The Boyle Papers

Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle

Michael Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780754655688
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351893718
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Robert Boyle (1627-91) was the most influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century. His huge archive, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769, has only recently been explored, leading to a new understanding of many aspects of Boyle's thought. This volume brings together the essential materials for understanding the Boyle Papers. It includes a revised version of Michael Hunter's fundamental study of the archive, first published in 1992, which elucidates its history and the way in which handwriting evidence can be used to identify chronological strata within it, thus making it possible to trace the development of Boyle's ideas. Other chapters deal with such components of the Papers as Boyle's 'workdiaries' and his projected Paralipomena; another uses material from the archive to illuminate the making of a key work by Boyle, his Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature; while another illustrates that, large as the archive is, it is only a part of what existed in Boyle's lifetime. Parts of the content have been published before, but they are here presented in revised and fully indexed form. Lastly, the volume includes a completely revised version of the catalogue of the Boyle Papers, Letters and ancillary manuscripts originally published in 1992, updating it by tabulating the extensive use of the archive made in recent years in connection with the publication of the definitive editions of Boyle's Works and Correspondence (1999-2001). In all, the volume will be indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Boyle.

Chapter 1
Robert Boyle and his Archive

Boyle and his Writings

The Boyle archive comprises the Boyle Papers – forty-six uniformly bound volumes of miscellaneous papers; the Boyle Letters – seven volumes of correspondence bound in guardbooks; and thirty-one volumes of notebooks and other manuscripts. Housed at the Royal Society in London since 1769, this represents the principal archival resource for the study of Robert Boyle, one of the seminal figures of the Scientific Revolution. In the formative years that witnessed the founding of the Royal Society and an unprecedented flowering of scientific activity in England, Boyle did more than anyone to define the character of English science – both as a prolific author, who published over forty works in the course of his lifetime, and as a widely respected and influential personality in his own right. Boyle was the prime advocate of the blend of systematic inductivism and a commitment to a mechanical view of the workings of the world which is rightly seen as characterising the early Royal Society. He was also a major apologist for the new science, both its usefulness and its religious role. Arguably, Boyle was the dominant figure in English science in the generation before Newton; it is not surprising that he and his work have both been held in high regard ever since.

Boyle was born on 25 January 1627 at Lismore, Munster, son of the notorious Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. His father had made a fortune as an adventurer in Ireland, rising to the position of Lord Treasurer of Ireland and an English Privy Councillor.¹ As a result, he bequeathed his children high status and considerable wealth, both of which were to form leading features of the life of his youngest son, Robert. Robert’s education began at home and continued first at Eton and then in foreign travel. During the formative years that he spent abroad, from 1639 onwards, Boyle visited France, Geneva – where he claimed to have experienced a religious awakening which affected him for the rest of his life – and Italy, where he encountered the writings of Galileo. During Boyle’s travels, Civil War broke out in England, temporarily affecting the family fortunes; but, after returning to England in 1644, in 1645 Boyle was able to take up residence at the family manor house at Stalbridge, Dorset, where he spent much of the next decade, apart from a visit to Ireland in 1652–4. Late in 1655 or early in 1656 he moved to Oxford, joining the circle of natural philosophers there which formed the liveliest centre of English science at that time. After the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, many of these men moved away from Oxford, in many cases to London, where the Royal Society was founded in that year. But Boyle moved to London only in 1668, thereafter sharing a house in Pall Mall with his sister Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, until both of them died within a few weeks of one another in 1691.

Boyle’s career as an author began in the 1640s, when he compiled a number of longer or shorter writings on religious and moral issues, which have now been published in full.² At this point in his career, Boyle was very much a moralist rather than a ‘scientist’, and his preoccupations have often been misunderstood by those who have read them through the filter of his later career, not least in relation to the shadowy ‘Invisible College’ with which he was associated at this time. In the years around 1650, however, Boyle seems to have suffered a real conversion experience, suddenly discovering the fascination with the empirical investigation of nature and its use in connection with religious apologetic that were to dominate the rest of his career.³ In pursuit of these ends, he became increasingly involved with others sharing similar concerns, notably the American-born chymist George Starkey and the circle of intellectuals surrounding the Prussian emigré Samuel Hartlib. Similar links with like-minded intellectuals continued both at Oxford in the 1650s and 1660s and in London in the 1670s and 1680s; in both places he was also active in the direction of missionary and charitable work, including the publication of the Bible in such languages as Algonquian and Irish. But Boyle’s predominant activity was writing and experimenting: throughout his adult career, books continued to come out at a rate of almost one a year, while the profuse experiments in which he engaged are evidenced not least by records surviving among the Boyle Papers. More than almost any of his scientific contemporaries – and assisted by his private means – Boyle followed a career resembling that of a modern research scientist, devoting his life to extensive and systematic experimentation.

Boyle’s first publication was a contribution to a collaborative volume put out by Hartlib in 1655, advocating the free circulation of scientific and medical data.⁴ Though in the 1650s he clearly wrote assiduously on a range of topics on which books by him were to appear at a later date, by the time of the Stuart Restoration Boyle had produced only one book. This was a devotional work usually known as Seraphic Love, published in 1659, which was to prove his most successful publication, going into eleven editions during his lifetime and four thereafter. From 1660 onwards, however, Boyle embarked on a profuse publishing career which was to continue for the rest of his life, though he never lost a certain diffidence in presenting his writings to the public. Among the works that he now put into print were two further religious treatises, Some Considerations touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures of 1661 and Occasional Reflections of 1665. But more important were the major scientific works that he produced. at this time. First, there was his classic work on pneumatics, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660). Both in this work and in his subsequent defence of it against Thomas Hobbes and other critics, Boyle used a key piece of scientific equipment, the air-pump, to explore the physical properties of the air, vindicating the possibility of a vacuum, illustrating the extent to which life depended on air, and proving that the volume of air varies inversely with its pressure (Boyle’s Law). He was to publish other works on related topics throughout the remainder of his career, including his Hydrostatical Paradoxes of 1666 and his General History of the Air, posthumously published in 1692.

The year 1661 saw two other important publications, his famous Sceptical Chymist and his equally seminal Certain Physiological Essays; again, these represented the beginning of a series of publications on related topics continuing over several decades, in which he sought to vindicate a mechanistic theory of matter and to remodel chemistry along new lines, distinct from those adopted hitherto by ‘Vulgar Spagirists’ and others. In these treatises, he also crucially vindicated an experimental approach, particularly in Certain Physiological Essays, which contained an important essay asserting the need to record unsuccessful experiments. In 1663 came the first part of Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, the second instalment following in 1671, in which Boyle sought to vindicate an improved understanding of nature both in its own right and for its utilitarian advantages. The mid 1660s saw the appearance of various lengthy books setting out Boyle’s experimental findings and using them to undermine the presuppositions of Aristotelian science. This motive was particularly overt in his Origin of Forms and Qualities of 1666, but it also underlay his experimental histories of colours (1664) and cold (1665): again, everything was reduced to matter and motion, in contrast to the complicated theories of the Aristotelians, and this was a further project which was to continue over subsequent years, perhaps most notably in his Experiments, Notes, &c., about the Mechanical Origin or Production of Divers Particular Qualities of 1675–6.

In the 1670s, Boyle continued to publish works on a range of topics, including treatises developing the themes of his experimental work in the 1660s and others of a more speculative nature. He also pursued his earlier tradition of theological publication, his works of the 1660s being followed by The Excellency of Theology, Compar’d with Natural Philosophy of 1674 and Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion of 1675. In the 1680s, his publishing interests shifted particularly to medical matters, hitherto represented largely by the relevant section of his Usefulness of Natural Philosophy: he brought out various books on such topics, ranging from Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood (1684) to Medicina Hydrostatica (1690) and the collections of recipes that he presented to the public in his Medicinal Experiments (1688–94). He also produced more miscellaneous works in these later years, including a Baconian natural history, Experimenta et Observationes Physicae (1691). At the same time, his activity as a religious apologist continued, with perhaps the most famous of all his works of this kind, The Christian Virtuoso, appearing in 1690–1. His concern about the theological implications of the new philosophy is also in evidence in his Discourse of Things above Reason (1681) and his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688), while his important Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature, which testifies to comparable preoccupations, appeared in 1686. It was appropriate that at his death in 1691 Boyle endowed a Lecturership to expound the Christian message against its infidel opponents, for a number of the Boyle Lecturers were to promote the ‘physico-theology’ which he had pioneered in his own writings.

Boyle’s crucial significance for a range of facets of natural philosophy was recognised in his lifetime. It is symptomatic that – as recent studies have underlined – his influence was particularly important for Isaac Newton, the leading figure in the generation following Boyle’s, whose work is often seen as the culmination of the scientific achievement of seventeenth-century England.⁵ By the eighteenth century, Boyle’s importance was taken for granted, and he was repeatedly referred to as a paragon of Baconian, experimental science. As the writer Peter Shaw put it in an epitomised version of Boyle’s works that he produced: ‘Mr Boyle appears to have been, in all respects, one of the most profitable authors, who ever treated philosophy … ’Tis certain, that he laid the foundations of almost all the improvements which have been made since his time, in natural philosophy.’⁶ It is not surprising that in the years following Boyle’s death epitomes of his writings were produced by Richard Boulton as well as by Shaw, while demand for his works was such that a collected edition of them, produced by Thomas Birch in 1744, was reprinted in 1772.

Boyle’s significance has been reflected by scholarly interest in the twentieth century. He received an appropriate degree of treatment in such pioneering works as E.A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924), chapter 6 of which is devoted to Boyle. Attention to him intensified, however, with the burgeoning interest in history of science characteristic of the postwar years, which also stimulated a reprint of Birch’s edition of his writings in 1965 with a lucid introduction by Douglas McKie. The importance of Boyle’s early pneumatic work was recognised by the inclusion of key passages from his New Experiments … Touching the Spring of the Air as the first of the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, edited by J.B. Conant in 1948. As for his vindication of what he christened ‘corpuscularianism’, Boyle forms the centrepiece of Marie Boas’s book-length study, ‘The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy’, published in Osiris in 1952, in which Boyle’s matter theory was fully expounded against the background of earlier atomist ideas. Subsequently, Boas went on to write a book on Robert Boyle and Seventeenth Century Chemistry, published in 1958, in which an attempt was ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Boyle Papers in Context
• 1 Robert Boyle and his Archive
• 2 The Lost Papers of Robert Boyle
• 3 The Workdiaries of Robert Boyle: A Newly Discovered Source and its Internet Publication
• 4 Robert Boyle’s Paralipomena: An Analysis and Reconstruction
• 5 The Making of Robert Boyle’s Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature (1686)
• Catalogue of the Boyle Papers, Letters, Notebooks and Associated Manuscripts
• Index