The seventh son of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, the Right Honorable Robert Boyle became the foremost natural philosopher in Britain in the period immediately before Newton. Educated by private tutors, he began his career as a lay religious thinker and moralist. Always extremely devout, he turned to the study of the natural world in order to develop a natural theology; many of his most important works use natural phenomena to argue for the existence and benevolence of God. These include Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663), A Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), and The Christian Virtuoso (1690). He began by setting up an alchemical laboratory in his manor house at Stalbridge in Dorset. In 1654 he moved to Oxford where he took on Robert Hooke (1635–1703) as his assistant, and became part of the circle of natural philosophers who were to help set up the Royal Society in 1660. Boyle's alchemical studies embraced the theories of Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) and others who had developed a corpuscular theory of alchemy, and so he was well placed to embrace the corpuscular physics of Descartes. According to John Aubrey (1626–97), author of the biographical notes later published as Brief Lives (1898), it was Robert Hooke who “made him understand Des Cartes’ Philosophy,” and Boyle was one of the first to characterize Descartes’ philosophy as the “mechanical philosophy.” Boyle was never a full-fledged Cartesian, however, because his alchemical and other experimental studies and his religious sensibilities convinced him that matter could be endowed with principles of activity.

Boyle also embraced the belief, advocated by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and later promoted by the Royal Society, that reform of natural knowledge was best accomplished by gathering facts, without allowing any preconceived ideas or theories to dictate what supposed “facts” were important. Bacon's inductivist experimentalism, in which experiments are not (must not be) designed to test a hypothesis but are merely intended as ways of gathering more facts, is generally regarded by philosophers of science as unworkable. Certainly, in many of his experiments Boyle can be seen to have been following what is now recognized as the (decidedly un-Baconian) hypothetico-deductive method; nevertheless, it cannot be denied that, in some of his works at least, Boyle came closer than anyone else to exemplifying the Baconian method. Some of his most important works were attempts to provide the kinds of “natural histories” of phenomena advocated by Bacon: New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air (1662), Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664), New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold (1665), Memoirs for the Natural History of Humane Blood (1684), and others. It was Boyle's perceived Baconianism that made him so respected among contemporaries, especially in Britain, where Bacon's influence was strongest. Boyle's Baconianism also ensured that he could not endorse Descartes’ essentially rationalist approach to knowledge.

Boyle believed that his commitment to a corpuscular mechanical philosophy could be justified experimentally and therefore made compatible with his Baconianism: corpuscular explanations were intelligible and persuasive because they were based on the kind of physical explanations familiar to us from everyday experience. While developing these claims, he was led to make the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which was subsequently taken up by John Locke.

See also Bacon, Francis; Experiment; Locke, John; Method; Physics