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The Testimony of Nature: Boyle, Hooke and Experimental Philosophy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Robert H. Kargon
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Extract

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

The first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”

Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Summer 1971 , pp. 72 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1971

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the Pacific Northwest Section of the Conference on British Studies on 6 March 1971 in a slightly different form.

References

NOTES

1 See Webster, Charles, “The Origins of the Royal Society,” History of Science, 6 (1967), p. 117.Google Scholar

2 Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667).Google Scholar

3 Purver, Margery, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 6.Google Scholar

4 Webster, , “Origins,” p. 117Google ScholarPubMed. See also Kargon, R., Atomism in England (Oxford, 1966), ch. XGoogle Scholar, for one interpretation of varieties of Baconianism in the Royal Society.

5 Hall, Marie Boas, Robert Boyle and 17th Century Chemistry (Cambridge, 1958), passimGoogle Scholar, and Hesse, Mary, “Hooke's Philosophical Algebra.” Isis, 57 (1966), pp. 67–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Debus, A., The English Paracelsians (London, 1965), pp. 13–48Google ScholarPubMed. See also Boyle's, RobertSceptical Chymist (London, 1661)Google Scholar for a treatment of the debate among world-views.

7 Quoted in Hall, Boas, Boyle, p. 78.Google Scholar

8 Hall, M. Boas, Boyle, p. 91.Google Scholar

9 Hall, Marie Boas, Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy (Bloomington, Indiana, 1965), p. 123.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., pp. 123-124.

11 Boyle, , Works of the Hon. Robert Boyle, ed. Birch, T. (London, 1732), V, pp. 539–540.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., IV, p. 232.

13 Ibid., p. 233.

14 Ibid., V, p. 529.

15 Hesse, Mary, “Hooke's Philosophical Algebra,” Isis, 57 (1966), 67–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Hooke, Robert, Posthumous Works, ed. Waller, Richard (London, 1705), p. 5Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as Hooke, P.W.

17 Ibid., p. 6.

18 Bacon, Francis, The New Organon, ed. Anderson, Fulton (Indianapolis, 1960), p. 34.Google Scholar

19 Hooke, , P.W., pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 61.

21 For Boyle and Newton on transdiction, see Mandelbaum's, M. very valuable essay in Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (Baltimore, 1964), ch. 2.Google Scholar

22 Hooke, , P.W., p. 536Google Scholar. For other views of the “hypothetical physics” see R. Kargon, op. cit., chs. VII - XI.

23 Quoted in Gunther, Robert, Early Science in Oxford (Oxford, 1930), VI, 112.Google Scholar

24 Hooke, , P.W., p. 357.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p. 34.

26 Bacon, N. O., Book II, aphorism XX.

27 Ibid., Book II, aphorism XXI.

28 Ibid., aphorism XXXV.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Hooke, R., Micrographia (London, 1665), p. 54.Google Scholar

32 See the excellent discussion of Sabra, A. I., Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (London, 1967), pp. 65 ff.Google Scholar

33 Hooke, , Micrographia, p. 54.Google Scholar

34 Cohen, I. B., (ed.), Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 50.Google Scholar