The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
J. R.
Jacob
The
Ideological Origins of Robert Boyle’s Natural Philosophy
Journal
of European Studies 2, 1972, 1-21
Students of young Robert Boyle have treated the
relation between his science and religion from two points of view.* Some have been primarily
interested in the religious motive for his scientific endeavour
and have claimed it to derive from his puritan piety. [l] Others have dealt with another aspect
of the question. According to them,
Boyle’s natural theology is largely a response to those who argue that the
study of nature leads to a preoccupation with second causes and a consequent
neglect or denial even of the first or God. [2] These two views of Boyle’s
understanding of the relationship between science and religion are by no means
mutually exclusive. Nor does the
validity of one hang on that of the other. Each, instead, stands on its own and answers a
different set of questions. The first
treats of the problem of motivation: was science fed by the fuel of religion;
if so, why and to what degree? The
second treats of the problem of justification: how could the investigation of
natural phenomena, once undertaken, be explained in
terms consistent with or even convenient to the faith. So one might hold both views at the same time,
and in fact a recent student seems to have done just that. [3]
The fact that these two views of the relation of young
Boyle’s science to his religion are separate and independent does not mean of
course that in Boyle’s own thought motivation and justification were in fact so
isolated and compartmentalized. On the contrary, I shall argue that they were not - that the
source of Boyle’s religious justification of science lay in his religious
motivation and that this motivation is revealed in that justification. In doing so I shall offer a third view. Against the prevailing view of justification I
shall claim that Boyle laid the foundations of his natural religion before he
developed his corpuscular philosophy, his distinctive contribution to
seventeenth-century science, and
* I thank the American
Philosophical Society for a grant from the Penrose Fund making it possible for
me to complete the research for this essay. I wish also to thank the following for their
help with the ideas and presentation - Dr M. C. Jacob, Professor J. J. John,
Professor F. G. Marcham, Dr J. R. Ravetz,
Professor H. R. Trevor-Roper and Dr J. M. Smith.
1. R. K.. Merton, ‘Science, technology’ and
society in seventeenth century
2. Robert Hugh Kargon,
Atomism in England from
Harriot to Newton,
3. R. S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century
England, New Haven, Connecticut, 1958, pp. 2-3 and 7-11.
1
that this natural religion
both helped to shape and determined the significance of his full-blown
philosophy of nature. So in line with
the prevailing view of his motivation I shall suggest that his piety did indeed
influence the development of his science or, more properly, his natural philosophy.
Against this prevailing view of
motivation, however, I shall argue that this piety was not merely puritan - if
puritan at all - and that its effect upon Boyle’s natural philosophy was much
greater and more specific than has been realized. I shall do so by tracing this piety to its
particular social and ideological roots. To do this I shall chart the course of Boyle’s
life from the mid-1640s through the early 1660s, when the outlines of his
mature philosophy of nature begin to emerge.
After having spent the preceding
six years on the continent, Boyle returned to
Thus when economic exigency
dictated that Robert remain at least outwardly neutral in the conflict nothing
in his background prevented his doing so.
4 Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Lismore
Papers (second series), 5 vols., (n.p. 1888), V, 20-22; hereafter cited as Lismore.
5 Ibid.,
p.72 and, Thomas Birch, ‘The Life of the Honourable
Robert Boyle,’ in The Works of the Honourable
Robert Boyle (Thomas Birch ed.), 5 vols.,
6
Ibid.
7. Quoted ibid.,
p. 19, Boyle to Isaac Marcombes,
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted ibid.
2
The business of negotiating a livelihood was not
Boyle’s only concern. He had always been
a serious student, and his prolonged stay on the continent with nothing to do
but study must have strengthened this seriousness. When be returned to Eng1and, he met Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Benjamin Worsley and others - the first two again probably through
his sister. [10] Their
interest in science and its practical applications engaged Boyle’s mind and
turned his study in new directions. They,
for instance, probably introduced Boyle to the chemical practice to which he
was to be so addicted for many years to come.
Useful intelligence was not all Boyle shared with Hartlib, Dury and their circle. Dury and Hartlib worked towards bringing in a religious settlement
in
10. R. E. W. Maddison,
The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle,
11. Dictionary of.National Biography (DNB).
12. Samuel Hartlib,
A Description of the
Famous
13. Ibid.,
p. 18, Boyle to Marcombes,
14. Ibid.,
p. 19, Boyle to Marcombes,
15. Ibid
16. Ibid., p. 23, Boyle to Dury,
17. Ibid., p. 19, Boyle to Marcombcs,
3
toleration might be. He seems to have thought that each believer
should be responsible for setting his own. [18] Self-control productive of mutual
respect in matters of religion is the key then to the proper establishment of
the faith. That is to say, if each man
will police his own passions and exercise discretion, all men will benefit. They will at once avoid the dangers of license
and repression and put themselves in the best position for discerning and
spreading truths that will make every believer virtuous and reverent.
So the reformation of religion and
society will come as much from within as without; its means will be as much
self-imposed as imposed by public authority. Not surprisingly, then, one of Boyle’s
preoccupations if not his principal one in this period and for that matter for
the rest of his life was his interest in how this reformation within each man
can occur. What, he asked, can a man do
to become a true Christian? Not
surprisingly, too, the answers he found in the mid-1640s reflected and were moulded by his other preoccupations during this period as I
have sketched them in. What I wish to do
then is to examine these answers and the nature of their connections with the
other aspects of his experience - his management of his inheritance, his
studies and the religious question.
In 1645 and 1646 Boyle wrote a long
treatise, ‘The Aretology or Ethical Elements of
Robert Boyle’, which, though it was never published, registers for the first
time many of the fundamental moral and religious ideas that appear in
his later published work. [19] In his ‘Aretology’
he considered the typical view of the time that honour
and virtue depend upon fortune. According
to this view, a gentleman is expected to live virtuously and honourably because he enjoys the advantages of fortune - breeding,
wealth, company and leisure. [20] To live up to this expectation he must
satisfy the terms of a code requiring him to serve his family, caste, church
and king. The measure of his success is
the esteem of his peers and the favour of his patron and king. Such honour is the
reward of virtue and therein lies temporal happiness. This is the ethic in which Boyle had been
raised. [21] But
he now claimed that fortune, far from conducing to virtue and happiness, is
inimical to both. [22] If a man is to be happy, Boyle said, he
must strive to be virtuous despite fortune. To be so under such conditions, moreover, is
not to conform one’s behaviour to the dictates of the
code
18. Ibid
19. The Royal Society of
London, MS. 195; hereafter cited as Aretology. Another manuscript in the same library - MS.
192, ‘The Ethicall Elements’ - appears to be a draft
of the first portion of MS. 195. For the
dating of MS. 195, see the title page and Birch, Life in Works, 1, 17
and 20. For the appearance of ideas first expressed in ‘The Aretology’
in Boyle’s later work, compare my consideration of ‘The Aretology’
with, for instance, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God,
Pathetically discoursed of, in a letter to a friend, in The Works of the
Honourable Robert Boyle, (Thomas Birch,
ed.) 5 vols., London, 1744, I, 163; hereafter cited as
Works.
20. Aretology,
fol. 31 v; Robert Ashley, Of Honour, V. B. Heltzel (ed.), San Marino, California, 1947, pp. 28, 30, 35
and 51; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the
Sixteenth Century, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1964, pp. 22, 27 and 29-30;
and, Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor, Princeton,
1960, pp.67 and 91.
21. Chatsworth, Devonshire
Collections, Richard, the Earl of Cork’s Letter Book, fol. 142; Chatsworth,
Devonshire Collections, Robert Boyle to Richard, the Earl of Cork, i6 November
1640; and, Lismore, V, 114.
22 Aretology, fols.
18 and 22 v.
4
of a ruling élite.
It is instead to live in face of the
world by persevering, even rejoicing, when fortune is harsh, [23] and resisting
its blandishments when deceptively benign. [24] This is to live as if external
circumstances exist solely to be defied and so demands an enormous exercise of
will in the direction of self-mastery. Nor
does the judgment of one’s success come at the hands of any privileged, earthly
authority, whether peers, patron or king. Rather it comes from on high through the
agency of providence - and this in a particular way. If one has been virtuous enough - that is to
say, sufficiently defiant of fortune - providence itself will take one’s part
and work one’s eventual reward in both this life and the one to come. [25]
There is an intimate connection between Boyle’s rejection of the
inherited wisdom of his caste respecting virtue and happiness, his formulation
of his own ethic and his other preoccupations during these same years. Being the son of a rich and powerful Irish
peer, he was born into a world in which fortune was all on his side and
brought up to believe that his life would unfold as the conventional wisdom
decreed, that is to say, by his serving king and church in ways that would
bring honour to himself and his family. [26] But what hopes
Boyle cherished in this regard were dashed by civil war. The family’s wealth and power had been swept
away, and, instead of serving church and king, it was all Boyle could do
to keep himself solvent by husbanding what resources had been spared. Not only did the civil wars alter the course
of his life; they also led him to alter his understanding of his own and human
destiny. Forced to take charge of his
own affairs in strange and forbidding circumstances, he rejected the
conventional wisdom: experience had proved to him that fortune could no longer
be trusted to supply the ground of virtue and happiness. [27]
Nor did he stop there. He set about adopting another understanding
that met the demands of his new situation. In this enterprise he was helped by his
success. In combination with his deep
piety it led him to discern a divine pattern in his experiences: he was plunged
into successive difficulties, but God made each case, Boyle thought, an
occasion for profiting him. [28] God created such occasions sometimes in
order to test and instruct him and so strengthen him to face the future. [29] From here he went
on, by writing ‘The Aretology’, to elevate his
response to his own situation into a moral philosophy for which he claimed universal
validity: by defying fortune according to his formula, men will attain to
virtue, thus bringing their lives into harmony with providence, and providence
in return will prosper them in the long run. What Boyle essentially did then was to turn
his inherited view of the relation of virtue to fortune on its head. According to that view, fortune is a means to
virtue by way of providing a setting conducive to its cultivation. The upshot of Boyle’s view, however, is to make
virtue a means to fortune. This is one
measure of
23. Ibid., fol. 179 r.
24. Ibid., fol. 180 v.
25. Ibid., 173 r., and 174-5 r.; and, A Free Discourse Against
Customary Swearing, in Works, V, 216-17; cited hereafter as Free
Discourse. Birch claims (Birch, Life
in Works, I, 26) to have seen a finished or polished draft of the latter
work in Boyle’s own script dated 1647. This
should indicate that its composition was probably contemporary with that of
‘The Aretology’.
26. See note 21 above.
27 Birch, Life in Works, 1,6.
28. Ibid., p. 19, Boyle to Marcombes,
29. Birth, Life in Works, I, 19, Boyle to Marcombes,
5
the discrepancy between the
inherited wisdom and the new realities brought on by civil war.
But Boyle’s efforts to secure his fortune and their
outcome do not by themselves explain why he wrote ‘The Aretology’. Not only
did the moral precepts inscribed therein help him in his own predicament; they
also supplied the key, he believed, to the proper settlement of religion. If each man would follow his advice and
pursue virtue in the face of fortune, all men would benefit: providential order
and true religion would triumph over their enemies. Basically, these consist of two groups. First there are those whom Boyle commonly
calls ‘Macchiavillians’. Rather than resisting fortune as the virtuous
do, they exploit circumstances for their own gain and without regard to the
consequences. [30]
They will not be bound by moral rules and even go so far as to
make religion serve their selfish purposes. [31] If given a free hand they would reduce
human affairs to anarchy. But providence
keeps their activities in check and sees to it that, although they may thrive
for a time, in the long run all their efforts founder.
[32] The other
group do not go under any particular name.
Sometimes they are called ‘Profane Persons’, [33] sometimes ‘Gallants’,
[34] but Boyle includes among them and intends them chiefly to represent a type
of gentleman - not all, to be sure, but the indolent and stupid. [35] They adhere to the
old ethic and so continue to seek the old honour and
glory in a world where these are as likely the spoils of deceit as the fruits
of virtue. [36] They
also pursue ephemeral pleasures and neglect or even disparage religion. [37] In all of these
ways they keep faith with fortune instead of doing as they should and relying
upon providence. What is
more they fail to see the precariousness of their position and so leave
themselves even more vulnerable to circumstances than ‘the Macchiavillians’,
who at least know the game they are playing.
Boyle’s ethic would overcome the
threat from both ‘Macchiavillians’ and indolent
gentry. In spelling out how it would
work in this regard he did more than urge men to defy fortune by internalizing
the moral life. He went on to tell them
how they can do this on a daily basis.
First he invoked the doctrine of the calling. Its message is particularly important to the
indolent aristocrat whose leisure is an invitation to sin. ‘An honest Calling is an
30. The Royal Society of
London, MS. 196, ‘Of Piety’, fols. 54 v.-55; cited
hereafter as Of Piety; its contents and handwriting suggest that it was written
in the late 1640s (in this connection see also Maddison,
Life, p. 33).
31. Aretology, fol. 170 r.
32. Ibid., fols. 211
V. - 212 r.
33. Of Piety, fols. 54 V. - 55.
34. The Royal Society of
London, The Boyle Papers (hereafter cited as The Boyle Papers), ‘Of Time and
Idleness’, Theology, XIV, fol. 20 r.; this piece was probably written in the
late 1640s or the early 1650s (see Maddison, Life,
64).
35. Aretology, fols. 225 and 227 v. - 228 r.
36. Ibid., fols. 15 r. and 22 v. - 23 r.; and, The
Royal Society of London, MS. 196, ‘Of Valour’, fols. 64 v. - 65 r. (for the dating of this piece
see note 30 above).
37. Of Piety, fols. 54 V. - 55; and, Free Discourse, in Works, V,
216 -17.
6
discipline of honest work, moreover, is enriched
by providence ‘with temporal blessings’. [38] Second, Boyle recommended as especially
beneficial a particular kind of work, the labour of study. It furnishes means to virtue in addition to
those inherent in all labour. [39] Study of God and his ways instil a desire to be worthy of Him and of his ‘no les Boundles then undeserved Bounty...’ [40] And study of nature offers an
instructive comparison:
how... can he [man] consider
the Ruf Draughts and Images of Virtue in the Very
Brutes; without a Noble Scorn that he shud make himself
inferiour to them by his Actions, that God made so
much superior to them by his Birth; and that while all the Creatures
unanimously conspire, to attaine in their particular
Conditions, the End of their Creation; man alone, shud
strive to frustrate his by his Actions, and be the onely
jarring Voice to spoile the Harmonius
Concert of so numerous a Set of wel-tun’d Creatures;
making use of his Reason, to becom the more unreasonable.
[41]
The message is clear: nature presents to the student a
model of harmony with God’s purpose that man would do well to emulate. Each creature functions in such a way as to
conduce to the end of all. If ‘the Very
Brutes’ can do this, how much better able should men be to do the same? The study of nature then is not an end in
itself. Nor was Boyle interested here in
science in a modern sense. He believed
such study to contribute to man’s moral, civic and religious enterprise. All knowledge ultimately becomes ethical
knowledge, teaching men to live more virtuously, and the pursuit of knowledge
an ethical pursuit. Boyle has now shown
how through defiance of fortune, an honest calling and the study of nature
a man can achieve virtue and happiness. The individual, moreover, is not the only one
who stands to gain. There is also a
social dividend. The ethic answers the
threat to religion and society posed by the cunning and the indolent. To the extent that men put Boyle’s formula
into practice they tune their lives to providence and so contribute to the
universal harmony just as ‘the Very Brutes’ do and teach them to. Thus, as the indolent are reformed, the ranks
of the virtuous swell; harmony will then come to pervade human affairs as it
does all else, and ‘the Macchiavillians’, dependent
as they are upon fortune, will no longer have any room to machinate because
fortune will have been swallowed up in the rule of providence.
In his ‘Aretology’ Boyle answered the two
imperatives in terms of which he lived during the civil wars - the demands of
his economic predicament and those of right religion; the compulsion to secure
his fortune and the necessity of securing the proper establishment of the
faith. Boyle’s ethic would produce men
of consummate self-control. This would
not only serve them in their conduct of affairs; it would also have a crucial
ecclesiastical function. Only such men,
avoiding the hazards of licence and repression, would
strike the right balance between liberty and discipline, and so bring in the
proper settlement of religion. Thus if
Boyle’s ethic reflects his adjustment to circum-
38. Aretology, fols. 224 V. - 225 F.
39. Ibid., fol. 191 V.
40. Ibid., fol. 192 r.
41. Ibid., fol. 192 V.
7
stances, it also represents an answer to the sell out
to circumstances on the part of the indolent, the ruthless and the cunning if
Boyle’s economic security depended upon his own adjustment to circumstances,
the institution of true religion, he thought, depended upon a collective
adjustment to these same circumstances - and in precisely the manner that he
practiced and prescribed. What Boyle did
in his ‘Aretology’ then was to provide ideological -
social and religious - grounds, growing out of his experience of and response
to events, for a theory of self-interest. He assumed that providence works in a certain
fashion. When a man defies fortune
through an internalization of the moral life, pursues an honest calling and
goes to nature for moral and religious instruction, he is not the only one who
benefits. These actions, undertaken in
private independently of what anyone else may or may not be doing, contribute
mysteriously to the comnonweal. The process is hidden; an invisible hand
forges a secret identity between individual purposes and the public good.
During the period 1647-1649 Boyle
wrote ‘An Invitation to a free and generous Communication of Secrets and Receits in Physick’. [42] There he attacked the attitude widely current
among gentry and aristocracy that the value of knowledge lies not in its
practical application but in its significance as a mark of the intellectual
distinction of the possessor and so as still further evidence of gentle status.
Hence cures and alchemical formulae were
not to be spread abroad but hoarded up - one’s merit depending upon the rarity
of his specimens. [43] This attitude was another aspect of the
conventional wisdom respecting virtue and happiness against which young Robert
in consequence of his experience had revolted. Boyle’s attack rested in part upon his
assumption of the identity between public and private interest. He attempted to persuade his readers to give
up their attitude by arguing that in communicating useful secrets they serve
both the public and themselves. First
their possession of their own secrets depends upon such communication. Where would they be, he asked, if everyone had
always refused to tell? [44] Second, where there are no barriers to
the communication of medical knowledge, not only does the number of available
remedies increase but the good drive out the false. Everything is tested by experiment and the
genuine alone survives. Both the public
and the honest empiric are served, and the charlatan is the only loser. The empiric especially benefits. By making the results of his experiments
public he gets the praise he deserves and is provided with the opportunity ‘to
reform his errors’ and so win new honour by making
further advances for the public good. [45] According to Boyle’s ethic, virtue
conduces to private and public advantage alike. In his ‘Invitation’, written within two or
three years after ‘The Aretology’, the communication
of remedies does the same. Here again
providence is the
42. Margaret E. Rowbottom, ‘The earliest published writing of Robert
Boyle’, Annals of Science, VI (
43. Walter
E. Houghton, Jr., ‘The English virtuoso in the seventeenth century’, Journal
of the History of Ideas, III (January 1942), ~ and (April 1942),
190-219; and, Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy,
44. Rowbottom,
op.cit., pp. 380-1.
45. Ibid., p. 383.
8
mysterious agent of this occult harmony: ‘... careful
providence forseeing how inclinable frail men would
be to selfishness in. the dispensation of such goods as these, hath most wisely
provided, that the parting with these goods should not prejudice their
possession, nor liberality impoverish him that uses it’. Such a man is one ‘Whom the Nature of the
riches he disperses, resembles to the Sun, who though so bountifully he bestoweth his Beams on the whole universe never findeth a scarcity of them in himself…’ [46]
We have traced the origins of
Boyle’s ethic to his experience of and reflection upon events. Some of his ideas in. this regard are similar
to the contemporary opinions of Samuel Hartlib, John Dury and John Milton, [47] who at the time both knew Hartlib and was a friend of Lady Ranelagh,
Boyle’s sister, to whom he was especially close. [48] In addition he addressed his
‘Invitation’ to Hartlib, who eventually published it.
[49] This is
all evidence for a community of opinion of which Boyle was a part. But whether he borrowed from any of these
sources or from similar ones is not known.
As the ‘Invitation’ suggests, Boyle
continued to elaborate the ideas first expressed in. ‘The Aretology’.
Between 1648 and 1655 he modified ideas
born of his earlier situation to meet the challenge of his new one. His pivotal concern was still the question of
how men can become true Christians and so bring in the reformation or proper
settlement of religion. Likewise, the
answer he gave - more definitively this time, to be sure - was again the result
of his experience of and. reflection upon events.
The execution of the king and the
proclamation of the republic in January 1649 forced Boyle to decide whether he
would acquiesce in the new government or not. Previously he had tried for economic reasons
to remain neutral. But this was no
longer possible. His brother Roger,
Baron Broghill, who had fought in Ireland to defeat
the rebels, now determined to go to the continent to serve Charles I’s son. [50] In Roger’s effort to get safely out of
46. Ibid.
47. Hartlib, op. cit., pp. 580-5; Birch, Life in
Works, I, 23, Boyle to Dury, 3 May 1647; and, Milton,
Areopagitica, in Complete Prose
Works of John Milton (New Haven and London 1959), II, 565 and 567-8.
48. In 1644
49. Rowbottom, op. cit., pp. 378-9.
50.
Thomas Morrice, ‘The life of the Earl of Orrery’, in A Collection of the State Letters of the
Right Honourable Roger Boyle, the First Ear1 of Orrery.., London, 1742, pp. 9-10.
51. Historical
Library, Medical Library, Yale University, a draft letter written by Robert
Boyle and addressed to an unidentified lady, requesting her aid in securing a
pass for Roger from the French Ambassador, Marston
Bigot, 26 March 1649.
52. Morrice,
op. cit., p. 11 also Edward Hyde, Earl.of
Clarendon, State Papers, Oxford, 1773, II, 501, ‘The Lord Inchiquin to the Marquis of Ormond’, Kilmallock,
9 December 1649, which tends to confirm Morrice’s
account.
9
having acquiesced in the
Commonwealth, went to
The family Boyle thus came
to have a substantial stake in. the republic, and Robert, no doubt as a result,
defended it against those whom he regarded as its foes. These were of two kinds. There were the ‘Macchiavillians’
again and ‘the vulgar’ or ‘the Giddy Multitude’, [54] by which in the context
of the 1650s Boyle was probably referring to the sectaries. The workings of providence eventually remove
the threat of the first. [55] But the second, it seems, were not
to be so easily undone. Boyle’s
apprehension in this regard is not difficult to understand, given his stake in
a republic rendered unstable by continual radical, sectarian activity. He agreed with ‘the vulgar’ that the right to
or possession of power does not necessarily confer the ability to use it with
wisdom. But he also believed that it is
better to trust the one or the few who hold power than for every man to claim,
as ‘the vulgar’ themselves do, that he alone can exercise it to best effect. [56]
Boyle thought that this is so because he
assumed that each man acts as a ‘free agent’ and as such, unless otherwise
instructed, pursues his own interests whether consistent with those of the
whole or not.
Thus, when ‘the vulgar’ take issue
with the government, they do so for utterly selfish reasons. Limited in their vision by the blinders of
untutored self-interest, they rush on unable to tell whether their aims serve
the public good or not - and, naked self-interest being what it is, they
probably do not. [57]
The government having been thus challenged or subverted, if men
discover, and they probably will, that their interests have not been served,
the situation will continue to deteriorate. Those who feel their interests threatened by
this initial challenge or subversion will themselves undertake to challenge or
subvert and so on to chaos. Not content
to rest his acquiescence in the republic merely upon the grounds of his
analysis of what would happen if ‘the Giddy Multitude’ prevailed, Boyle gave
the government the sanction of religion by suggesting that when men obey, they
become eligible to receive ‘divers peculiar blessings, that God oftentimes
vouchsafes to our obedience to his vicegerents, and his institutions’. [58] Here, as in ‘The Aretology’, the motive of conduct is the opportunity not of
spiritual but of material reward. This,
however, is not the same for Boyle as the self-interest of the sectaries. Theirs is reckless, offends providence and is
punished. But the pious and hence
certain way of realizing one’s interests is, Boyle
suggests, by an effort of calculated obedience. Contemporaneously Boyle pursued his studies,
biblical and scientific. These he
regarded as complementary. Like Sir
Francis Bacon, [59] Boyle held that both God’s word and his works, when
properly studied, reveal the same
53. R.. E. W. Maddison, ‘Studies in
the life of Robert Boyle, F.R.S. Part VI.
The Stalbridge Period, 1645-1655, and the
54. B.M. Add. MS.
32093, fol. 293, Boyle to John Mallet,
55.
Works, II, 199, in a dialogue that ‘treats of Angling improved to spiritual
uses’ (ibid., 182), written some time between
the regicide and the restoration (ibid., 181).
56. Ibid., pp. 196-7.
57. Ibid., pp. 195-6.
58. Ibid, pp. 196-197.
59. Boyle knew Bacon’s Advancement
of Learning by this time and accepted his sense expressed therein of the complementarity of theology and natural philosophy; see Some
Considerations [touching the Usefulness of
experimental natural philosophy, Part I, in Works, I, 458; cited
hereafter as Considerations, Part I.
These were written between 1649 and 1654; see R. S. Westfall, ‘Unpublished
Boyle papers relating to scientific method’, Annals of Science, XII (March
2956), p. 65; hereafter cited as Westfall, Boyle Papers.]
HHC - [bracketed] displayed
on p. 11 of original.
10
truths. [60]
Once more, as we shall see, the
significance of Boyle’s studies derives from their social and ideological
context because once more the truths thus revealed reflect his response to
events. As such these truths, he
believed, answered the challenge to the republic with whose interests, as we
have just seen, he identified his own. Furthermore, these truths, by answering these
challenges, prepared the way for true religion, which he held to be his central
concern. [61] In
Boyle’s mind events, studies and the reformation thus came for a second time to
be intimately related.
What are the truths in which nature
and scripture are so rich, and, once discovered and applied, how do they work
to produce virtue and piety? On
I will not now presume
to entertain you with those moral speculations, with which my chemical
practices have entertained me; but if this last sickness had not diverted me, I
had before this presented you with a discourse... of the theological use of
natural philosophy, endeavouring to make the
contemplation of the creatures contributory to the instruction of the prince,
and to the glory of the author of them...
The study of nature offers insight
by turns into morals, politics and divinity. This assumption is reminiscent of what Boyle
had said in this regard in ‘The Aretology’. For the source of Boyle’s belief in the
existence of instructive relations between different orders of being, moreover,
one need scarcely look further than to his reading of the Bible. To Boyle, as to many others in the seventeenth
century, the scriptures demonstrated how God used events, natural and
political, to teach men their duty and presage the future. [63] Augmenting Boyle’s
scriptural sense of the relations between things was his contemporary interest
in astrology, [64] the cabala [65] and indeed, as his remarks to Katherine and
elsewhere [66] show, alchemy itself. From
these too flowed the sense that human destiny is bound up with the order of
nature and that the latter properly approached will reveal something of the
former. Boyle’s belief in the existence
of these relationships is one thing; his understanding of their nature, of the
60. Considerations,
Part I, in Works, I, 430, 431 and 433.
61. Ibid, pp.
439, 440 and 461.
62. Works,
V, 238.
63. Considerations,
Part I, in Works, I, 433 and 439-440; Bacon, The Advancement of Learning; and, M.
C. Jacob, The Church and the Boyle Lectures: The Social Context of the Newtonian
Natural Philosophy, (unpublished PhD thesis; Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York, 1969).
64. ‘Of
Celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air’, in Works, V, 124-7 (for
dating sec Westfall, Boyle Papers, 65).
65. Works,
V, 236, Robert Boyle to Lady Elizabeth Russey,
66. H.
Fisch, ‘The scientist as
priest: a note on Robert Boyle’s natural theology’,
11
unifying factor or connecting principle, is
quite another—and the subject to which we shall now turn.
Between 1649 and 1654 or 1655 Boyle wrote five essays
that are perhaps as close as he ever came to the ‘discourse. ... of the theological use of natural philosophy’ mentioned in
the letter of the late summer of 1649. These were published in 1663 as ‘Part I’ of Some
Considerations touching the Usefulness of experimental natural philosophy. [67] In these
five essays Boyle set out to refute those who claimed that study of the created
order leads to preoccupation with second causes to the neglect or exclusion
from consideration of the first, the Creator himself. [68] On the authority of the Bible,
Plutarch, Cicero, Macrobius, Seneca, Philo, [69]
Galen [70] and Clement of Alexandria, [71] Boyle asserted that nature is a
temple and man the priest. All creatures
embody evidence of God’s glory. But man
alone among them enjoys reason enough to witness this evidence and ‘return
thanks and praises to his Maker’, which he does ‘not only for himself; but for
the whole creation’. [72] God thus accomplishes one of the two
ends of the creation, the manifestation of his glory. So the study of nature, far from being
irreligious, is man’s primary duty to God and ‘the homage we pay for the
privilege of reason’. [73] Through such study man also benefits
himself: Not only does nature supply his
wants and appetites; it teaches him virtue and piety. The benefit of man being God’s other aim in
the creation, He accomplishes both of his ends at
once. [74] In
Boyle’s hands the doctrine of God’s two purposes in the creation acquired a
particular ideological significance. To
the extent that man plays his part in fulfilling these purposes, Boyle argued,
he will answer the four real enemies of true religion - indolent gentry, ‘Macchiavillians’, sectaries and philosophical heretics. Boyle thus turned the case of the detractors
of natural philosophy on its head. Not
only is the study of nature not irreligious; it is itself the best defence against irreligion.
Wherein does this study consist and how would it overcome the fourfold
threat to true religion?
First there was the problem of the indolent gentry. Boyle claimed them to be ‘lulled asleep by
custom and sensuality’. [75] ‘Custom’ had restricted their ‘...Acts of Devotion
to the Begging of Blessings from God, and returning them to Him in the Person
of one’s Neighbor’. [76]
This was acceptable as far as it went. But God’s mercy is not his only perfection - far
from it. There are also his wisdom and
power, ‘for whose Manifesting he was pleased to construct this vast Fabricke’. [77] These attributes had ‘exacted both Men
and Angell’s
67. See note 59 above.
68. Considerations, Part I, in Works,
I, 425, 429-30, 440, 442, 443 and 453.
69. Ibid., p. 441; and,
The Boyle Papers, Philosophy, VIII, 226 r. (The Boyle Papers, Philosophy, VIII,
fols. 223-38 were probably written during the same
period as ‘Part I’ of Considerations; compare, for instance, Works, I,
424 and 426, and fol. 229; Works, I, 430, and fol. 224 v.; Works, I,
432, and fol. 227 v.; Works, I, 433 and 439, and fol. 138r.; and, Works,
I, 441-443, and fols. 125 r. 128 v.).
70. Considerations, Part
I, in Works, I, 454.
71. The Boyle Papers, Philosophy, VIII,
226 r.
72. Considerations, Part I, in Works,
I, 441.
73. Ibid., p.461.
74. Ibid., pp. 441-2.
75. Ibid., pp. 425-6.
76. The Boyle Papers,
Philosophy, Viii, 125 r.; and, Considerations, Part I, in Works, I,
442.
77. The Boyle Papers,
Philosophy, Viii, 125 V.
12
Adoration, before they needed’ his mercy. To Boyle ‘it appeares something selfish and to imply an injurious Disparity
betwixt Perfections, all equall because all Infinite,
to let God’s Mercy... engrosse our Thoughts’, to the
neglect of his other attributes. [78] Men should thus also worship Him
through the contemplation of his creatures. Boyle went on to suggest that gentlemen should
do as he did and devote a portion of the Sabbath to such contemplation,
supporting his case by an appeal to Mosaical
authority. [79] Besides the impediment of ‘custom’,
there was that of ‘sensuality’. Left to
themselves, men take the line of least resistance. Because of their superior faculties they can
delight in observing the created order without the slightest exertion. ‘... The
bare beholding of this admirable structure, is capable
of pleasing men...’ [80] Anything more requires application. At this point ‘sensuality’ takes over in many,
and they refuse to make the effort. Boyle replied, ‘… if we (contenting ourselves
with the superficial account given us of things by their obvious appearances
and qualities) are beholden for that we know, to our nature, not our industry,
we faultily lose both one of the noblest imployments,
and one of the highest satisfactions of our rational faculty’. [8l]
In the study of the creatures Boyle found an
alternative to indolence. Second he
provided the same alternative to the pursuits of ‘the Macchiavillians’. As he had shown in his ‘Aretology’,
their preoccupation was with the acquisition of fame and power regardless of
the consequences. Boyle now claimed that
if they were successful, it was due not to their knowledge but to their birth
and fortune. Such success could give
them neither honour nor contentment - not honour because their positions rested less upon anything
they themselves had designed and accomplished than upon circumstances beyond
their control, and not contentment because circumstances change and foil the
successful; knowing this, they could not possibly enjoy any peace of mind. In essence they could take satisfaction
neither in what had already happened nor in what was going to. True honour and
contentment come then, Boyle suggested, not from the pursuit of fame and power
but from study and knowledge of the creatures. [82] This is so because, as we have seen,
Boyle believed that natural philosophy teaches men the ways of God and how to
live according to them. So Boyle’s
answer to the threat of ‘the Macchiavillians’ was the
same as his advice to the indolent - to apply oneself to the investigation of
the world, to the performance of one’s priestly function, the role to which God
has assigned man, in the temple of nature. The reward will follow - a life proportioned
to divine providence and a deep and permanent happiness as distinct from the
one, hollow and tenuous, that fortune holds out.
Third there was the problem of the sectaries. They believed, Boyle held, that learning is a
‘Profane Thing’. [83] They also claimed that God speaks
directly to his saints and thus reveals to them the truths of things. So divine illumination, not human learning,
should be man’s guide. Such a view makes
78. Ibid., p. 128.
79. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I, 442-3; and, The
Boyle Papers, Philosophy, VIII, 128.
80. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I, 424.
81. Ibid., p. 426.
82. Ibid., p. 429.
83. B. M., Harley 7003, fol. 279, Boyle to Mallet,
November 1651.
13
each man’s private vision the measure of
wisdom. The political and social
implications of this view were what disturbed Boyle in his defence
of the republic against ‘the vu1gar’, already examined. [84] In the early 1650s when he wrote the
essays in hand, these implications were anything but academic. On the basis of their claims to divine
inspiration many sectaries, some in high places, preached an imminent
millennium. [85] This
situation posed a threat to the existing order. So Boyle’s judgment and interests, realized
under and protected by that order, led him to oppose the sectaries. He said to them as to the indolent and ‘the Macchiavilliains’ that knowledge is the product of
industry, of the sustained exertion of intelligence, of the application of
reason to the observation of the creatures. Visions, he suggested, generate an excitement
in their subject detrimental to his understanding. [86] Boyle also enlisted the hermetic
tradition in support of his position. [87] According to seventeenth-century
legend, Hermes Trismegistus was an ancient whose
knowledge had come straight from God. All
subsequent philosophies were supposed to have been derivative of this source
and as such to have been nothing better than pale copies and partial glimpses
of the divinely-revealed wisdom of Hermes. Boyle assumed in his use of the tradition that
the early Hebrews possessed something like the complete hermetic wisdom. [88] The ancient Egyptians,
according to Josephus, learned true ‘astronomy and philosophy’ from Abraham. Later, Aristotle, according to other ‘Jewish
authors’, borrowed from Solomon’s ‘matchless records of nature’. Since then much of Aristotle’s natural
philosophy had been lost. Boyle offered
an explanation. The missing Aristotle is
what he took from Solomon and as such represents the true philosophy of nature
revealed by God to the leaders of his chosen people. He may have caused such wisdom to be lost as a
part of his conscious design. Boyle
wrote:
Providence perhaps deprived
the world..., upon such a score, as it did the Jews of the body of Moses, lest
men should idolise it, or as some Rabbies
are pleased to inform us, lest vicious men should venture upon all kinds of
intemperance, out of confidence of finding out by help of those excellent
writings the cure of all the distempers their dissoluteness should produce. [89]
Neither visions nor revelations from on high,
therefore, would bring knowledge befitting a true Christian: visions
impair understanding, and divine revelation,
84. See notes 56 and 57 above.
85. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Oliver Cromwell and his Parliaments’, in
Religion,
the Reformation and Social Change,
86. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I, 424.
87. Fisch, op. cit., pp. 252-65,
treats of Boyle’s appropriation of hermetic doctrines and claims that they
served as the basis of ‘the integration’ of his science and religion, to which
his natural philosophy in turn ‘owes its dynamism...’ (ibid.,
pp. 253-4). But according to Fisch, Boyle’s reasons for appropriating hermetic doctrines
were ‘metaphysical and psychological’ (ibid., p. 254), whereas I shall
argue that they were social and ideological.
89. The Boyle Papers, Philosophy, 227 v.; and, Considerations,
Part I, in Works, I, 441.
89. Ibid., 429.
14
though affording complete comprehension, would
for that very reason tempt men to lives of sin. Boyle’s way, on the other hand, the way of
reason and industry, is not open to attack upon either of these grounds. To quite the contrary.
First the man who conditions himself to
Boyle’s way will be less given to excitement than the visionary and so less
susceptible of any impairment of his understanding. Second the sustained application of
intelligence to a searching inquiry into nature will itself make a man
virtuous. Negatively the very labour of
the search will keep a man from vice. Positively the inquiry will reveal more and
more evidence of God in the creatures and so cannot help but have a morally and
spiritually beneficial effect. A man
will thus grow so piously conditioned that when he makes discoveries, such as
cures, he will regard them not as inducements to vice wherewith to patch up
‘all distempers’ that future ‘dissoluteness should produce’ but instead as
gifts of God or at most rewards of virtue. It is curious that Boyle used the hermetic
tradition to support his position because certain sectaries did the same. [90] It was obviously
capable of various, even contrary interpretations. In this regard Boyle may have appropriated the
tradition to his own purposes partly in an effort to steal the sectaries’
hermetic thunder. [91] It is interesting to note in this
connection that one of Boyle’s chief sources for the tradition was The
Divine Pymander, translated by John Everard and published in London in 1650: [92] Everard’s view of the relative merits of learning and
divine inspiration as means to truth was precisely that of the sectaries which
Boyle was attacking, [93] Everard himself having been
‘haled before High Commission in 1639 for familism, antinominism and anabaptism and
fined a thousand pounds’. [94]
A sectary might have argued that Boyle’s way to
knowledge makes a man rely for understanding upon himself alone and that
therefore his own way was more godly because he depended, instead, upon divine
illumination. Boyle’s position, however,
precluded such a case being made against it: just as natural philosophy can
deepen piety, so God can reward such piety in a man by furthering his
understanding of nature. God’s
contribution, to be sure, does
90. Geoffrey Nuttali, “Unity with the
Creation”: George Fox and the hermetic tradition’, in The Puritan Spirit, London,
1967, pp. 194-203; and, John Webster, Academiarum
Examen, London, 1654, pp. 26-32.
91. This sort of motive almost certainly whetted his interest in rabbinnical studies in this period. In 1651 he knew that the Jews might shortly
win legal toleration in
92. Compare The Boyle Papers, Philosophy, VIII, 127 V., and Everard’s translation, p. 2; and, The Boyle Papers,
Philosophy, VIII, 128 v., and Everard, p. 1 and ‘To
the Reader’; see also Considerations, Part I, in Works, I, 441
and 458.
93. William Hailer, The Rise of
Puritanism,
94. Hailer, op.cit., p. 208.
15
not come in the form of a
sudden and. total. revelation of nature’s secrets - as
this, as we have seen, might produce undesirable consequences. Boyle wrote, for instance, ‘... I dare not
affirm, with some of the Helmontians and Paracelsians,
that God discloses to men the great mystery of chymistry
by good angels, or by nocturnal visions…’ [95] Boyle said ‘some’, not all, ‘Helmontians and Paracelsians’
because he, too, used the work of Paracelsus and J. B. van Helmànt
in his own chemical studies. [96] Who then were the ones from whom Boyle
was here dissociating himself? They
would seem to have been the sectaries again whose view that knowledge is a
matter of visions and divine revelations derived from, among other sources, the
works of Paracelsus and van Helmont. [97] Evidence suggests
that in taking this position Boyle was answering Thomas Vaughan, a contemporary
hermetist who believed that through divine illuinination men can arrive at a complete comprehension of
the universe. [98] Vaughan himself was not a sectary. [99] But his views were
similar to those of some sects, and Henry More, for instance, attacked
The fourth threat was that of
philosophical heretics who might be either Aristotelian or Epicurean. Boyle undertook to answer them in ‘Essay IV. Containing a requisite Digression concerning
those, that exclude the Deity from inter-meddling with
Matter.’ The answer represents his first
unequivocal affirmation of the ideas that were to be the basis of his
scientific work. These consisted of a
particulate theory of matter that was treated as an
hypothesis to be tested by experiment. [102] The strictly technical and intellectual
origins and aspects of these ideas, Boyle’s so-called corpuscular philosophy,
have been
95. Considerations, Part
I, in Works, I, 460.
96. Works, I, 167; Maddison, Studies, VI; and, J. J. O’Brien, ‘Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on Robert Boyle’s scientific
development. Part I. The Stalbridge Period’, Annals of Science, XXI (March
1965), pp. 1-14.
97. P. M. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’, Ambix, XI (1964), pp. 24-32; P. M. Rattansi, ‘The intellectual origins of the Royal Society’, Notes
and Records of the Royal Society of London, XXIII (December 1968), pp. 136-7;
and, Webster. op.
cit., pp. 74-6, and pp. 106-7.
98. Compare, for example, Considerations,
Part I, in Works, I, 461, and Thomas Vaughan., Magia
Adamica: or the Antiquitie
of Magic, in A. E. Waite (ed), The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan, London,
1888, pp. 103-4; see also G. H. Turnbuil, ‘George Stirk, philosopher by fire (1628?-1665), Publications of
the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXXVIII. Transactions 1947-1951,
99. Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica,
in Waite (ed.), op.cit., p. 38.
100. M. H. Nicholson (ed.), The Conwav Letters,
101. Considerations, Part
I, in Works, 1,460.
102. Ibid., pp. 446 and
450.
16
dealt with elsewhere. [103] But the full story of his adoption of
these ideas has not been told because it has not been seen how they comported
with his contemporary religious and ideological position. How then did Boyle’s corpuscular philosophy
not only explain the phenomena but do so in such a way as at least at the
outset to serve an ideological function? An answer to this question emerges from ‘Essay
IV’ where Boyle treated of contemporary Aristotelians and Epicureans who
claimed ‘to be able to explicate the first beginning of things and the
world’s phenomena, without taking in, or acknowledging any divine Author of
it’. [104]
Those who followed Aristotle in this regard said ‘that
if a man put one end of a long reed into a vessel full of water, and suck at
the other end, the suction drawing the air out of the cavity of the reed, the
water must necessarily succeed in the place deserted by the air, to prevent a
vacuity abhorred by nature’. [105] This
explanation, Boyle said, ‘supposes that there is a kind of anima mundi, furnished with various passions, which watchfully
provides for the safety of the universe; or that a brute and inanimate
creature, as water, not only has a power to move its heavy body upwards,
contrary (to speak in their language) to the tendency of its particular nature,
but knows both that unless it succeed the attracted air, there will follow a
vacuum; and that this water is withal so generous, as by ascending, to act
contrary to its particular inclination for the general good of the universe,
like a noble patriot, that sacrifices his private interests to the publick ones of his country’. [106] But to claim that irrational creatures
are capable of such reason and virtue is, Boyle said, to put them on a par with
man. [107] Worse than this, since such
creatures are not possessed of rational and hence immortal souls and yet can do
everything that man is supposed to be able to do by reason of his, the
implication is that he does not have one either. [108] So Boyle objected to this Aristotelian
position in the last analysis because it leads logically to a denial of the immortality
of the human soul as conventionally understood. No doubt his objection was whetted by the fact
that such a denial based upon arguments like those of the Aristotelians here
was current among religious and political radicals during the 1640s and 1650s,
the obvious examples being Milton and Richard Overton, the Leveller
leader. [109] Neither
Milton nor Overton was an atheist. But less
radical thinkers saw a threat of atheism or at least of disorder in the mortalist’s position. If men came to believe that the soul is
mortal, conventional religion would lose one of its strongest sanctions. What difference does it make what one does in
this life, if the individual soul does not survive intact into the next, there
to receive its just deserts? This
attitude would leave the door open to every form of vice and rebellion. Of course Boyle would
103. For instance, Marie Boas, ‘Boyle as theoretical scientist’, Isis,
XL (1950), pp. 261-8; Westfall, Boyle Papers, pp. 63-73 and 103-17; Kargon, op. cit., pp. 93-105; and, Laurans Laudan, ‘The clock
metaphor and probabi1ism: the impact of Descartes on English methodological
thought, 1650-65’, Annals of Science, XII (June 1966), pp. 73-104.
104. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I,
~
105. Ibid., p. 445.
106.
Ibid.
107. Ibid., pp. 445 and 446-7.
108. Ibid., p. 447.
109. Denis Saurat,
17
oppose a view that would
undermine as this did his ethic of rewards and punishments and so give ‘Macchiavillians’ and sectaries a free hand. Thus when before the restoration he heard the
younger Sir Henry Vane preach to his followers on a biblical text suggestive of
mortalism, Boyle spoke up and made it clear that he
countenanced nothing but a strictly orthodox exegesis of the passage. [110] Thus too his
corpuscular philosophy offered an alternative, avoiding any mortalistic
implications, to Aristotelian explanations. The rising of fluid in a tube when one
end is sucked and the other immersed in the liquid is due not to ‘nature’s
detestation of a vacuity’ but to strictly material factors - ‘the pressure of
the air (against the liquors and the sucker’s chest) and their respective
measures of gravity and lightness compared to that pressure...” [111] This and similar
explanations of other phenomena led Boyle in the same essay to adopt his
corpuscular theory of matter : [112]
… methinks
we may, without absurdity, conceive, that God,... having resolved before the
creation, to make such a world as this of ours, did divide (at least if he did
not create it incoherent) that matter, which he had provided, into an
innumerable multitude of very variously figured corpuscles, and both connected
those particles into such textures or particular bodies, and placed them in
such situations, and put them into such motions, that by the assistance of his
ordinary preserving concourse, the phaenomena, which
he intended should appear in the universe, must as orderly follow, and be
exhibited by the bodies necessarily acting according to those impressions or
laws, though they understand them not at all, as if each of those creatures had
a design of self-preservation, and were furnished with knowledge and industry
to prosecute it; and as if there were diffused through the universe an
intelligent being, watchful over the publick good of
it, and careful to administer all things wisely for the good of the particular
parts of it, but so far forth as is consistent with the good of the whole...
The creatures behave ‘as if each... had a design of
self-preservation, and were furnished with knowledge and industry to prosecute
it...” But it is really God who makes
them do so, and the immortality of the human, soul is thus preserved.
By making God the
origin of motion in ‘(most of) the... phaenomena of
nature’ excluding man, Boyle also answered ‘the modern admirers of Epicurus’. Although he had adopted their atomic
conception of matter, he refused to accept their view, which excluded God from
the creation and government of the world, that motion is inherent in the atoms.
[113]
The proper study of nature,
according to Boyle, would diminish if not eliminate all threats. But more positively what sort of order would
this study produce, while counteracting the enemy? Boyle suggested that the creatures teach men
the same lessons as the Bible. ‘This is
so because [114]
110. Birch, Life in Works, I, 88.
111. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I,
445.
112. Ibid, p. 446.
113. Ibid., pp.447-9, and 455-2.
114. Ibid., p. 439.
18
not content to have
provided him [man] all, that was requisite either to support or
accommodate him here, he [God] hath been pleased to contrive the world so,
that... it may afford him not only necessaries and delights, but instructions
too. For each page in the great volume
of nature is full of real hieroglyphicics, where (by
an inverted way of expression) things stand for words, and their qualities for
letters.
In fact a knowledge of God’s works is in some cases
necessary to a proper understanding of his word, ‘the Scripture being so full
of allusions to and comparisons borrowed from the properties of the creatures,
that there are many texts not clearly intelligible without some knowledge of
them… [115] The
most important instance to Boyle’s mind of the function of the creatures in
this regard is the light they shed for man upon divine providence and human
prudence. Indeed the Scriptures
themselves tell man to go to nature for instruction in both of these crucial
matters. [116]
Christ commands his
disciples to learn of serpents and pigeons prudence and inoffensiveness.
The same divine teacher enjoins his
apostles to consider the lilies, or (as some would have it) the tulips of
the field, and to learn thence that difficult virtue of a distrustless reliance upon God.
What is most interesting and
significant is the lesson Boyle learned from ‘serpents and pigeons’, when he
supposedly did go to nature and observe them.
The serpent is wise, the dove ‘harmless’ or innocent. The serpent’s wisdom consists in ‘a serpentine
wariness in declining dangers’; the dove’s innocence, in ‘not alone an inoffensivess towards others... but also as harmless a way of
escaping the dangers they are actually ingaged in, as
that of doves, who being pursued by birds of prey, endeavour
to save themselves not by fight, but only by flight.’ [117] The serpent’s wisdom, in other words,
amounts to the same thing as the dove’s harmlessness. Where the dove’s harmlessness is wise, the
serpent’s cunning is innocent. Both
creatures act out of an instinct for self-preservation, when it comes to ‘declining
dangers’. The dove especially manifests
to man the value of rational calculation. Against fierce ‘birds of prey’ the gentle dove
is not a match. So in such a case the
creature endeavours to save itself ‘not by fight, but
only by flight’. The dove and serpent
then are images or types of prudence. As
such, Boyle said, ‘our great Master’ recommends them ‘to his disciples’. [118]
Well might Boyle have made the
instance of ‘serpents and pigeons’ the most important light that nature sheds
upon Scripture. The biblical lesson that
Boyle claimed the dove and serpent teach is precisely the conclusion to which
he had already come as a result of his experience of an reflection upon events;
men need only make rational calculations on the basis of what they take to be
their long-run interests, act accordingly and trust in providence to do the
115. Ibid., p. 433.
116. Thi4., p. 439.
117. Ibid., p. 433.
118. The Boyle Papers,
Philosophy, VIII, fol. 138 r., written during the same period as the passages
I have just quoted (note 68 above), confirms the point of this paragraph
and the following paragraph of my text.
19
rest. Men will then be like the dove and serpent, at once wise and innocent, and as such will follow the surest path towards reformation, the best possible order upon earth, wherein providential harmony in human affairs will prevail. [119]
The other virtue that nature can
teach preparatory to the establishment of a Christian commonwealth is ‘a
provident industry’ [120] something which ‘The Aretology’
had also prescribed. Certain of the
creatures display a diligence that man would do well to imitate. [121] The proper study of
the creatures also, as we have seen, demands industrious application. Such efforts in these directions as man chooses
to expend will indeed be highly ‘provident’. The upshot of Boyle’s ethic is a ‘provident’ meliorism: a man who pursues his aims with industry and
prudence and entrusts the outcome to providence can be certain of the ultimate
success of his venture. In the specific
case of an industrious inquiry into nature there is a threefold reward. There is first an increase in useful
knowledge. [122] Second there is an
improvement in man’s moral and spiritual condition because, as we have seen,
such an inquiry enhances piety by revealing to man evidence of God and how to
bring human affairs into harmony with the natural and providential order of
things. Third and finally, Boyle
suggested that the proper study of nature bridges religious and political
divisions among men. It knows no
boundaries and draws support, as Boyle showed in his treatment of the hermetic
tradition, from all religions. [123] And because ‘it is the first act of
religion, and equally obliging in all religions’, performance of this obligation
should take precedence over that of any other. Too often, however, the reverse is the case, [124]
Which makes me somewhat
angry with them, who so busy themselves in the duties and imployments
of their second and superinduced relations, that they
will never find the leisure to discharge that primitive and natural obligation,
who are more concerned as citizens of any place, than of the world; and both
worship God so barely as Catholick or Protestants,
Anabaptists or Socinians, and live so wholly as lords
or counsellors,
119. B.M. Add. MS. 32093, fol.
293, Boyle to Mallet,
120. Considerations, Part I, in Works, I,
439.
121.
Ibid.
122. Ibid., pp. 429, 460.
123. Ibid., p. 457.
12.4 Ibid., p. 462.
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Londoners or Parisians, that they will never find the leisure, or
consider not, that it concerns them to worship and live as men...
The suggestion is that what men have in common in the
way of this primary obligation to acknowledge God’s glory through the proper
study of nature is much more conducive to their happiness both here and
hereafter than the things that divide them - perhaps because such study is what
overcomes these divisions. Boyle was
true in the early 1650s to the irenic aim that he had shared with Dury and Hartlib in the 1640s. Only now he saw a new means to religious unity
and harmony in the proper study of nature. Now too one of his closest associates in this
aim was his brother Roger, to whom he dedicated his own contribution to irenic
literature, Some considerations touching the
style of the Holy Scriptures, when it was published in 1661. [125] This was in
consequence of the permission for him to do so that Roger had given in 1653 or 1654,
[126] a year or so after the treatise was written. [127] At this time Broghill
was one of the chief parliamentary advocates of ecclesiastical comprehension. [128]
It is also interesting that Dr James
Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, figured in the irenic
efforts of both brothers. Usher’s model
of church government seems to have served as a basis of Roger’s own schemes. [129]
And the Archbishop’s encouragements,
Robert said, ‘much engaged me to the study of the holy tongues’, [130] a task
that, aimed as it was at an accurate rendering of biblical literature, was not
without its irenic uses. [131] Thus
Robert’s philosophy of nature and Roger’s ecclesiastical politics seem to have
emerged out of a mutual commitment and to have represented two aspects of a
single effort.
When Boyle wrote in answer to
Aristotelian heretics that God causes irrational creatures to behave ‘as if
each... had a design of self-preservation, and were furnished with
knowledge and industry to prosecute it…’, there was more in what he said than
his object in this instance, which was to counter the mortalists,
would indicate. God makes the creatures
act as he would have man also do, and nature through her signal examples of
prudence and industry can show him the way. The outcome should be the same for man as it
is in nature: ‘... as if there were diffused through the universe an
intelligent being watchful to administer all things wisely for the good of the
particular parts of it, but so far forth as is consistent with the good of the
whole...’ If there is no
‘intelligent being’ ‘diffused through the universe’ such as the Aristotelian
position suggested, there is providence and this is enough, enough to guarantee
that private interests piously pursued will conduce to the public good. This is the conclusion to which Boyle came as
a result of his experience of and response to events. With the help of the Bible and its
commentators, alchemy, astrology and hermetic lore Boyle read this conclusion
into nature and saw it refracted out again as a universal truth, the sum of
revealed wisdom, and the road to reformation.
125. Works, 11, p. 107.
126. Ibid., p. 88.
127 Ibid.,
p. 90; and, Birch, Life in Works, I, 28.
128. George
R. Abernathy, Jr., ‘The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648-1663’,
in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S.,
129. Ibid., pp. 11-12, and 13-14.
130. Quoted in Birch, Life in Works, I, 29.
131. Works, II, 107.
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