Robert Boyle – The origin of forms and qualities according to the corpuscular philosophy
[...] having for many reasons, elsewhere mentioned, purposely forborne the reading of some
very much and, for aught I know, very justly esteemed discourses about general hypotheses,
it is very possible that I may be a stranger to some ofthose arguments - besides this, I say, I
confess I have purposely forborne to make use of others which I have sufficiently taken
notice of. For some of those ratiocinations would engage him that should employ them to
adopt a hypothesis or theory in which, perhaps, I am not so thoroughly satisfied, and of which
I do not conceive myself to have, on this occasion, any necessity to make use: and
accordingly I have forborne to employ arguments that are either grounded on, or suppose,
indivisible corpuscles called atoms, or any innate motion belonging to them; or that the
essence of bodies consists in extension; or that a vacuum is impossible; or that there are such
globuli caelestes, or such a materia subtilis, as the Cartesians employ to explicate most of the
phenomena of nature. For these, and divers other notions, I (who here write rather for the
Corpuscularians in general, than any party of them) thought it improper needlessly to take in,
discoursing either against those to whom these things appear as disputable as the Peripatetic
tenents seem to me, or for to satisfy an ingenious person whom it were not fair to impose
upon with notions that I did not myself think proper. (p. 7)
[...] I hope then, upon the whole matter, that I have pitched upon that way that was the most
conducive to my design - partly by insisting only on those opinions, whether true or false,
which for their importance or difficulty seemed to deserve to be particularly either explicated
or disproved; and partly by choosing to employ such arguments as I thought the clearest and
cogentest, and, by their assuming the least of any, seemed the easiest to be vindicated from
exceptions - without troubling myself to answer objections that appeared rather to be drawn
from metaphysical or logical subtleties, or to be grounded upon the authority of men, than to
be physical ratiocinations, founded upon experience or the nature of the things under debate:
especially having, in the proposal and confirmation of the truth, so laid the grounds, and
intimated the ways of answering what is like to be colourably objected against it, that an
ingenious man may well enough furnish himself with weapons to defend the truth out of the
notions, hints, and experiments, wherewith in this tract care has been taken to accompany it.
(p. 8-9)
[...] But now we are to consider that there are de facto in the world certain sensible and
rational beings that we call men, and the body of man having several of its external parts, as
the eye, the ear, &c., each of a distinct and peculiar texture, whereby it is capable to receive
impressions from the bodies about it, and upon that account it is called an organ of sense - we
must consider, I say, that these sensories may be wrought upon by the figure, shape, motion
and texture of bodies without them after several ways, some of those external bodies being
fitted to affect the eye, others the ear, others the nostrils, &c. And to these operations of the
objects on the sensories, the mind of man, which upon the account of its union with the body
perceives them, giveth distinct names, calling the one light or colour, the other sound, the
other odour, &c. And because also each organ of sense, as the eye or the palate, may be itself
differingly affected by external objects, the mind likewise gives the objects of the same sense
distinct appellations, calling one colour green, the other blue, and one taste sweet and another
bitler, &c.: whence men have been induced to frame a long catalogue of such things as, for
their relafing to our senses, we call sensible qualities. And because we have been conversant
with them before we had the use of reason, and the mind of man is prone to conceive almost
everything (nay, even privations, as blindness, death, &c.) under the notion of a true entity or
substance, as itself is, we have been from our infancy apt to imagine that these sensible
qualities are real beings in the objects they denominate, and have the faculty or power to
work such and such things, as gravity hath a power to stop the motion of a bullet shot
upwards and carry that solid globe of matter toward the centre of the earth: whereas indeed
(according to what we have largely shown above) there is in the body to which these sensible
qualities are attributed nothing of real and physical but the size, shape, and motion or rest, of
its component particles, together with that texture of the whole which results from their being
so contrived as they are. Nor is it necessary they should have in them anything more, like to
the ideas they occasion in us - those ideas being either the effects of our prejudices or
inconsiderateness, or else to be fetched from the relation that happens to be betwixt those
primary accidents of the sensible object and the peculiar texture of the organ it affects: as,
when a pin being run into my finger causeth pain, there is no distinct quality in the pin
answerable to what I am apt to fancy pain to be; but the pin in itself is only slender, stiff, and
sharp, and by those qualities happens to make a solution of continuity in my organ of
touching, upon which, by reason of the fabric of the body and the intimate union of the , soul
with it, there ariseth that troublesome kind of perception which we call pain. (p. 30-31)
[...] So that, though I would not say that any thing can immediately be made of every thing as a gold ring of a wedge of gold, or oil or fire of water - yet, since bodies, having but one
common matter, can be differenced but by accidents, which seem all of them to be the effects
and consequents of local motion, I see not why it should be absurd to think that (at least
among inanimate bodies), by the intervention of some very small addition or subtraction of
matter (which yet in most cases will scarce be needed), and of an orderly series of alterations,
disposing by degrees the matter to be transmuted, almost of any thing may at length be made
any thing; as, though out of a wedge of gold one cannot immediately make a ring, yet by
either wire-drawing that wedge by degrees, or by melting it and casting a little of it into a
mould, that thing may easily be effected. And so, though water cannot immediately be
transmuted into oil, and much less into fire, yet if you nourish certain plants with water alone
(as I have done), till they have assimilated a great quantity of water into their own nature, you
may, by committing this transmuted water (which you may distinguish and separate from that
part of the vegetable you first put in) to distillation in convenient glasses, obtain, besides
other things, a true oil, and a black combustible coal (and consequently fire) ; both of which
may be so copious, as to leave no just cause to suspect that they could be anything near
afforded by any little spirituous parts which may be presumed to have been communicated,
by that part of the vegetable that is first put into the water, to that far greater part of it which
was committed to distillation. (p. 49-50)
[...] First, then, among the physical arguments that are brought to prove substantial forms, I
find that the most confidently insisted on, which is taken from the spontaneous return of
heated water to coldness: which effects, say they, must necessarily be ascribed to the action
of the substantial form, whose office it is to preserve the body in its natural state, and, when
there is occasion, to reduce it thereunto. And the argument indeed might be plausible, if we
were sure that heated water would grow cold again (without the avolation of any parts more
agitated than the rest), supposing it to be removed into some of the imaginary spaces beyond
the world; but as the case is, I see no necessity of flying to a substantial form, the matter
seeming to be easily explicable otherwise. The water we heat is surrounded with our air, or
with some vessel or other body contiguous to the air, and both the air and the water in these
climates are most commonly less agitated than the juices in our hands, or other organs of
touching, which makes us esteem and call those fluids cold. Now when the water is exposed
to the fire, it is thereby put into a new agitation more vehement than that of the parts of our
sensory, which you will easily grant if you consider that, when the heat is intense, it makes
the water boil and smoke and oftentimes run over the vessel; but when the liquor is removed
from the fire, this acquired agitation must needs by degrees be lost, either by the avolation of
such fiery corpuscles as the Epicureans imagine to be got into heated water, or by the water's
communicating the agitation of its parts to the contiguous air, or to the vessel that contains it,
till it have lost its surplusage of motion, or by the ingress of those frigorific atoms wherewith
(if any such be to be granted) the air in these climates is wont to abound, and so be reduced
into its former temperature : which may as well be done without a substantial form, as, if a
ship swimming slowly down a river should by a sudden gust of wind, blowing the same way
the stream runs, be driven on much faster than before, the vessel upon the ceasing of the wind
may, without any such internal principle, return after a while to its former slowness of
motion. So that in this phenomenon we need not have recourse to an internal principle, the
temperature of the external air being sufficient to give an account of it. (p. 59-60)
[...] Now for our doctrine touching the origin of forms, it will not be difficult to collect it
from what we formerly discoursed about qualities and forms together. For the form of a
natural body being, according to us, but an essential modification and, as it were, the stamp of
its matter, or such a convention of the bigness, shape, motion (or rest) , situation, and
contexture (together with the thence-resulting qualities) of the small parts that compose the
body, as is necessary to constitute and denominate such a particular body, and all these
accidents being producible in matter by local motion, it is agreeable to our hypothesis to say
that the first and universal, though not immediate, cause of forms is none other but God, who
put matter into motion (which belongs not to its essence), and established the laws of motion
amongst bodies, and .also, according to my opinion, guided it in divers cases at the beginning
of things; and that, among second causes, the grand efficient of forms is local motion, which,
by variously dividing, sequestering, transposing, and so connecting, the parts of matter,
produces in them those accidents and qualities upon whose account the portion of matter they
diversify comes to belong to this or that determinate species of natural bodies: which yet is
not so to be understood as if motion were only an efficient cause in the generation of bodies,
but very often (as in water, fire, &c.) it is also one of the chief accidents that concur to make
up the form. (p. 69)
[...] As for what may be objected, that we must distinguish betwixt factitious bodies and
natural, I will not now stay to examine how far that distinction may be allowed . For it may
suffice for our present purpose to represent that , whatever may be said of factitious bodies
where man does, by instruments of his own providing, only give figure, or also contexture, to
the sensible (not insensible) parts of the matter he works upon - as when a joiner makes a
stool, or a statuary makes an image, or a turner a bowl - yet the case may be very differing in
those other factitious productions wherein the insensible parts of matter are altered by natural
agents, who perform the greatest part of the work among themselves, though the artificer be
an assistant by putting them together after a due manner. And therefore I know not why all
the productions of the fire made by chemists should be looked upon as not natural but
artificial bodies, since the fire, which is the grand agent- in these changes, doth not, by being
employed by the chemist, cease to be and to work as a natural agent; and since nature herself
doth, by the help of the fire, sometimes afford- us the like productions that the alchemist's art
presents us : as in Etna, Vesuvius, and other burning mountains (some of whose productions I
can show you), stones are sometimes turned into lime (and so an alkalizate salt is produced),
and sometimes, if they be more disposed to be fluxed than calcined, brought to vitrification;
metalline and mineral bodies are by the violence of the fire colliquated into masses of very
strange and compounded natures; ashes and metalline flowers of divers kinds are scattered
about the neighbouring places, and copious flowers of sulphur, sublimed by the internal fire,
have been several times found about the vents at which the fumes are discharged into the air
(as I have been assured by ingenious visitors of such places, whom I purposely enquired of
touching these flores, for of these travellers more than one answered me they had themselves
gathered and had brought some very good). [...] But this upon the bye, being not obliged to
set down here the grounds of my paradoxical conjecture about the effects of subterraneal fires
and heats, since I here lay no stress upon it, but return to what I was saying about Etna and
other volcans. Since, then, these productions of the fire, being of nature 's own making,
cannot be denied to be natural bodies, I see not why the like productions of the fire should be
thought unworthy that name, only because the fire that made the former was kindled by
chance in a hill, and that which produced the latter was kindled by a man in a furnace. And if
flower of sulphur, lime, glass, and colliquated mixtures of metals and minerals, are to be
reckoned among natural bodies, it seems to be but reasonable that, upon the same grounds,
we should admit flower of antimony, lime, and glass, and pewter, and brass, and many other
chemical concretes (if I may so call them), to be taken into the same number; and then it will
be evident that, to distinguish the species of natural bodies, a concourse of accidents will,
without considering any substantial form, be sufficient. (p. 74-76)