Book World review of Michael Hunter's 'Boyle: Between God and Science'
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
BOYLE
Between God and Science
By Michael Hunter
Yale Univ. 366 pp. $55
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) ranks with Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin among the greatest of English scientists. In his laboratory practice and in books such as "The Sceptical Chymist" (1661), Boyle helped establish the modern experimental method. He made anatomical dissections, analyzed the nature of colors and human blood, investigated luminescence, studied medicine, pneumatics and hydrostatics, speculated about the temperature of the oceans and the Earth's core, and even wrote an essay on how poisons could be used to cure illness.
Most of us can dredge up at least a vague memory of Boyle's Law, which established the inverse relationship between the pressure applied to a gas and its volume (as one increases, the other decreases, if the temperature is kept constant). Boyle's famous experiments with an air pump, which allowed the gradual creation of a vacuum in a bell-like metal canister, killed various test animals but also led to a better understanding of respiration. Above all, Boyle argued that the universe was built of tiny particles he called "corpuscles" and that it was, in essence, a marvelous machine, matter in motion.
However, Boyle was far more than just a scientist. He grew up as the privileged son of the wealthy Earl of Cork, and his siblings were lords and ladies. Alongside his active scientific career, he labored mightily as a devout Christian, publishing theological works justifying the ways of God to men and supporting evangelical crusades among the Irish, the North American Indians and the peoples of Asia. He even paid to have the New Testament translated into Irish and Algonquian. It's no accident that Boyle's first two published works were an unlikely pair: "Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God" (a.k.a. "Seraphic Love," 1659) and "New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects" (1660) -- by "spring" Boyle meant what we now call pressure. In his will, this scientist and religious apologist combined his chief passions in the establishment of the Boyle Lectures -- still given -- in which the evidence of nature and science was to be deployed to defend Christian belief.
That said, there was yet a third, darker and more mysterious passion in Boyle's life: alchemy. This pious Christian and outstanding member of the scientific Royal Society was also an occult philosopher, a follower of Hermes Trismegistus, virtually a magus.
Before anyone e-mails Dan Brown with an idea for a new novel, let me point out that Iain Pears's long, brilliantly structured mystery "An Instance of the Fingerpost" features Boyle and his air pump as well as philosopher John Locke, Boyle's good friend. Similarly, Neal Stephenson's fantastic Baroque Cycle -- "Quicksilver," "The Confusion" and "The System of the World" -- imaginatively builds on this intersection of the occult and the scientific in early modern England. Newton, who himself has been called "the last alchemist," corresponded with Boyle about the possibility of "projection," that is, the transmutation of base metals into gold, and about the search for a so-called "alkahest," or universal solvent, with which one could "reduce any substance to its component parts." As scholars now recognize, alchemy wasn't replaced by chemistry nor occult studies overturned by true science. Boyle's life and work demonstrate that one could be, simultaneously, a pioneering scientist, a fundamentalist Christian and a practicing adept.
Michael Hunter is not only our leading authority on Boyle and the general editor of his complete works, but also a wide-ranging scholar of 17th-century scientific thought in general. (I recommend his study of that wonderfully eccentric antiquary and memoirist John Aubrey.) Still, "Boyle: Between God and Science" can be frustrating as well as absorbing. Although Boyle was prolific in publishing his works of science and theology, he left little in the way of personal material -- and not much in the way of charming anecdote. His life was essentially cerebral. Boyle seems to have regarded the plague as a nuisance and the restoration of Charles II as important only insofar as it affected his rents. But Hunter himself overlooks opportunities for legitimate readerly entertainment, as when he mentions that the second Earl of Castlehaven was involved in "a notorious scandal." The accompanying footnote leads only to a scholarly tome, with no hint as to what the earl actually did. Sodomy was the least of it.
Nonetheless, one does learn that Boyle suffered from a terrible stutter and that he eventually damaged his vision, so that in later years he had to employ secretaries and amanuenses. Like any educated scholar, he could write Latin with ease, but to further his theological investigations he also learned Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Aramaic. His library was extensive, and he once said that "to be able to write one good Book on some Subjects, a man must have been at the trouble to read an hundred."
Throughout his life, Boyle was beset by a psychological tendency to indecision and doubt, to endless qualifications and religious scruple. This led him to turn to casuistry -- the careful probing of one's conscience and motives, usually with the assistance of a learned religious adviser. At times, this practice recalls legalistic cross-examination and modern psychoanalysis, as one seeks to resolve some moral or ethical dilemma. Perhaps not incidentally, the lordly Boyle regularly took all the credit for his discoveries rather than fully acknowledging his predecessors or assistants, even such gifted ones as Robert Hooke.
Still, Boyle possessed an astonishing flair for devising imaginative experiments, and he was nothing if not wide-ranging in his interests. One of his last books includes a section called "Strange Reports," focusing on "plants resuscitated from their ashes" and other bizarre matters. He also promised but apparently never produced a study of witchcraft, second sight and other aspects of the supernatural. After Boyle's death, however, Newton wrote to Locke asking him about an alchemical secret that Boyle had apparently promised to leave him. The greatest English philosopher eventually sent England's greatest scientific mind some kind of mysterious "recipe."
In his concluding chapter, Hunter quite naturally emphasizes his subject's importance in the history of science. He concludes that Boyle was "significant above all for his insistence on the need to conjoin natural philosophy with natural history -- in the sense that conclusions needed to be based on the rigorous collection of experimental evidence -- and for his demarcation between facts and hypotheses." Fair enough. But I'd still like to know what was in that "recipe" sent to Newton.
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