Boyle: Between God and Science

  • Michael Hunter
Yale University Press: 2009. 400 pp. £25, $55 9780300123814 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-2381-4

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle (1627–91) was the leading natural philosopher in Britain. Yet although historians have been piecing together a more-detailed profile of him in the past three decades, his popular image extends little beyond the law that bears his name and his most famous publication, The Sceptical Chymist. As with his contemporaries Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton's shadow has obscured our view of Boyle. But previous biographers must share the blame for Boyle's faded image, not least the first, Thomas Birch. Writing in the 1740s with his collaborator Henry Miles, Birch removed letters and whole unpublished works from Boyle's papers in order to perpetuate the anodyne image that suited the polite tastes of the day.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN BURTON.

Nevertheless, there is no paucity of material with which a biographer can work. Indeed, the most impressive feature of biographer Michael Hunter's Boyle is the meticulous care with which he has combed the vast quantity of published and unpublished materials — including portraits, printed images and medallions — relating to Boyle's life. Hunter masterfully interweaves the narrative of Boyle's intellectual development and scientific achievements with a measured assessment of Boyle's diffident, even convoluted, personality.

The tale begins with Boyle's domineering and ambitious father, Richard, the Earl of Cork, and moves through his infancy, childhood and Eton school years. Then follows his Grand Tour of Europe, on which Boyle had seminal experiences that were to shape his earnest Christian faith and his early intellectual trajectory, and from which he emerged as a precocious adolescent.

Perhaps surprisingly, Boyle's first exploits as a writer were directed to moral and devotional topics. But at the age of 22 he was “transported and bewitch'd” by experimental chemistry and never looked back. So began a life dedicated to the study of nature: a life that was funded by the substantial means he inherited from his father, and that is epitomized in the title of his popular later work The Christian Virtuoso.

The most compelling chapters in Hunter's narrative cover Boyle's time in Oxford from the winter of 1655–56 and his emergence, in the early 1660s, as a celebrated public figure and emblem of the early Royal Society. These years were his most productive, both in terms of experimental results and written output: from 1660 to 1666, he published a dozen books at an average of 140,000 words per year. Other works took shape in this period, emerging in later decades; and still others have only recently been unearthed and published in the definitive 14-volume The Works of Robert Boyle (Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000), of which Hunter is an editor.

In his publications, Boyle introduced a new and distinctive natural philosophy called corpuscularianism. He also stressed the interplay of theory and experiment in the construction of natural histories, an approach that was to dominate British science for four decades. However, most significant was the series of innovative experiments Boyle performed with his air-pump, J-tube and long pipette. Through the clever manipulation of air and mercury and with careful measurement, he established that the pressure of the air is inversely proportional to its volume. Furthermore, he solved the long-standing problem in animal physiology as to the cause of air entering the lungs in respiration: there is a differential in air pressure between the expanded lungs and the atmosphere.

Yet there is more to Boyle than the careful experimenter. Hunter shows how in the eyes of his contemporaries, from the royal court to savants abroad, Boyle was a larger-than-life character. This stemmed in part from his overt religiosity, his reputation for professional integrity and his understated philanthropy. But it is the inner Boyle whom Hunter is most concerned to explore: Boyle the doubter, the vacillator, the stuttering and conscience-stricken man revealed in private notes written near the end of his life. Hunter displays fascination and impartiality, even wavering respect, but in the final analysis it is not clear that he really likes Boyle. However, the biographer shows maturity by leaving the reader latitude to make up their own mind about what made Boyle tick.

This first comprehensive work on the life of Boyle is a piece of stunning scholarship, a command performance by a gifted historian. It is also a great read.