THE ALCHEMICAL SOURCES OF BOYLE,ROBERT CORPUSCULAR PHILOSOPHY

Robert Boyle is remembered largely for his integration of experiment a nd the 'mechanical philosophy', Although Boyle is occasionally elusive as to what he means precisely by the 'mechanical philosophy', it is c lear that a major portion of it concerned his corpuscular theory of ma tter. Historians of science have traditionally viewed Boyle's corpuscu lar philosophy as the grafting of a physical theory onto a previously incoherent body of alchemy and iatrochemistry. As this essay shows, ho wever, Boyle owed a heavy debt to a longstanding alchemical theory tha t postulated the corpuscular make-up of metals and various reagents. I have elsewhere argued in a general way for Boyle's debt to alchemical corpuscular theory, but in the present essay I show one of his precis e sources - namely the Wittenberg medical professor Daniel Sennert (15 72-1637). In his youth Boyle wrote a treatise on corpuscularianism, Of the Atomicall Philosophy, that borrowed heavily from Sennert without acknowledgement. Later works, such as The Sceptical Chymist, elaborate on these borrowings. This discovery shows that we cannot view Boyle's corpuscular philosophy as an imposition of physics on chemistry: inst ead, it appears that it originally grew out of chemistry itself. The d iscovery also throws an interesting light on Boyle's attitude toward s ources.