The Sceptical Chymist

Robert Boyle’s dense, stilted language takes great patience and devotion to navigate, but the rewards are many. To read him is to time-travel, to live inside and experience a different era and a mind-set truly different from the one we assume today.

Five friends meet in a garden for a civilized chat about the “constituents of the mixt bodies.” Their fictional conversation, published in 1649, is a landmark of the new “enlightened” philosophy that will complicate and forever change the way people relate to the physical world. The conversation continues today, but conducted in a much less civilized manner.

The five:
Carneades, host and Skeptic - Enlightened philosopher, dedicated to experiential chymical exploration;
Philoponus, show more Sober Chymist [as opposed to the uneducated, common “Vulgar Chymist”] - adherent of Paracelsus’ Spagyrist Doctrine of three Principles: Mercury, Sulphur, Salt;
Themistius, Aristotelian - adherent of the classical Doctrine of four “Peripatetick” Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water;
Eleutherius, impartial Judge;
unnamed narrator, secretary - records the exchange.

Themistius presciently anticipates the Uncertainty Principle. He advocates for a world view based upon established “Reason.” Aristotle’s Doctrine is “Obvious,” stable, and an expression of eternal “Truth.” Laboratory experiments are done in order to support the truth of that Doctrine, not the other way around where experimental results determine Doctrine. That way, he notes with horror, one never settles on “Truth” at all. Doctrine must be modified and changed with each new discovery.
Themistius explains, “For this [Aristotelian] Doctrine is very different from the whimseys of Chymists and other Modern Innovators, of whose Hypotheses we may observe, as Naturalists do of less perfect Animals, that as they are hastily form'd, so they are commonly short liv'd. For so these, as they are often fram'd in one week, are perhaps thought fit to be laughed at the next ; and being built perchance but upon two or three Experiments are destroyed by a third or fourth, whereas the doctrine of the four Elements was fram'd by Aristotle after he had leasurely considered those Theories of former Philosophers, which are now with great applause revived, as discovered by these latter ages ; And had so judiciously detected and supplyed the Errors and defects of former Hypotheses concerning the Elements, that his Doctrine of them has been ever since deservedly embraced by the letter'd part of Mankind.”

In “The Myth of the Eternal Return” Mircea Eliade names this dread of relativity and ambiguity. He calls it the Terror of History.
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This Classics of Science Library edition (1997) is a beautifully bound volume that one can read with turning the book to scraps. The binding is fake leather and the edges are gilded, making it both attractive and robust. Original published in 1661.

Volume number 559 in Everyman's Library with dust cover still intact.

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