Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher and theological writer, a preeminent figure of 17th-century intellectual culture. Boyle was one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century and an important influence on Locke and Newton. He was an experimental philosopher, unwilling to construct abstract theories to which his experimental results had to conform.
Background
Robert was born on January 25, 1627, in Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland. He was the seventh son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and Catherine Fenton. Robert's father was one of the richest and most powerful men in Ireland, and throughout his life, Boyle enjoyed, in addition to his native talents, the advantages of position, family, and wealth.
Upon the death of his father, Boyle returned in 1644 to England, where after some initial delay he settled at the manor of Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, which he had inherited from his father.
Education
After the death of his mother in 1630, Boyle's daily care and supervision went to a local Irish woman, known today only as Nurse Allen. Allen raised Boyle, teaching him the Irish language, until his eighth year when he was sent away, along with his brother Francis, for formal education at Eton College.
At age 12 he embarked on a lengthy tour of Europe with his older brother Francis and a tutor. This 'Grand Tour' was a traditional part of many wealthy people's education, often including visits to the great classical sites of Italy and Greece. In fact, Robert spent much of his time in the Swiss city of Geneva.
At age 14 he traveled to Italy, where he learned how Galileo Galilei had used mathematics to explain motion. Robert was thrilled by this and began studying Galileo's work, presumably smuggled in from Switzerland, because it had been banned in Italy.
Galileo was in the final year of his life when Robert arrived in the Italian city of Florence, where Galileo lived under house arrest.
Robert decided he agreed with the idea promoted by Galileo and Nicolaus Copernicus that the earth and other planets orbit the sun.
Career
Robert Boyle became increasingly interested in natural philosophy. He interested himself in nearly all aspects of physics, chemistry, medicine, and natural history, although it was a chemistry that "bewitched" him and primarily occupied his time.
In 1652 Boyle left Stalbridge for Ireland, where 10 years of civil war had seriously disordered the family estates. During his stay, he continued to pursue his scientific interests. In 1654 he settled in Oxford, then the scientific center of England. He there associated himself with a group interested in the "new learning." This group, including many of the leading scientific figures of the day, quickly recognized Boyle's exceptional abilities, and he became a regular participant in their activities, pursuing particularly his interest in chemistry.
Soon after his arrival in Oxford, Boyle's researches took on an additional dimension. Having learned in 1657 of the vacuum pump recently invented by Otto von Guericke, Boyle immediately set Robert Hooke, his brilliant assistant (and later an eminent scientist in his own right), the task of devising an improved version. Utilizing this improved pump Boyle immediately began a long series of investigations designed to test properties of the air and to clearly establish its physical nature. Boyle's first account of these "pneumatic" investigations was entitled "New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects" (1660). He continued his study of air and vacuum throughout the rest of his life, and although his experiments with the "Boyleian vacuum" (as it came to be known) were repeated by many, no one in the 17th century surpassed Boyle's ingenuity or technique.
In 1660, together with 11 others, Boyle formed the Royal Society in London which met to witness experiments and discuss what we would now call scientific topics. He published his results on the physical properties of air through this Society. His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a mathematical science based on a mechanistic theory of matter. It is for this reason that we have decided to include Boyle into this archive of mathematicians for, although he did not develop any mathematical ideas himself, he was one of the first to argue that all science should be developed as an application of mathematics. Although others before him had applied mathematics to physics, Boyle was one of the first to extend the application of mathematics to chemistry which he tried to develop as a science whose complex appearance was merely the result of simple mathematical laws applied to simple fundamental particles.
In considering optics, in a particular color, Boyle was not so successful. He published "Experiments and considerations touching colors" in 1664 but was quite prepared to acknowledge that Hooke's work of 1665 was superior and he completely acknowledged that Newton's ideas, published in 1672, should replace his own.
In 1668 Boyle left Oxford and went to live with his sister Lady Ranelagh in London. There he became a neighbor of Barrow but seemed to have more common scientific interests with another neighbor Thomas Sydenham, a physician. In 1669 his sister's husband died. Some, however, were keen to find Boyle a wife. Wallis found someone whom he considered particularly suitable to be Boyle's wife and wrote to him saying: "If I might be the happy instrument in making two so excellent persons happy in each other... I do not know in what else I could more approve myself."
Boyle seemed to have successfully avoided such attempts to marry him off. In June 1670 he had a stroke which left him paralyzed but slowly he recovered his health. He continued to work and to entertain at his London home. Visitors were so frequent that he had to restrict visits so that he had time to continue with his scientific researches, which he did with the help of many excellent assistants.
In 1680 he refused the presidency of the Royal Society. He explained his reasons were religious in that he could not swear to necessary oaths. The religious side of Boyle is one which we have not mentioned in this biography, yet it was an important force in his life.
Religion
Boyle was a devout and pious Anglican who keenly championed his faith. He sponsored educational and missionary activities and wrote a number of theological treatises. Whereas the religious writings of Boyle's youth were primarily devotional, his mature works focused on the more complex philosophical issues of reason, nature, and revelation and particularly on the relationship between the emergent new science and religion.
Boyle was deeply concerned about the widespread perception that irreligion and atheism were on the rise, and he strove to demonstrate ways in which science and religion were mutually supportive. For Boyle, studying nature as a product of God’s handiwork was an inherently religious duty. He argued that this method of study would, in return, illuminate God's omnipresence and goodness, thereby enhancing a scientist’s understanding of the divine. "The Christian Virtuoso" (1690) summarized these views and may be seen as a manifesto of Boyle’s own life as the model of a Christian scientist.
Boyle spent years mastering ancient Biblical languages to further his understanding of the Bible, including Greek, Syrian, Aramaic, and Arabic. He learned Hebrew to read the Torah and sought out Jewish scholars for advice on his translations. He argued for religious tolerance, though he thought Christianity held the only path to salvation.
Boyle believed in the existence of supernatural creatures such as angels, demons, and witches. In "Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God" (1685), he claimed that angels, both good and evil, are rational but completely incorporeal and that there could be as many species of angels and demons as there are nonhuman animals, with subtle moral differences between them. On the other hand, he also believed that most witch trials were unjust and not cases of real witchcraft. He tried to apply his empirical scientific method to the investigation of supernatural phenomena by creating a sort of database of reliable accounts of supernatural events, just as his Baconian histories of qualities were records of reliable experimental observations of natural substances. Boyle was convinced that enough reliable accounts of supernatural phenomena would make skepticism of Christianity seem unreasonable. He even saw to the publication of what he believed to be a true account of a poltergeist: "Pearreaud’s Devil of Mascon" (1658). He also tried to investigate what he thought to be a reliable account of precognition.
Despite a lifetime of religious pursuits, Boyle also had significant religious doubts. These doubts troubled him, and throughout his life, he sought spiritual guidance from friends, family, and clergy. He worried that his wealth had been taken from Ireland unjustly and that his philanthropic endeavors were inadequate. He also feared that he had committed a sin against the Holy Ghost by ignoring opportunities to repent for self-acknowledged sins.
Politics
Malcolm Oster examined Boyle's political views during the upheavals of the civil war by drawing on Boyle's ethical works, which have never previously been accorded such importance in influencing political attitudes. Oster presented a picture of Boyle that incorporates his upbringing and early writings to show that he sought to transcend political partisanship.
Views
Boyle considered natural philosophy to be an important part of philosophy. He believed God gave humans three books to aid in their salvation: "the book of scripture," "the book of conscience," and "the book of nature." In works such as "Of the Study of the Book of Nature" and "Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy" (1663), Boyle argues that the natural world had been not only intentionally designed by God but had been designed specifically to be understood, at least in part, by rational human minds. He believed that humans equipped with reason could make use of detailed observation, under controlled experimental conditions, to uncover the hidden structure of nature. Boyle’s efforts to bring chemistry out of the disreputable shadows of alchemy, as well as all sorts of other projects he undertook in natural philosophy, were justified as part of the theologically acceptable study of the natural world, God's great automaton, the study of which Boyle believed too many people neglected. Boyle saw it as a religious duty to investigate natural phenomena and publish the knowledge he gained for the benefit of humanity. This Baconian approach to science can be seen throughout his research, including his chemical analyses of medicines, his investigations of air pressure, his study of human anatomy, his invention of the friction match, his efforts to expand the human lifespan, and even his work to advance agriculture and animal husbandry techniques.
Many areas of Boyle's philosophy are intimately connected to his natural philosophy, including his rejection of scholastic Aristotelianism, his acceptance of the corpuscular mechanical philosophy, his work in chemistry, alchemy, medicine, and pneumatics, as well as his philosophical views regarding the nature of knowledge, perception, substance, real and nominal essences, causation, and alternative possible worlds.
Boyle made extensive studies of the elasticity of the air and of its necessity for various physical phenomena, such as combustion, the propagation of sound, and the survival of animals. He verified Galileo's conclusions about the behavior of falling bodies by studying the rate at which a light body fell, both in air and in a vacuum. By placing a Torricellian barometer in the receptacle of his pump, he also verified that it was indeed air pressure that supported the column of mercury. When his conclusions about the relationship between the pressure of the air and the weight of the mercury it would support were challenged, he produced a series of experiments demonstrating that for a given quantity of air the volume is inversely proportional to the pressure, a relationship now known as Boyle's law.
"The Sceptical Chymist" (1661), although one of Boyle's more theoretical works and suffering from his usual lack of organization, well illustrates his contention that all scientific investigation must be firmly based on an experiment. Directing his attack at what he conceived as the erroneous foundations of contemporary chemical theory, he brought forth extensive experimental evidence to refute the prevailing Aristotelian and Paracelsian concepts of a small number of basic elements or principles to which all compounds could be reduced by chemical analysis. He demonstrated that common chemical substances when decomposed by heat not only failed to yield the requisite number of elements or principles, but that the number was a function of the techniques employed. Accordingly, he denied that elements or principles (as thus defined) had any real existence and sought to replace these older concepts of chemical change with what he termed the "corpuscular philosophy."
Although he emphasized the necessity of basing scientific research on experiments, Boyle was not a simple empiricist. Behind his more specific and detailed work was a general theory of the structure of matter; and his continued advocacy of the mechanical philosophy - that is, explanation in terms of matter and motion - was one of his most significant contributions. According to Boyle's corpuscular philosophy, God had originally formed matter in tiny particles of varying sizes and shapes. These particles tended to combine in groups or clusters which, because of their compactness, had a reasonably continuous existence and were the basic units of chemical and physical processes. Any change in the shape, size, or motion of these basic clusters altered the properties of the substance involved, although chemical reactions were generally conceived as involving primarily the association and dissociation of various clusters.
Boyle also made significant contributions to experimental chemistry. He made extensive studies of the calcination of metals, of combustion, and of the properties of acids and bases. He emphasized the application of physical techniques to the chemical investigation and developed the use of chemical indicators which showed characteristic color changes in the presence of certain types of substances. His pioneering study of phosphorus, during which he discovered nearly all the properties known for the next two centuries, well illustrates the effectiveness of his experimental techniques.
Quotations:
"The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation."
"And I might add the confidence with which distracted persons do oftentimes when they are awake, think, they see black fiends in places, where there is no black object in sight without them."
"Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry."
"As the moon, though darkened with spots, gives us a much greater light than the stars that sewn all-luminous, so do the Scriptures afford more light than the brightest human authors. In them the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance."
"There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book than in being the first author of the thought."
"As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying."
"I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature."
"In the Bible the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance."
"I use the Scriptures, not as an arsenal to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as a matchless temple, where I delight to be, to contemplate the beauty, the symmetry, and the magnificence of the structure, and to increase my awe, and excite my devotion to the Deity there preached and adored."
"Darkness, that here surrounds our purblind understanding, will vanish at the dawning of eternal day."
"Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay."
"Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry."
Membership
In 1663 Robert was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
Personality
Although wealthy, Boyle lived a relatively frugal, simple life and was generous to other people. He was happy to spend large amounts of money on his experiments - he did not mind diminishing his wealth if by doing so he could learn some of Nature's secrets.
Robert's private character and virtues, the charm of his social manners, his wit and powers of conversation endeared him to a large circle of personal friends.