Essay Review: Boyle's Industry,Robert Boyle Reconsidered,Robert Boyle Reconsidered,Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends;With a Fragment of William Wotton's Lost,the Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment

See Westfall R. S. , “The changing world of the Newtonian industry”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxvii (1976), 175–84; Bechler Z. , Contemporary Newton research (Dordrecht and Boston, 1982): Whiteside D. T. , “The latest on Newton …”, Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, xliv (1990), 111–17; idem, “The prehistory of the Principia from 1664 to 1686”, Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, xlv (1991), 11–61. Westfall wrote (p. 175 n. 2) of the dominant group in the industry as constituting a “claustrophobic and neurotic society, the members of which circle each other warily, jockeying for position, each of the others with one eye cocked on the Lord High Executioner …”. In a domain which had avoided “recession” and which “still [ground] on apace”, the aforesaid executioner, D. T. Whiteside, was also said to be “the leading manufacturer of them all”. However, Whiteside himself lamented recently that the “Cambridge Newton factory” (i.e. the University Press) had dramatically scaled down its previous operations, while the “thriving research then still massively pursued into Newton's scientific papers” which only a decade earlier was commonly called an industry “has shrivelled to be little more than a cottage one …”. See Whiteside , “The latest”, 112 and idem, “Prehistory”, 35 n. 2. For comments on this paper, I would like to thank Michael Hunter, Larry Stewart, Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin; the views expressed within are of course my own.

See Birch T. (ed.), The works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (6 vols, London, 1772); Conant J. B. (ed.), “Robert Boyle's experiments in pneumatics”, in Harvard case histories in experimental science (2 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1957), i, 1–63; Hall M. B. , Robert Boyle and seventeenth-century chemistry (Cambridge, 1958); Maddison R. E. W. , The life of the Honourable Robert Boyle F.R.S. (London, 1969); Jacob J. , Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977); Webster C. , The Great Instauration: Science, medicine and reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975); Frank R. , Harvey and the Oxford physiologists: A study of social ideas and social interaction (Berkeley, 1980). See also Hunter M. , Letters and papers of Robert Boyle: A guide to the manuscripts and microfilm (Bethesda, Maryland, 1992).

Shapin S. , “Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle's literary technology”, Social studies of science, xiv (1984), 481–520; Shapin Schaffer S. J. , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985); McGuire J. E. , “Boyle's conception of nature”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxiii (1972), 523–42. For the relations between moral certainty and ‘latitudinarian’ theology see Shapiro B. , Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century England: A study of the relationships between natural science, religion, history, law, and literature (Princeton, 1983). For Boyle's exchange with Spinoza see Hall A. R. Hall M. B. , “Philosophy and natural philosophy: Boyle and Spinoza”, in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré (2 vols, Paris, 1964), ii, 241–56 and Curley E. M. (ed. and transl.), The collected works of Spinoza (Princeton, N.J., 1988–), i, 157–218. Various differences between Boyle and More concerning the value of experiment for producing reliable knowledge are discussed in Leviathan and the air-pump, 207–24. For another view which stresses the theological basis of their disagreement see Henry J. , “Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The Spirit of Nature and the nature of providence”, in Hutton S. (ed.), Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary studies (Dordrecht, 1990), 55–76.

Canny N. , The Upstart Earl: A study of the social and mental world of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge, 1982); Todd M. , Christian humanism and the Puritan social order (Cambridge, 1987); Shapin S. , “Robert Boyle and mathematics: Reality, representation and experimental practice”, Science in context, ii (1988), 23–58; idem, “The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 373–404; idem, “The invisible technician”, American scientist, lxxvii (1989), 554–63; Principe L. , “Robert Boyle's alchemical secrecy: Codes, ciphers and concealments”, Ambix, xxxix (1992), 63–74; Clericuzio A. , “A redefinition of Boyle's chemistry and corpuscular philosophy”, Annals of science, xlvii (1990), 561–89; idem, “From Van Helmont to Boyle: A study of the transmission of Helmontian chemical and medical theories in seventeenth-century England”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 303–34.

Harwood J. , The early essays and ethics of Robert Boyle (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1991), pp. xxiii–lxvii (esp. pp. xxxviii–xxxix for early traces of his concern with modesty and tolerance); Hunter M. , “Alchemy, magic and moralism in the thought of Robert Boyle”, The British journal for the history of science, xxiii (1990), 387–410; idem, “The conscience of Robert Boyle: Functionalism, ‘dysfunctionalism’ and the task of historical understanding”, in Field J. V. James F. A. J. L. (eds), Renaissance and revolution: Humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), 147–59; idem, “Casuistry in action: Robert Boyle's confessional interviews with Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, 1691”, Journal of ecclesiastical history, xliv (1993), 80–98; idem, “How Robert Boyle became a scientist”, History of science, xxxiii (1995), 59–103. A comprehensive account of the backgrounds to Alsted's mammoth undertaking can be found in Hotson H. , “Johann Heinrich Alsted: Encyclopaedism, millenarianism, and the second reformation in Germany”, D.Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1991.

Harwood , op. cit. (ref. 5), pp. xlix–li. See also in this regard the remarks on the provisional and fluid quality of these self-fashioning exercises in Shapin S. , “Personal development and intellectual biography: The case of Robert Boyle”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 335–45, and idem, A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England (Chicago, 1994), chap. 4. For another view see Oster M. , “Biography, culture and science: The formative years of Robert Boyle”, History of science, xxxi (1993), 177–226. Oster also emphasizes the significance for Boyle of manual labour as well as his continuing interest in the work of skilled craftsmen in idem, “The scholar and the craftsman revisited: Robert Boyle as aristocrat and artisan”, Annals of science, xlix (1992), 255–76. See also idem, “The ‘Beame of Divinity’: Animal suffering in the early thought of Robert Boyle”, The British journal for the history of science, xxii (1989), 151–80.

See Hunter , “Alchemy” (ref. 5), “Casuistry” (ref. 5), and “How Boyle became a scientist” (ref. 5), 65, 73, 75–77, 89–90. According to Hunter, at this time Boyle saw atheism and Catholicism as “tangential threats”: “How Boyle became a scientist”, 74.

Hunter M. C. W. (ed.), Boyle (London, 1994), pp. xix–xx, 3, 20. For the many negative local reactions to Cork's self-fashioning strategies, see Canny , op. cit. (ref. 4).

Harwood , op. cit. (ref. 5), 208. There is a general account of the place of medicine in Boyle's life and work in Kaplan B. B. , ‘Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick’: The medical agenda of Robert Boyle (Baltimore, 1993), and an analysis of Boyle's bodily presentation of self in its various forms in Shapin , “Social history” (ref. 6), 152–5.

Harwood , op. cit. (ref. 5), 13–14, 34, 45, 56, 187 (from the essay Harwood calls “The doctrine of thinking”), 74, 67–68, 89. In “Of sin”, Boyle referred to the “fals optic glass of the Sensuall Appetite” and urged: “Let not him then … that is giv'n to Women, affect the Company of Temting Butys, Naked Pictures, and the like, nor him that overvalues Wine frequent the Tavern.” The vast amount of “outward objects” which “incessantly sollicit the Soule to gad and wander after them”, only “debach[ed] and diver[ed] the soul from her Employments”: ibid., 147 and 151–2. See also Fiering N. , Moral philosophy at seventeenth century Harvard: A discipline in transition (Chapel Hill, 1981), 147–8, 150–4, 159–61, 176, 186. Struck-through words indicate deletions, words inside angled brackets are additions.

Harwood , op. cit. (ref. 5), 192, 196, 195, 197 (citing 2 Cor. 10: 4–5). The notion that Catholic history was one big Romance was common to Protestant contemporaries. Compare this with Newton's attack on the spurious “Romances” of Leibniz in the drafts of the Conti and Clarke-Leibniz correspondence; see Koyré A. Cohen I. B. , “Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence with notes on Newton, Conti and Des Maizeaux”, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, xv (1962), 63–126, pp. 75, 110, 115. See also Principe L. , “Virtuous romances and romantic virtuoso: The shaping of Robert Boyle's literary style”, Journal of the history of ideas, lvi (1995), 377–98.

Harwood , op. cit. (ref. 5), 200, 150, 246, 118, 155.

Ibid. , 85–86 (cf. 88 and 244), 87–88.

Ibid. , 239, 241, 116, 245 (cf. 88), 244, 242. Boyle's love of tennis is also recorded in Hunter (ed.), Boyle (ref. 8), 15 (from “Philaretus”) where he described it as “a Sport he ever passionately loved”.

Ibid. , 88–89; Shapin , “Social history” (ref. 6), 188–9 (and cf. 129 for Boyle's “effective constitution into a template for others' emulation” as “collective enterprise”). Hunter also points out that the exemplary nature of Boyle's life is also displayed by the importance attached to his portraiture.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle (ref. 8), 26–29, 54. See also Hunter , “Alchemy” (ref. 5); and Hunter (ed.), Boyle (ref. 8), pp. lxxvii–lxxix. For an early reference to utility in Boyle's description of his interests, see his letter to Marcombes in Birch , op. cit. (ref. 2), i, p. xxxiv.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle (ref. 8), 30–34.

Robert Boyle reconsidered , ed. by Hunter M. C. W. (Cambridge, 1994), 4–5: Hunter , “Conscience” (ref. 5), 147–8. Sargent's argument is presented in Sargent R-M. , “Scientific experiment and legal expertise: The way of experience in seventeenth-century England”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xx (1989), 19–45 and again in her book which I examine later in this essay.

Hunter , “Conscience” (ref. 5), 153, 158 and 148; idem, “Casuistry” (ref. 5), passim.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle (ref. 8), 5 (from “Philaretus”). Hunter reads Shapin's comments on the lack of similarity between Boyle's earlier and later work as “perhaps unduly nihilistic reflections on the whole enterprise of intellectual biography”, although it is not clear what the deleterious implications of this nihilism would be. See Hunter , “How Boyle became a scientist” (ref. 5), 61. For more detailed accounts of Shapin's approach to Boyle see Shapin , “Biography” (ref. 6). Cf. Kaplan , op. cit. (ref. 9), 13: “Boyle's contemplative nature, the experiences of his grand tour, his revulsion over the social discord in his country, and his preoccupation with his own physical and spiritual health caused him to focus his attention during this period on issues of human morality and ethical conduct” (my italics).

Hunter (ed.), Boyle reconsidered (ref. 18), 25–26, 28, 32.

Ibid., 37, 39, 41–42, 47, 49.

Ibid. , 134, 79, 81–83, 112, 115. See also Hall M. B. , “Boyle's method of work: Promoting his corpuscular philosophy”, Notes and records of the Royal Society, xli (1987), 111–43; Kim Y. S. , “Another look at Robert Boyle's acceptance of the mechanical philosophy: Its limits and its chemical and social contexts”, Ambix, xxxviii (1991), 1–10; Alexander P. , Ideas, qualities and corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the external world (Cambridge, 1985), and Newman W. , “The alchemical sources of Robert Boyle's corpuscular philosophy”, Annals of science, liii (1996), 567–85. For another view of the Sceptical chymist, see Golinski J. V. , “Robert Boyle, scepticism and authority in seventeenth century chemical discourse”, in Benjamin A. (eds), The figural and the literal: Problems of language in the history of science and philosophy, 1630–1800 (Manchester, 1987), 58–82.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle reconsidered (ref. 18), 88, 92–93, 97; Turnbull H. W. (eds), The correspondence of Isaac Newton (7 vols, Cambridge, 1959–81), iii, 45. See also Principe , “Boyle's alchemical secrecy” (ref. 4) and Ihde A. J. , “Alchemy in reverse: Robert Boyle on the degradation of gold”, Chymia, ix (1964), 47–57.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle reconsidered (ref. 18), 100–2; Hunter , “Alchemy” (ref. 5), 397–8.

Hunter (ed.), Boyle reconsidered (ref. 18), 140–2, 151–2. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Wojcik J. , Robert Boyle and the limits of reason (Cambridge, 1997).

Hunter (ed.), Boyle reconsidered (ref. 18), 161–2, 168–9 and 172 n. 9, although Davis does not consider that Hooke himself may have been the source for Aubrey's remark.

Ibid., 181–2.

Sargent R.-M. , The diffident naturalist: Robert Boyle and the philosophy of experiment (Chicago and London, 1995), 1.

Ibid., 7, 8–9, 2–3.

Ibid., 26, 24, 29, 39, 41.

Ibid. , 43, 45, 48–49. Sargent repeatedly refers to things called “epistemic” factors throughout the text, as if Shapin and Schaffer do not hold that internal non-‘social’ interests or reasons have any place in their analysis, but this clearly runs counter to their overt treatment of the reasons for Boyle's change in air-pump design following attacks on it in the early 1660s. From their perspective Sargent's account presumably relies inter alia on inaccessible mental states and (in practice) the uncritical regurgitation of an historical actor's own words. For an account by Andrew Pickering (whom Sargent generally cites favourably elsewhere) of why these distinctions will not do, see idem, “Philosophy naturalized a bit”, Social studies of science, xxi (1991), 575–85, p. 579: “The constructivist quarrel with the philosophical tradition is not that the constructivists want to invert the tradition's privileging of the epistemic, but rather that, on naturalistic grounds, the constructivist lacks faith in the battery of logical empiricist a priori dichotomies — Including the epistemic / non-epistemic ….” Sargent asserts in her “Scientific experiment” (ref. 18) that “Perhaps one should not expect an epistemic analysis from social historians …”: ibid., 44–45.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 49–50, 55, 57.

Shapin , “Boyle's attitude” (ref. 4); idem, “Social history” (ref. 6), 321, 336, 341 and 350–4 (for how gentlemen might converse civilly about issues concerning precision); and Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 37 and 66–67. In contrast to Shapin, Sargent remarks: “The absence of mathematical demonstrations in his work should be attributed to his philosophical arguments against the mathematical model of reasoning and to his interest in the qualitative aspects of nature” (ibid., 250 n. 26). See also Shapin Schaffer , op. cit. (ref. 3), chap. 4; Mulligan L. , “Robert Hooke and certain knowledge”, The seventeenth century, vii (1992), 151–69; Dear P. , “Jesuit mathematical science and the reconstitution of experience in the early seventeenth century”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxviii (1987), 133–75; and idem, Discipline and experience: The mathematical way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995). For the social status of mathematics and astronomy in the early modern period, see Westman R. S. , “The role of the astronomer in the sixteenth century”, History of science, xviii (1980), 105–97, and Biagioli M. , “The social status of Italian mathematicians, 1450–1600”, History of science, xxvii (1989), 41–95.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 62–63, 71–74.

Ibid. , 76–84. The extent of Boyle's dissatisfaction with contemporary Galenic practice is clearer from his unpublished work. In one manuscript, he lambasted the contemporary methodus medendi and assailed the supposed safety of techniques such as “Bleeding, Vomiting, Purging, Sweating and spitting”, which tended to “weaken or discompose where they are employed but do not certainly cure afterward”: R.S. BP Ms. 199 fol. 120^r, cited in Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 255 n. 87. Michael Hunter is currently studying this area in detail.

Ibid., 88, 259 n. 3.

Ibid. , 90–92, 96–97. See also Davis E. B. Hunter Michael (eds), A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature (Cambridge, 1996).

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 99–100, 104–6.

Ibid. , 109–10, 111, 120–1, 118–19, 115. For Boyle on ‘reason’ see Mulligan L. , “Robert Boyle, ‘right reason’ and the meaning of metaphor”, Journal of the history of ideas, lv (1994), 235–57.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 123–5 and 277 nn. 109 and 113. See also Westfall R. S. , “Unpublished Boyle papers relating to scientific method”, Annals of science, xii (1956), 63–73 and 103–17, esp. pp. 67–68 and 113–14: “… the Organs of Sense are but the Instruments of Reason in y^e Investigation of Truth … the well Circumstanc'd Testimony of Sense is to be preferr'd to any meer Hypothesis, or to Ratiocinations not grounded upon Sense, or either Mathematical or Metaphysical Truths.” Note also the early manuscript recently published by Hunter Michael , “Of Naturall Philosophie”, in which Boyle outlined an experimental project which took account of both ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ in the performance of experimental writing: “The Principles of naturall Philosophie ar two 1. Sense either of our owne or others to the matter of which belongeth Scripture. Of the destitutions & deceptions of sense. That it is requisite to be furnished with observations at [sic] Experiments.” See Hunter , “How Boyle became a scientist” (ref. 5), 70.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 132, 134–5.

Ibid. , 138, 281 n. 34, 142–5, 288 n. 87, 148, 152–7. Presumably Sargent means the instrument-maker Ralph Greatorex and not (Jonathan) Goddard in describing the identity of the collaborator with Hooke and Boyle on the design and construction of the early air-pump: ibid., 282 n. 42. For a far more jaundiced view of the need to interact with “mechanick people”, see Boyle's Excellency of theology of 1674 in Works (ref. 2), iv, 35–36.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 159–60, 293 n. 17.

Ibid. , 166–7, 170, 176–80. Sargent criticizes Shapin and Schaffer for their account of Boyle's essay, “Concerning the unsuccessfulness of experiments”, asserting that they “mention these essays in a dismissive tone presumably because they have dismissed the relevance of epistemological reasons in their analysis of the performative nature of Boyle's work” and that they treat these essays as examples of the kind of candid reporting required by “consensual natural philosophy”. She counters that “it is misleading to see Boyle's justificatory procedures as based upon the simple achievement of consensus” and asserts that Boyle “did not discuss the contingencies of experiments in order to save theories from experimental refutation”. The contingencies he discussed “were mostly those concerned with the practical problems that arise from performance”. Ibid., 294–5 n. 32 (and cf. 298–9 n. 85) and Shapin Schaffer , Leviathan and the air-pump (ref. 3), 185.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 181–2, 300 n. 2, 185, 189–93. For a different view of the division of labour in Boyle's laboratory see Shapin , “Social history” (ref. 6), chap. 8.

Sargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 2, 10.

Ibid., 6, 7, 9. Given Sargent's strict adherence to Boyle's own words, it is difficult for her either to adopt any distanced analytical perspective on Boyle's descriptions of his own activity, or to offer an ‘explanatory’ narrative (the latter of which she explicitly eschews at the outset). In Leviathan, Shapin and Schaffer use the locution “This is what Boyle did” to stress both the practical nature of Boyle's activity and to avoid the more sceptical attitude implied by phrases such as “he said that …” or “he claimed that …” (Leviathan and the air-pump (ref. 3), 42) although they rely almost wholly on published sources. See in this regard Holmes F. L. , “Do we understand historically how experimental knowledge is acquired?”, History of science, xxx (1992), 119–36, who states (p. 131) that “Boyle's work is not a transparent window on the experimental work that lay behind it” and the comments on this paper (and its inattention to manuscript sources) in Sergent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 297 n. 63.

Sociologists of science rarely make reference to historiography when discussing methodology, and their disciplinary neighbours are more obviously sociology, philosophy and anthropology. Pickering, for example, sees the historical interpretive attitude as being very different from that of the sociological, arguing that to go back to research in the 1950s “is to enter a very strange land; it requires a considerable act of the imagination to figure out how scientists were thinking in those days”; cf. Pickering Andrew , “Knowledge, practice and mere construction”, Social studies of science, xx (1990), 682–728, p. 724 n. 30.

“Leviathan”, 4–7, 15, 6 note 7, 6, 7, 14–15. In her earlier article. she suggested that Leviathan's invocation of Hobbes served to show what Boyle's philosophy ‘really’ was: “Hobbes was not an unbiased stranger, he was an active opponent who had his own interests, one of which was to discredit the experimentalists. It is extremely unlikely that an opponent of Boyle would be a good source for what his method really was.” Cf. Sargent , “Scientific experiment” (ref. 18), 42 note 99. Compare her use of ‘interest’ here with her account of Shapin and Schaffer's use of it in Seargent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 221 note 26.

Sergeant , Naturalist (ref. 29), 9–10 (cf. 223 note 48). For the description of a ‘form of life’ as a “loose and fragile unity” see Pickering , “Knowledge” (ref. 49), 707.

Shapin Schaffer , Leviathan and the air-pump (ref. 3), 22–23, 150; Sergent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 159–65, 211, 214–15, 291 n. 3. Constructivists concur with Sargent (p. 212) that “the presence of social conventions in the construction of knowledge does not warrant the conclusion that knowledge is nothing but a social construct established by the aggregation of individual's beliefs” (my italics). Note also her comment in “Scientific experiment” (ref. 18), 41: “Because experiments are produced in the artificial environment of the laboratory and depend on witnessing for validation, they [i.e., constructivists] believe they have shown that the experimental production of facts is fundamentally an arbitrary process …”.

Sergent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 215–16. The process by which a natural object is ‘split off’ from the contexts of its production and then reinserted as the cause of that activity is discussed in Latour B. Woolgar S. , Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts (Princeton, 1986), 176–83.

Sergent , Naturalist (ref. 29), 211, 216.