![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Prof. Michael Hunter for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to Dr. Elizabethanne Boran for her helpful suggestions. I wish to thank Prof. Franco Giudice for his advice and Prof. Enrico Giannetto for help and discussions when this paper was in progress.
Notes
1. Clericuzio, “God and the Physical World, 1047.” See also Brooke, Science and Religion, 130–135; Osler, “The Intellectual Sources,” 178–198.
2. Anon. The humble Advice, 52–53. The orthodox view was stated by Calvin in his Psychopannychia (Strasbourg: Per Wendelinum Rihelium, 1545). See Burns, Christian Mortalism, 20–25, 143.
3. Anon, An ordinance of the Lords and Commons, sig. A3r.
4. For an account of sectarian views on the soul see Burns, Christian Mortalism, chap. 2.
5. See Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 64. Boyle likely heard Vane's sermon between the late 1640s and the early 1650s, since he told Pett that when the meeting took place Vane was at the peak of his political career. “He and his party were called seekers,” as Burnet reported: Burnet, History of my own time, vol. 1, 279. For Vane's intellectual biography see Parnham, Sir Henry Vane.
6. Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 64. For a discussion of Boyle's stance on sectarianism and of the Jacob's thesis of a “dialogue with the sects,” see Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 87–92.
7. Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself, 19.
8. Cf. Hall, Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy, 177–179. It has been discussed by Hunter in his “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 63. See also his paper “Robert Boyle's Early Intellectual Evolution: A Reappraisal” in this issue.
9. On “Booke of Nature” and “Holy Scriptures” see Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 67–68, 71–77 nn51, 108. See also Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 55–58.
10. Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 186–187, 191. Boyle refers to the three books of Aristotle's De anima.
11. Ibid., vol. 13, 187. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) wrote the Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516) and was prosecuted by the Inquisition for having stated that the immortality of the soul was beyond rational demonstration. Boyle might have heard about Pomponazzi's doctrines and his Tractatus de immortalitate animae (Bologna: per […] Justinianum Leonardi Ruberiensem, 1516) when he was in Padua, Ferrara or Bologna, where Pomponazzi taught from 1488 to his death. See Gilson, “Autour de Pomponazzi.” Later Boyle cited also Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619), the Italian heterodox thinker who travelled across Europe and lived in England between 1612 and 1614: Reason and Religion, in Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 237. On Vanini and his influence see Raimondi, Giulio Cesare Vanini.
12. Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 211.
13. For an overview on Boyle's adversaries in “Holy Scriptures” see Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 74–78.
14. In particular, annihilationism was the doctrine held by a group of enthusiasts that N. T. Burns has called “experimental Christians,” whose historical and doctrinal development dated back to Familism. As Burns put it, “Both groups of soul sleepers [i.e. psychopannichists and thnetopsychists] believed in the personal immortality of the individual after the resurrection of the body, and so they should not be confused with the annihilationists.” Burns, Christian Mortalism , 13–21, 18.
15. Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 201.
16. Overton, Mans Mortallitie, 11–14 et passim (On the title-page of the copy in the British Library “Amsterdam” is deleted and replaced with “London”). In 1655 an enlarged and revised edition of Overton's pamphlet was issued under the title Man Wholly Mortal and was reprinted in 1674 and 1675. An account of Overton's ideas and their impact is to be found in Burns, Christian Mortalism, 154–57 and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
17. Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 75, 86.
18. Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 55–59.
19. The Brevis Disquisitio was translated in English by John Biddle (c. 1615–62) in 1652. Cf. the preface to the English edition, arguably written by Biddle, “To The Christian Reader,” in Stegmann, Brevis Disquisitio, sig. A3v. On Biddle, Paul Best and English Socinianism during the Interregnum, cf. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 158–167. On Socinian mortalism see Burns, Christian Mortalism, 142 and McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England, 92.
20. Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 202.
21. Ibid., vol. 13, 209.
22. Ibid., vol. 13, 190. Boyle might refer to Traité des passions, I, art. IV, where Descartes differentiated soul's function, i.e. thought, from bodily ones: Œuvres de Descartes, vol. XI, 329.
23. Boyle, Works, 204–5. On the Helmontian content of “Holy Scriptures” see Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 223–224. For Boyle's reception of Helmontian chemistry, see Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle.”
24. In “Holy Scriptures” Boyle summed up van Helmont's theory of knowledge: Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 187. He apparently referred to the Ortus Medicinae, in particular to the sections “Studia Authoris” and “Venatio Scientiarum,” in van Helmont, Ortus medicinae, 17, 26. On van Helmont's theory of knowledge see Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont, chap. 3.
25. Boyle Papers 7, fol. 106, in J. J. MacIntosh, Boyle on Atheism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 274.
26. Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 189.
27. Ibid., vol. 13, 202.
28. On the early debate on resurrection cf. Grant, “The Resurrection of the Body,” 193–197.
29. “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body”: quoted from KJV, the same quotation in Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 302.
30. For instance, it was espoused by Origen. On this crucial issue and seed images of resurrection cf. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 6–10.
31. Quoted from the first English translation of De Veritate, Grotius, True religion explained, 105–106 (the English edition erroneously reports the section as XII instead of X). For the Latin edition see Opera omnia theological, vol. 3, 38.
32. On palingenesis in “Holy Scriptures” and in previous alchemical literature, Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 227–232. See also Secret, “Palingenesis, Alchemy, and Metempsychosis.”
33. Browne, Religio Medici, 91.
34. Fisch, “The Scientist as Priest,” 253–55; Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 84.
35. Compare Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 204 and Browne, Religio Medici, 90–91. The “revivification” (shortened “revivication”) denoted a chemical process consisting in the restoration of a substance (usually metals) to a pure state from a mixture. It is not a coincidence that from the early modern period the term meant also resurrection. Cf. OED.
36. Boyle, Works, vol. 14, 279.
37. For references about dating see the introductory note in Boyle, Works, 14, xxx. Boyle did not publish them and some related texts survive in the Boyle Papers. They are partly transcribed in MacIntosh, Boyle on Atheism, 231–232.
38. As Hunter has pointed out, Boyle cited these authors in “Booke of Nature” and in “Holy Scriptures,” but they disappeared in his later writings: Hunter, “How Boyle Became a Scientist,” 78.
39. Boyle, Works, vol. 14, 279.
40. Ibid., 280.
41. Cf. Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 95–97.
42. Boyle, Works, vol. 14, 280.
43. Cf. introductory notes in ibid., vol. 8, xi–xiv, xxi–xxvi.
44. Ibid., vol. 8, 236–237. On libertinism and atheism see Hunter, Science and Society, chap. 7; Hunter, “Science and Heterodoxy.”
45. Beale to Boyle, 11 October 1665, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 554.
46. Ibid., vol. 2, 147–148. Beale referred to p. 62 of the first edition of Boyle, Some Considerations, 62, i.e. Boyle, Works, vol. 3, 241. For a comment on the letter see also Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 22–23. Beale and Boyle began to correspond in 1663, although they communicated indirectly via Hartlib from the late 1650s: see Stubbs, “John Beale.”
47. On this issue see Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England, esp. chap. 6; Hunter, “Latitudinarianism,” 45–71. On the attacks from the Cambridge milieu see Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 55–57.
48. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 9.
49. Ibid., vol. 8, 237.
50. Ibid., vol. 3, 112.
51. Ibid., vol. 3, 121–122, 134; vol. 8, 259–261. Boyle discussed and criticized Hobbes' statement in De Corpore, “There can be no cause of motion, except in a body contiguous and moved”: De Corpore, II. IX, sect. 7, in Hobbes, Opera philosophica, vol. 1, 110–11; Hobbes, English Works, vol. 1, 124. For a discussion of Boyle's argument see Clericuzio, “God and the Physical World,” 1037. Cf. also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 204–205.
52. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 162. Indeed, in the preface Boyle claimed that he wrote his Animadversions just after the publication of Hobbes' Problemata Physica (1662) but they were “causally mislaid e're they were finished.” He declared that “I had still persisted in my silence, if Mr. Hobbes had not as ‘twere summon'd me to break it by publishing again his Explications” (ibid., 161). Indeed, in 1668 the Problemata were reprinted in the Opera Philosophica along with the Appendix: cf. Hobbes, Opera philosophica.
53. For the text of the 1668 Appendix see Wright, Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes, 35–173, III, §§176–180, 148–150 [hereafter Appendix]. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, I.IV, §21; I.XII, §§6–8, 21, 64–66.
54. See Appendix, I, §§41–56, 60–73. For Hobbes' mortalism see Hobbes, Leviathan, IV.XLIV, esp. §§14–16, 418–420 and Burns, Christian Mortalism, chap. 4. On the theological content and background of Leviathan, Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan. On contemporary reactions to Hobbes' materialism, Mintz, Hunting of Leviathan, chaps. IV–V.
55. Oldenburg to Boyle, 24 December 1667, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 3, 386. Cf. Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, esp. the appendix “Defending the Soul's Immortality against the Somatists or Epicureans, and other Pseudophilosophers.”
56. More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, sig. A1v–B2v, A3+1; More to Boyle, 4 December 1671, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 4, 231–232.
57. Boyle, Works, vol. 7, 141–142.
58. Cf. “Essay on Spontaneous Generation,” in Boyle, Works, vol. 13, 279. The essay was composed between c. 1659 and c. 1665: ibid., vol. 13, xlvii–xlviii.
59. John Aubrey's claim that Hooke “made him [Boyle] understand Des Cartes’ Philosophy” is in Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. 1, 411. See also Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, 106 n9.
60. Oldenburg to Boyle, 4 July 1665, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 488. On those disputations see Ariew, “Descartes and the Jesuits,” 157.
61. Boyle to Oldenburg, 8 July 1665, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 2, 494. On Boyle's reading of Cartesian philosophy and Occasionalism see Anstey, “Boyle on Occasionalism,” 65–69.
62. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 23.
63. He cited Descartes' Replies to the Second Objections and his answer to Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who had asked him his opinion on the fate of the soul. See Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 24–25; Descartes, Œuvres, VII 127–128, 153; Elizabeth to Descartes, 28 October 1645 and Descartes to Elizabeth, 3 November 1645, Descartes, Œuvres, IV 320–324, 330–334. Cf. also Cottingham, “Cartesian Dualism,” 237–241.
64. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 24. For Descartes' hyperbolic doubt and the certainty of the cogito in the Meditationes, see Descartes, Œuvres, VII 34–35, 53–62. The same argument is in the Discourse de la méthode, Descartes, Œuvres, VI 31–32.
65. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 25.
66. On the contrary, the young Boyle seemed to acknowledge that animals have “Passions and Pleasures,” following the majority of English naturalists in opposing Descartes' theory: see Oster, “The ‘Beame of Diuinity’,” 160.
67. Cf. Boyle Papers 17, fols. 166v–167r, published in Conry, “Robert Boyle et la doctrine cartésienne,” 70–71. In this paper Boyle explicitly referred to Gassendi's remarks on the beast-machine doctrine in his Fifth Objections to the Meditations (Descartes, Œuvres, VII 268–271). Gassendi had maintained that imagination is common to beasts an men, but Boyle pointed out that he “had ascrib'd too much to the Imaginative faculty of Bruits,” though later he mend his ways. On Gassendi's views on the soul, see Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi, 362–368.
68. Anon., “An Account of Some Books.”
69. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 297. Arguably, the manuscripts Boyle referred to in the preface are now located in Boyle Papers 7, fols 28–42. However, as Wojcik pointed out, none of the manuscript passages appear verbatim in the published version: Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 58n.
70. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 304.
71. “Introduction to my loose Notes Theological,” in Boyle, Works, vol. 14, 281.
72. Clericuzio, “God and the Physical World,” 1046.
73. On the development of Boyle medical interests during the Oxford Period see Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, esp. chaps. 5–6; Kaplan, Divulging of Useful Truths, chap. 2, esp. 68–76. On the development of Boyle's experimental programme see Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, chap. 7.
74. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 299–300. The title page bore Gabriel's claim that “Nothing is impossible to God” (Luke 1:37). On moral demonstration see Reason and Religion in ibid., vol. 8, 281–82. On Boyle's classification of experience, The Christian Virtuoso in Boyle, Works, vol. 11, 307–309. See also Sargent, “Learning from Experience,” 65.
75. Boyle to Stubbe, 9 March 1666, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 3, 99. On the content of this letter and its place in the “affaire Greatrakes,” see Steneck, “Greatrakes the Stroker,” 149–52.
76. Reason and Religion in Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 248.
77. Ibid., vol. 8, 252.
78. On Aquinas' doctrine of formal identity see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, chap. 6, esp. 256–265.
79. Boyle, Works, vol. 5, 453–454. As for the origin of soul, Boyle held the creationist view. He considered the creation of soul as a divine miracle. God created each individual soul and infused it in the embryo at a particular stage of his development, around the sixth week. Cf. Notion of Nature in ibid., vol. 10, 553; Christian Virtuoso in ibid., vol. 11, 301.
80. See ibid., vol. 5, 300, 343. Cf. also Notion of Nature in ibid., vol. 10, 452. On Boyle and the scholastic conception of soul see Wojcik, Boyle and the Limits of Reason, 125–126, 172.
81. Southwell to Boyle, 30 March 1661, Boyle, Correspondence, vol. 1, 452. Two years earlier Southwell had given details about the plant to Oldenburg: Southwell to Oldenburg, 20 October 1659, Oldenburg Correspondence, vol. I, 324. Athanasius Kircher performed the experiment of the “vegetable phoenix” to celebrate Queen Christina of Sweden's visit to the Collegio Romano in 1656. The small plant he obtained was exhibited at the Musaeum Kircherianum: Mayer-Deutsch, “‘Quasi-Optical Palingenesis’,” 105–129, 107.
82. It is worth noting that the experiment was also performed at the early Royal Society, but the fellows were not fully satisfied by it: see Gorman, “From ‘The Eyes of All’,” 170–189.
83. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 305–308.
84. Ibid., vol. 8, 308
85. Ibid., vol. 8, 304. For Boyle's views on human body see Usefulness of Natural Philosophy II.I in ibid., vol. 3, 310; Notion of Nature in ibid., vol. 10, 540; Final Causes in ibid., vol. 11, 148; The Christian Virtuoso II in ibid., vol. 12, 472–473. Boyle seemed to espouse the preformist view in the “Essay on Spontaneous Generation,” although the matter is not clear; ibid., vol. 13, 279–281. For Boyle's comments on current embryology and epigenesis see Ekholm, “Harvey's and Highmore's Accounts,” 571.
86. Boyle, Works, vol. 8, 301.
87. Ibid., vol. 8, 308.
88. Ibid., vol. 8, 310.
89. Things above reason in ibid., vol. 9, 388: The Christian Virtuoso II in ibid., vol. 12, 477–478. On Boyle's views on the mind/body problem, Anstey, Philosophy of Robert Boyle, chap. 8.
90. Cf. MS 198, fol. 39, in MacIntosh, Boyle on Atheism, 271.
91. Cf. MS 199, fol. 125v, in ibid., 270. On Boyle's classification of miracles see Clericuzio, “God and the Physical World,” 1044–1045.