change in the universe. It seemed to follow, for
those in this tradition, that the behaviour of light was the model of
all causation in the physical universe. This belief gave rise to the
rich tradition of geometrical optics and to the commonplace belief in
the validity of astrological influence. The universal formative agency
of the autodiffusive light ensured that all things in the universe were
unified with everything else. Everything in the universe contains light
within it and this internal light is ultimately the origin and principle
of all motion. Robert Grosseteste, a leading writer in this tradition,
even described all qualitative change in terms of light within a body
being emitted and light outside a body being absorbed. Of course, this
internal "essential" light is not the same as visible light. Sensible
light was regarded as only one manifestation of the emanative power of
lux. Al-Kindi, author of De radiis stellarum one of the most influential
works in the tradition (also known as De theoria artium magicarum),
believed that everything in the world produced its own rays of influence
like a star. Moreover, these rays were proper to each thing and different
from all others, just like Worsley's lights.[48]
Benjamin Worsley's essay of "Celestial Influences or Effluviums in
the Air" fits easily into the light metaphysical tradition and Boyle
himself may well have been sympathetic to this speculative tradition.
Boyle pointed out in his "Aerial noctiluca" (an essay about a luminescent
body), for example, that "light was the first corporeal thing the great
Creator of the universe was pleased to make, and... he was pleased to
allot the whole first day to the creation of light alone, without associating
with it in that honour any other corporeal thing".[49] Moreover,
Boyle certainly entertained the possibility that the sun and planets
might have specific influences "here below" which are "distinct from
their heat and light": "On which supposition", he wrote, "it seems not
absurd to me to suspect, that the subtil, but corporeal, emanations even
of these bodies may... reach to our air, and mingle with those of our
globe in that great receptacle or rendesvous of celestial and terrestrial
influences, the atmosphere."[50] Having said this, Boyle was quick to forestall
any assumptions that he was proposing a simple mechanistic account of
celestial influences:
the very small knowledge we have of the structure and constitution
of globes, so many thousands or hundreds of thousands of miles remote
from us, and the great ignorance we must be in of the nature of the particular
bodies, that may be presumed to be in those globes (as minerals and other
bodies are in the earth) which in many things appear of kin to those
that we inhabit,... this great imperfection, I say, of our knowledge
may keep it from being unreasonable to imagine, that some, if not many,
of those bodies and their effluxions, may be of a nature quite differing
from those we take notice of here about us, and consequently may operate
after a very differing and peculiar manner.[51]
When Boyle wrote in the Cosmical Qualities that there were three
bodies in the world which, by onobserved operations, affect the cosmical
qualities of things and so enable them to "work... changes on other bodies" which
they could not otherwise do, he had in mind the subterraneal parts of
the globe, the atmosphere, and the stars and aether around them. I have
suggested that the Hidden Qualities of the Air and Worsley's Celestial
Influences or Effluviums in the Air offer us our best chance of discovering
Boyle's meaning. It would seem that Boyle wished to make a plea for the
possibility that there were effluvia of an exotic nature, in the air,
the heavens and the earth, "of peculiar operation", which were capable
of altering earthly bodies to give them relational properties such as
gravity, magnetism, fermentation and other chemical properties. Accordingly,
Boyle wished to infer, there are more laws of nature than just the three
which Descartes enumerated and which (together with the derivative seven
rules of impact), the influential French philosopher insisted, could
explain all physical phenomena.[52] Moreover, although some of these laws may be general in
their effects, there may also be local laws, or "customs" as Boyle calls
them, where phenomena which are far from universal may nonetheless be
designated "natural" and understood in terms of secondary causes operating
in a regular way.
The Cosmical Qualities was intended, therefore, to provide further
support for Boyle's conviction that the natural world could not easily
be understood in terms of the constant and undeviating operations of
a few simple laws of nature. As Marie Boas Hall and Steven Shapin have
both pointed out, Boyle sought to avoid conceptions of nature which were
idealized and subject to mathematical abstraction.[53] The
nature of the physical world was such, according to Boyle, that it could
not properly be analysed in mathematical terms. The problem was not simply
one of ensuring purity of samples, say, for the replication of chemical
experiments, nor was it merely a recognition of the inevitability of
experimenter error, or of discrepancies in instrumentation and apparatus.
As Shapin has shown, Boyle believed that reality was structured in such
a way that mathematical analysis was categorically inappropriate. The
air, for example, was not "a mere elementary body" but a "great receptacle
or rendesvous of celestial and terrestrial effluviums" whose precise
composition varied from time to time and place to place. Similarly, Boyle
believed that ores and minerals could differ in specific gravity and
other qualities because "neither nature nor art" gave "all the productions,
that bear the same name, a mathematical preciseness, either in gravity
or in other qualities".[54] Boas Hall
and Shapin concentrated in their analyses on Boyle's chemical speculations
but in Cosmical Suspicions we see him extending his doubts about
the regularity of nature to cosmology:
when I likewise consider the fluidity of that vast interstellar part
of the world wherein these globes swim, I cannot but suspect there may
be less of accurateness, and of constant regularity, then we have been
taught to believe, in the structure of the universe, and a greater obnoxiousness
to deviations than the schools, who were taught by their master Aristotle
to be great admirers of the imaginary perfections of the celestial bodies,
have allowed their disciples to think.[55]
Boyle's attitude to the concept of natural laws derives from two major
preconceptions. Firstly, Boyle's theology, as McGuire and others have
shown was undeviatingly voluntarist.[56] For
Boyle, it was God's supreme power and his arbitrary will which were paramount.
The idea that the complexity of the world system could be reduced to
a few simple laws of nature was associated, in Boyle's mind, with intellectualist
theologies in which, as far as Boyle and all other theological voluntarists'
were concerned, God's power was circumscribed by the need to conform
to the dictates of man-made reason and the expectations of man's ethical
assumptions. The rational reconstruction of the system of nature, which
Descartes no less than Scholastic philosophers indulged in, seemed to
imply that God could not have done things otherwise. Boyle's anti-rationalist
experimental philosophy went hand in hand with his theological voluntarism.
Whatever regularity there was in the system of the world was imposed
by God arbitrarily by his absolute power, not as a result of God's following
the dictates of reason. Accordingly, we could only discover the regularities
of the world by experience.
Secondly, as Steven Shapin has argued, the idealized, rationally reconstructed
world picture was liable, in Boyle's eyes, to be seen as a false authority
for the truth of natural philosophical claims.[57] The
sceptical chemist, like many of his countrymen, was deeply distrustful
of reason. The trouble with reason, as Jeremy Taylor pointed out in his Ductor
dubitantium was that it
is such a boxe of quicksilver that it abides no where; it dwells in
no settled mansion; it is like a doves neck, or a changeable taffeta;
it looks to me otherwise than it looks to you who do not stand in the
same light that I doe: and if we inquire after the laws of Nature by
the rules of our reason, we shall be uncertain as the discourses of the
people, or the dreams of disturbed fancies.[58]
The claim to a philosophy or a theology based on "reason" could be
made by Hobbists and other atheists, by Roman Catholics, or some even
more distasteful Protestant sect. As Boyle himself wrote in his Considerations
about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion,
there are very few conclusions, that we make, or opinions that we espouse,
that are so much the pure results of our reason, that no personal disability,
prejudice, or fault, has any interest in them, the very body of mankind
may be imbued with prejudices, and errors, that from their childhood,
and some also even from their birth, by which means they continues undiscerned,
and consequently unreformed.[59]
The way to avoid bogus claims, based on reason, was to develop an epistemology
in which truth claims were sanctioned only by immediately accessible
observations and experiments. This is precisely what Boyle, to say nothing
of a number of his colleagues in the Royal Society, attempted to do.[60]
It should be realised, of course, that these two preoccupations of
Boyle's have been expounded separately, and somewhat artificially, for
the sake of elucidation. As far as Boyle was concerned, these two considerations
were inextricably bound-up with one another. The fact that voluntarist
theology sanctioned, indeed demanded, an empiricist epistemolgy in which
rationalist claims about the operation of a few laws of nature were illegitimate,
was hardly separable from the belief that rationalist arguments could
be and were used by Roman Catholics, and other groups (whether heterodox
religious, or downright irreligious) merely to promote their own dubious
claims. Whichever way you looked at it, as far as Boyle was concerned,
rationalism was incompatible with sound religion.[61]
Whatever else may be said of Boyle's speculations in Cosmical Qualities,
it seems clear that he was seeking to go beyond the bounds of the mechanical
philosophy as it was set out by Decartes. Not only did he deny the competence
of Descartes' laws in terms of the variability of things in themselves,
and in terms of the variability of their interactions with other things
to which they are "manifestly related", but he also denied their ability
to account for the variations brought about by the fact that all things
are part of a system "so constituted as our world is". The world system
as a whole is such, Boyle suggested, "that there may be divers unheeded
agents" operating "by unperceived means" to directly affect bodies and
to affect the way those bodies interact with other bodies.[62] The
cosmical qualities themselves (whatever they might be), are to be attributed
to the ordinary bodies of the world. These qualities are evidently not
held to be inherent properties of the bodies in question, but relational
properties, like the property of a key to open a lock, and may well be
reducible to mechanistic terms.[63] Nevertheless,
the "unheeded agents" which produce the cosmical qualities in things
do not seem to be so reducible. Particles of matter which operate only
by impact cannot be held to affect the relational properties of other
things in the way that Boyle seems to hint at. The answer, therefore,
is to suppose, As Boyle does, that there must be "peculiar sorts of corpuscles" which
have "peculiar faculties and ways of working".[64]
One final question remains. If my reconstruction of the nature of the "unheeded
agents" capable of operating in peculiar ways to produce cosmical qualities
is correct, why did Boyle not clearly say so in 1671? Why did he hold
back his real thoughts on the matter? Why did he only hint obscurely
at these ideas in 1671 and provide examples which, by my reading anyway,
are extremely misleading because they deal with phenomena which seem
to be easily explicable in terms of ordinary interactions or relationships
between things, without invoking cosmic phenomena?
There are two or three closely connected reasons for Boyle's obscurity
on this issue. Firstly, Boyle did not want to be misunderstood. He did
not want his readers in 1671 to think he was forsaking and rejecting
the principles of the mechanical philosophy, in favour of a more occult
philosophy. His point was that the mechanical philosophy was too restricted
in the principles it allowed as legitimate. He did not deny the notion
of natural law, he simply doubted that Descartes' three laws of nature
could be used to explain all physical phenomena. By the same token, he
doubted that all the complexity of interactions in the world could be
explained in terms of the motions of particles of inert matter, colliding
with one another and transferring their motions in accordance with Descartes'
rules of impact. Nevertheless, as he wrote in Hidden Qualities of the
Air, it should be possible to discourse like a naturalist about even
such things as "Magnets of Celestial Emanations". Cosmical qualities
should not be dismissed as chimerical, because they can be evinced by
real experiments and physical phaenomena.
It was important not to be misunderstood on this point, of course,
because Boyle did not wish to disrupt the carefully forged links between
the mechanical philosophy and Christian religion. The boast of the devout
mechanical philosopher was that by showing how all physical phenomena
could be explained in terms of matter and motion, he simultaneously revealed
that whatever cannot be explained in those terms cannot be a bodily or
material phenomenon but must be spiritual. Any innovations in natural
philosophy which threatened to blur the clear distinction between mechanical
interactions and non-mechanical interactions (as the unheeded agents
which were held to produce Boyle's cosmical qualities did), had to be
very carefully managed. It is my belief that Boyle was not sure that
his cosmical qualities, or rather the agents held to produce them, might
not have been seized by irreligious thinkers to undermine the standard
religious tropes of the mechanical philosophy, and he wished to be circumspect.
Boyle's concept of cosmical qualities was not merely an extension of
the mechanistic ideas fully described in the Origin of Formes and Qualities
but was, in fact, an addendum to those ideas which Boyle regarded as
essential to account for all the physical phenomena of nature. To interpret
the cosmical qualities in such a way as to make them fit in with standard
accounts of the mechanical philosophy is to see only part of the story.
It is easy to see that the power of a key to open a lock does not have
to correspond to any real or physical entity in the key, and Boyle's
cosmical qualities were obviously intended to be seen in the same way.
The qualities themselves, however, were produced by external agents operating
in ways which were not allowed for in the standard contemporary accounts
of the mechanical philosophy. It would seem that Robert Boyle might have
said to Descartes or to Scholastic philosophers what Hamlet said to Horatio:
there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.
Notes for "Boyle and Cosmical Qualities"
[1] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 306.
[2] Forms and Qualities, Works,
iii, 18.
[3] Ibid. Frederick J. O'Toole, "Qualities
and Powers in the Corpuscular Philosophy of Robert Boyle", Journal
of the History of Philosophy, 12 (1974): 295-315, pp. 308-9; Keith
Hutchison, "Dormitive Virtues, Scholastic Qualities, and the New Philosophies", History
of Science, 29 (1991): 245-78, pp. 259-60.
[4] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 308, 309, 312, 313, 315.
[5] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 307.
[6] O'Toole, "Qualities and Powers" (ref.
3), pp. 302-3.
[7] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 306. For a full account of what is meant here by powers and capacities
see O'Toole, "Qualities and Powers" (ref. 3), pp. 310-5; and R. Harré, "Powers", British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 21 (1970): 81-101.
[8] O'Toole, "Qualities and Powers" (ref.
3), p. 313, suggests that his analysis of Boyle's matter theory in terms
of inherent non-relational and non-inherent relational properties provides
us with a complete analysis of the ascriptions of powers and capacities
to corporeal objects "according to the corpuscular theory of matter".
I wish to suggest that Boyle himself would have wanted to insist that
the category of non-inherent relational properties must be sub-divided
into those which O'Toole has discerned and others which, in Boyle's words
(Works, iii, p. 306), "are rather to be ascribed to some unheeded agents,
which, by unperceived means, may have great operations".
[9] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 306.
[10] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 316.
[11] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 307.
[12] H.G. Alexander (ed.), The
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester University Press, 1956),
p. 94. Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections,
Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, based on the fourth
edition London, 1730 (New York: Dover, 1952), p. 401. For a fuller
discussion see J. Henry, "Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy:
Active Principles in pre-Newtonian Matter Theory", History of Science,
24 (1986): pp. 335-81.
[13] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 317-8.
[14] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 308.
[15] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 316.
[16] BP IX, f. 40. I am very grateful
to Professor Steven Shapin for bringing this and the immediately following
quotation to my attention. It may be objected to my interpretation that
Boyle refers to these occult phenomena (gravity, fermentation, springiness,
magnetism) as "subordinate" and thereby implies that, ultimately, they
are explicable in terms of matter in motion. I cannot answer this except
by special pleading. In view of the fact that Boyle describes matter
and motion as "first and simplest principles", I believe that he might
have meant to suggest that gravity, magnetism and the like were secondary
and more complex explanatory principles. His use of the word subordinate
was meant, therefore, to convey the notion only of an ordering of heuristic
precepts without intending to imply dependence of one kind on the other.
The only support I can give for this interpretation is to be found in
the other quotations from Boyle's works which I discuss in this paper.
[17] BP VIII, f. 166.
[18] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 318.
[19] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 318. Descartes expounded his three laws of motion, or nature, and
his seven rules of impact in his Principia philosophiae (Paris,
1644), Part II, sections 37-42 and 46-52. See R. Descartes, Principles
of Philosophy, translated by V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (Dordrecht:
D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 59-62 and 64-69.
[20] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 307.
[21] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 319.
[22] Hidden Qualities of the Air, Works,
iv, 98.
[23] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, pp. 318, 319, 321.
[24] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 321-2.
[25] Salubrity and Insalubrity
of the Air, Works, v, 40.
[26] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 79.
[27] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 95.
[28] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 318.
[29] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 96.
[30] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 96.
[31] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 96. Note the similarity of expression at the end there with the quotation
from Cosmical Suspicions at note 18 above. The fact that Boyle
felt the same kind of defence of his position was required suggests that
we are correct in linking these two discussions.
[32] Hidden Qualities of Air, Works,
iv, 90.
[33] "Of Celestial Influences or Effluviums
in the Air", Works, v, 638-45. Worsley writes: "You did not expect,
I am sure, I should have adventured into so particular an Apology for
Astrology", p. 642. The Latin translation of this essay appears under
the somewhat nondescript heading, "Exemplar literarum Benjamini Worslaei" in
the Hartlib Papers in Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers 42/1/18A-25B.
Confirmation of Worsley's authorship is provided by a letter from Worsley
to Hartlib, 20 October 1657, Hartlib Papers 42/1/10A. I am extremely
grateful to Dr Antonio Clericuzio for bringing this information to my
attention. For a fuller treatment of Worsley's essay together with related
documents from the Hartlib archive see A. Clericuzio, "New Light on Benjamin
Worsley's Natural Philosophy", in The Advancement of Learning in the
Seventeenth Century: The World of Samuel Hartlib, ed. M. Greengrass,
M. Leslie and T. Raylor (Cambridge University Press, 1993), forthcoming.
For a general account of Worsley's activities in the 1640s and 50s see
Webster, Great Instauration (consult the index). Eight years Boyle's
senior, Worsley was the initiator of the "Invisible College" of which,
as far as we know, Boyle was the only other noted member. He died in
1677.
[34] Letter from Locke to Boyle, 21
October 1691, in E. S. De Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke,
8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-1989), iv, pp. 320-22, also published
in Works, vi, pp. 543-4. The text appearing under the heading "Of
Celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air" is clearly presented as
a letter to Samuel Hartlib but it is unsigned. There is nothing surreptitious
about this; Locke apologizes in his "Advertisement" that "The Negligence
of Transcribers has let slip the Characters of Relators, and Names and
Places of Authors from whom several of the Particulars in the following
Papers were taken", Works, v, p. 609. In fact, the original of
this letter in the Hartlib Papers (unlike the Latin translation discussed
in the previous note), is unattributed (I owe this information to Dr
Stephen Pumfrey), and it seems reasonable to suppose therefore that Boyle's
copy was also unattributed.
[35] General History of Air, Works,
v, p. 611. For attributed extracts see, for example, Pascal "in his small
Tract, either De la Pesanteur de l'air, or in that Del'Equilibre des
liqueurs", p. 694; "Casati, Mechanicorum, lib. VIII, c. 5, p. 792, 793, &c." (i.e.
Paulo Casati, Mechanicorum libri octo, Lyons, 1684), p. 616; "Agricola,
de re metallica, lib. duodec.", p. 634; and "Jacobi Zabarelli de Regionibus
Aeris, c. 8" (i.e. G. Zabarella, in his De rebus naturalibus libri
xxx, Cologne, 1590), p. 695. For unattributed contributions see,
for example, letters from Mr. J.T., pp. 624, 625, and 634; or from "Fort
St.George" dated January 23 1668, pp. 645-6.
[36] General History of the Air, Works,
v, p. 612.
[37] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 318.
[38] General History of Air, Works,
v, 638-9.
[39] General History of Air, Works,
v, 638.
[40] General History of Air, Works,
v, 640.
[41] General History of Air, Works,
v, 641.
[42] General History of Air, Works,
v, 641.
[43] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 307.
[44] General History of Air, Works,
v, 641.
[45] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 318.
[46] Graham Rees, "Francis Bacon's
semi-Paracelsian Cosmology", Ambix, 22 (1975): 81-101; idem, "Francis
Bacon's semi-Paracelsian Cosmology and the Great Instauration", Ambix,
22 (1975): 161-73; idem, "Matter Theory: A Unifying Factor in Bacon's
Natural Philosophy?", Ambix, 24 (1977): 110-25; idem, "The Fate
of Bacon's Cosmology in the 17th Century", Ambix, 24 (1977): 27-38.
[47] William Harvey, Disputations
touching the Generation of Animals, translated by Gweneth Whitteridge
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 378, see also pp. 374-83. For a full
discussion of these ideas see D. P. Walker, "The Astral Body in Renaissance
Medicine", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
21 (1958): 199-33, reprinted in idem, Music, Spirit and Language
in the Renaissance (London: Variorum, 1985).
[48] See A. C. Crombie, Robert
Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1953); James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982); David C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon's Philosophy
of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); David C. Lindberg, "The
Genesis of Kepler's Theory of Light: Light Metaphysics from Plotinus
to Kepler", Osiris, Second Series, 2 (1986): 5-42. On Al-Kindi
see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science,
8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1923-58), vol. 1, 642-6. For an indication
of the role of light metaphysics in the medical tradition see Walter
Pagel, New Light on William Harvey (Basel: Karger, 1976), pp.
161-7.
[49] Aerial Noctiluca, Works,
iv, p. 384.
[50] Hidden qualities of the Air, Works,
iv, 85.
[51] Hidden qualities of the Air, Works,
iv, 86. For another example of Boyle's consideration of the possibility
of astrological influences see also p. 98.
[52] Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (ref.
19), Part IV, section 199, pp. 282-3.
[53] Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle
and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge University Press,
1958), p. 216; Steven Shapin, "Robert Boyle and Mathematics: Reality,
Representation, and Experimental Practice", Science in Context,
2 (1988): 23-58.
[54] Shapin, "Boyle and Mathematics" (ref.
53), pp. 47-50. Hidden Qualities of Air, Works, iv, 91.
See also "Two Essays concerning the Unsuccessfulness of Experiments",
published in CPE in 1661, Works, i, 318-54. This aspect
of Boyle's work is also discussed briefly in Paul B. Wood, "Methodology
and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society", British
Journal for the History of Science, 13 (1980): 1-26, pp. 6-7; and
Michael Hunter, "Latitudinarianism and the 'Ideology' of the Early Royal
Society: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered",
in M. Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the
Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989), pp.
45-71, especially pp. 53, 62, and 68-9 where Hunter publishes a manuscript
draft by Henry Oldenburg from which Sprat evidently drew for pp. 243-5
of his History.
[55] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 322. Boyle's use of the word "obnoxiousness" here should be taken
in the sense of the fourth meaning given for "obnoxious" by the Oxford
English Dictionary: "Exposed to the (physical) action or influence
of, liable to be affected by...". Hence, the planetary and stellar bodies
are in a more pronounced state of being liable to be influenced by variations
than the schools would have us believe. See also Hunter, "Latitudinarianism
and the Society's 'Ideology'" (ref. 54), p. 68, where Oldenburg talks
of "Experiments [being] very obnoxious to contingencies". It is my belief,
though only speculative, that Boyle closely supervised this document
of Oldenburg's. Boyle does introduce non-chemical considerations elsewhere
when discussing this theme: in his "Two Essays concerning the Unsuccessfulness
of Experiments" (1661), Boyle had previously mentioned the variation
of the compass and some anatomical observations. But most of his examples,
as he mentioned in the full title were "chiefly Chymical". Works,
i, 318, 343, 345.
[56] J.E. McGuire, "Boyle's Conception
of Nature", Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1972): 523-42;
Eugene M. Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science: Belief in
Creation in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William
B. Eerdmans, 1977); J. Henry, "Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The Spirit
of Nature and the Nature of Providence", in Henry More (1614-1687):
Tercentenary Studies, ed. Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic,
1990), pp. 55-75.
[57] Shapin, "Boyle and Mathematics" (ref.
53), pp. 50-2. See also, S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and
the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton
University Press, 1985) for a fuller account of Boyle's concerns with
the authority for natural philosophical pronouncements.
[58] Jeremy Taylor, Works,
ed. R. Heber (London, 1828), vol. 11, p. 356.
[59] Works, iv, 164. For fuller
discussions of the suspicion of "reason" among English thinkers at this
time see H.G. van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought,
1630-1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability
and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton University
Press, 1983); Christopher Hill, "'Reason' and 'Reasonableness'", in C.
Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. 103-26; Lotte Mulligan, "'Reason',
'Right Reason', and 'Revelation' in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England",
in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian
Vickers (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 375-401; J. Henry, "The
Scientific Revolution in England", in The Scientific Revolution in
National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge University
Press, 1992), pp. 178-209.
[60] See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan
and the Air-Pump (ref. 57), Henry, "Occult Qualities and the Experimental
Philosophy" (ref. 12); Henry, "Scientific Revolution in England" (ref.
59).
[61] For another treatment of this
theme from a different perspective see Peter Dear, "Miracles, Experiments
and the Ordinary course of Nature", Isis, 81 (1990): 663-83.
[62] Cosmical Qualities, Works,
iii, 306.
[63] Here again I am referring to
the analysis of O'Toole, "Qualities and Powers" (ref. 3), in which he
distinguishes between non-relational inherent properties of bodies, and
non-inherent relational properties. See notes 6 and 8 above.
[64] Cosmical Suspicions, Works,
iii, 316. My conclusion should be taken to endorse and support, from
a non-chemical perspective, Antonio Clericuzio's recent attempt to redefine
Boyle's corpuscular philosophy in terms of his chemical philosophy. See
A. Clericuzio, "A Redefinition of Boyle's Chemistry and Corpuscular Philosophy", Annals
of Science, 47 (1990): 561-89. See also Henry, "Occult Qualities" (ref.
12).
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