Robert Boyle was perhaps the finest experimental natural philosopher of his age. He was active in the Republic of Letters, being one of the founding members of the Royal Society and a correspondent with scientific luminaries of his day. He was in broad strokes an adherent of what was then called the mechanical philosophy, which held that all qualities of natural things could be reduced to the properties of matter in motion. He was a reductionist about qualities, holding that “almost all sorts of qualities … may be produced … by such corporeal agents as do not appear either to work otherwise than by virtue of the motion, size, figure, and contrivance, of their own parts” (Boyle 1666, preface)