Robert Boyle – The origin of forms and qualities according to the corpuscular philosophy
[...] having for many reasons, elsewherementioned, purposely forborne the reading of some very much and,for aught I know, very justly esteemed discourses about generalhypotheses, it is very possible that I may be a stranger to some ofthosearguments - besides this, I say, I confess I have purposely forborneto make use of others which I have sufficiently taken notice of. Forsome of those ratiocinations would engage him that should employthem to adopt a hypothesis or theory in which, perhaps, I am not sothoroughly satisfied, and of which I do not conceive myself to have,on this occasion, any necessity to make use: and accordingly I haveforborne to employ arguments that are either grounded on, orsuppose, indivisible corpuscles called atoms, or any innate motionbelonging to them; or that the essence of bodies consists inextension; or that a vacuum is impossible; or that there are such
globuli caelestes, or such a materia subtilis, as the Cartesians employ toexplicate most of the phenomena of nature. For these, and diversother notions, I (who here write rather for the Corpuscularians ingeneral, than any party of them) thought it improper needlessly totake in, discoursing either against those to whom these things appearas disputable as the Peripatetic tenents seem to me, or for to satisfyan ingenious person whom it were not fair to impose upon withnotions that I did not myself think proper. (p. 7)
[...]I hope then, upon the whole matter, that I have pitched upon thatway that was the most conducive to my design - partly by insistingonly on those opinions, whether true or false, which for theirimportance or difficulty seemed to deserve to be particularly eitherexplicated or disproved; and partly by choosing to employ sucharguments as I thought the clearest and cogentest, and, by theirassuming the least of any, seemed the easiest to be vindicated fromexceptions - without troubling myself to answer objections thatappeared 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 ofthe truth, so laid the grounds, and intimated the ways of answeringwhat is like to be colourably objected against it, that an ingeniousman may well enough furnish himself with weapons to defend thetruth out of the notions, hints, and experiments, wherewith in thistract care has been taken to accompany it. (p. 8-9)
[...]But now we are toconsider that there are de facto in the world certain sensible andrational beings that we call men, and the body of man having severalof its external parts, as the eye, the ear, &c., each of a distinct andpeculiar texture, whereby it is capable to receive impressions fromthe bodies about it, and upon that account it is called an organ ofsense - we must consider, I say, that these sensories may be wroughtupon by the figure, shape, motion and texture of bodies withoutthem after several ways, some of those external bodies being fitted toaffect the eye, others the ear, others the nostrils, &c. And to theseoperations of the objects on the sensories, the mind of man, whichupon the account of its union with the body perceives them, givethdistinct names, calling the one lightor colour, the other sound, theother odour, &c. And because also each organ of sense, as the eye orthe palate, may be itself differingly affected by external objects, themind likewise gives the objects of the same sense distinctappellations, calling one colour green, the other blue, and one tastesweet and another bitler,&c.: whence men have been induced toframe a long catalogue of such things as, for their relafing to oursenses, we call sensible qualities. And because we have beenconversant with them before we had the use of reason, and the mindof 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 imaginethat these sensible qualities are real beings in the objects theydenominate, and have the faculty or power to work such and suchthings, as gravity hath a power to stop the motion of a bullet shotupwards and carry that solid globe of matter toward the centre ofthe earth: whereas indeed (according to what we have largely shownabove) there is in the body to which these sensible qualities areattributed nothing of real and physical but the size, shape, andmotion or rest, of its component particles, together with that textureof the whole which results from their being so contrived as they are.Nor is it necessary they should have in them anything more, like tothe ideas they occasion in us - those ideas being either the effects ofour prejudices or inconsiderateness, or else to be fetched from therelation that happens to be betwixt those primary accidents of thesensible object and the peculiar texture of the organ it affects: as,when a pin being run into my finger causeth pain, there is no distinctquality 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 thosequalities happens to make a solution of continuity in my organ oftouching, upon which, by reason of the fabric of the body and theintimate union of the , soul with it, there ariseth that troublesomekind of perception which we call pain. (p. 30-31)
[...]Sothat, though I would not say that any thing can immediately bemade of every thing - as a gold ring of a wedge of gold, or oil or fire ofwater - yet, since bodies, having but one common matter, can bedifferenced but by accidents, which seem all of them to be the effectsand consequents of local motion, I see not why it should be absurd to think that (at leastamong inanimate bodies), by the intervention ofsome very small addition or subtraction of matter (which yet in mostcases will scarce be needed), and of an orderly series of alterations,disposing by degrees the matter to be transmuted, almost of anything may at length be made any thing; as, though out of a wedge ofgold one cannot immediately make a ring, yet by either wire-drawingthat wedge by degrees, or by melting it and casting a little of it into amould, that thing may easily be effected. And so, though watercannot 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 ownnature, you may, by committing this transmuted water (which youmay distinguish and separate from that part of the vegetable youfirst put in) to distillation in convenient glasses, obtain, besides otherthings, a true oil, and a black combustible coal (and consequentlyfire) ; both of which may be so copious, as to leave no just cause tosuspect that they could be anything near afforded by any littlespirituous parts which may be presumed to have beencommunicated, by that part of the vegetable that is first put into thewater, to that far greater part of it which was committed todistillation. (p. 49-50)
[...]First, then, among the physical arguments that are brought toprove substantial forms, I find that the most confidently insisted on,which is taken from the spontaneous return of heated water tocoldness: which effects, say they, must necessarily be ascribed to theaction of the substantial form, whose office it is to preserve the bodyin its natural state, and, when there is occasion, to reduce itthereunto. And the argument indeed might be plausible, if we weresure that heated water would grow cold again (without the avolationof any parts more agitated than the rest), supposing it to be removedinto some of the imaginary spaces beyond the world; but as the caseis, I see no necessity of flying to a substantial form, the matterseeming to be easily explicable otherwise. The water we heat issurrounded with our air, or with some vessel or other bodycontiguous to the air, and both the air and the water in theseclimates are most commonly less agitated than the juices in ourhands, or other organs of touching, which makes us esteem and callthose fluids cold. Now when the water is exposed to the fire, it isthereby put into a new agitation more vehement than that of theparts of our sensory, which you will easily grant if you consider that,when the heat is intense, it makes the water boil and smoke andoftentimes run over the vessel; but when the liquor is removed fromthe fire, this acquired agitation must needs by degrees be lost, eitherby the avolation of such fiery corpuscles as the Epicureans imagineto be got into heated water, or by the water's communicating theagitation of its parts to the contiguous air, or to the vessel thatcontains it, till it have lost its surplusage of motion, or by the ingressof those frigorific atoms wherewith (if any such be to be granted) theair in these climates is wont to abound, and so be reduced into itsformer temperature : which may as well be done without asubstantial form, as, if a ship swimming slowly down a river shouldby a sudden gust of wind, blowing the same way the stream runs, bedriven on much faster than before, the vessel upon the ceasing of thewind may, without any such internal principle, return after a whileto its former slowness of motion. So that in this phenomenon weneed not have recourse to an internal principle, the temperature ofthe 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 bedifficult to collect it from what we formerly discoursed aboutqualities and forms together. For the form of a natural body being,according to us, but an essential modification and, as it were, thestamp of its matter, or such a convention of the bigness, shape,motion (or rest) , situation, and contexture (together with thethence-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, itis agreeable to our hypothesis to say that the first and universal,though not immediate, cause of forms is none other but God, who putmatter into motion (which belongs not to its essence), and established thelaws of motionamongst bodies, and .also, according to my opinion,guided it in divers cases at the beginningofthings; and that, among secondcauses, the grand efficient of forms is local motion, which, by variouslydividing, sequestering, transposing, and so connecting, the parts ofmatter, produces in them those accidents and qualities upon whoseaccount the portion of matter they diversify comes to belong to thisor that determinate species of natural bodies: which yet is not so tobe understood as if motion were only an efficient cause in thegeneration of bodies, but veryoften (as in water, fire, &c.) it is alsoone of the chief accidents that concur to make up the form. (p. 69)
[...]As for what may be objected, that we must distinguish betwixtfactitious bodies and natural, I will not now stay to examine how farthat distinction may be allowed . For it may suffice for our presentpurpose to represent that , whatever may be said of factitious bodieswhere man does, by instruments of his own providing, only givefigure, or also contexture, to the sensible (not insensible) parts of thematter he works upon - as when a joiner makes a stool, or a statuarymakes an image, or a turner a bowl - yet the case may be verydiffering in those other factitious productions wherein the insensibleparts of matter are altered by natural agents, who perform thegreatest part of the work among themselves, though the artificer bean assistant by putting them together after a due manner. Andtherefore I know not why all the productions of the fire made bychemists should be looked upon as not natural but artificial bodies,since the fire, which is the grand agent- in these changes, doth not, bybeing employed by the chemist, cease to be and to work as a naturalagent; 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 sometimesturned into lime (and so an alkalizate salt is produced), andsometimes, if they be more disposed to be fluxed than calcined,brought to vitrification; metalline and mineral bodies are by theviolence of the fire colliquated into masses of very strange andcompounded natures; ashes and metalline flowers of divers kinds arescattered about the neighbouring places, and copious flowers ofsulphur, sublimed by the internal fire, have been several times foundabout the vents at which the fumes are discharged into the air (as Ihave been assured by ingenious visitors of such places, whom Ipurposely enquired of touching these flores, for of these travellersmore than one answered me they had themselves gathered and hadbrought some very good). [...]But this upon the bye, being notobliged to set down here the grounds of my paradoxical conjectureabout the effects of subterraneal fires and heats, since I here lay nostress upon it, but return to what I was saying about Etna and othervolcans. Since, then, these productions of the fire, being of nature 'sown making, cannot be denied to be natural bodies, I see not whythe like productions of the fire should be thought unworthy thatname, only because the fire that made the former was kindled bychance in a hill, and that which produced the latter was kindled by aman in a furnace. And if flower of sulphur, lime, glass, andcolliquated mixtures of metals and minerals, are to be reckonedamong natural bodies, it seems to be but reasonable that, upon thesame grounds, we should admit flower of antimony, lime, and glass,and pewter, and brass, and many other chemical concretes (if I mayso call them), to be taken into the same number; and then it will beevident that, to distinguish the species of natural bodies, a concourseof accidents will, without considering any substantial form, besufficient. (p. 74-76)