{"id":4869,"date":"2025-11-16T04:45:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T04:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apeterman.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/phl202f25\/?page_id=4869"},"modified":"2025-11-16T04:45:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T04:45:43","slug":"robert-boyle-and-john-locke","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/apeterman.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/phl202f25\/robert-boyle\/robert-boyle-and-john-locke\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Boyle and John Locke"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of Robert Boyle\u2019s closest contemporaries was John Locke. Boyle\u2019s work on corpuscularianism strongly influenced Locke\u2019s own views on the external, mechanical world. Boyle and Locke met through the scientific community that was being fostered at Oxford in the mid-17th century. Locke found himself disagreeing with the Aristotelian-dominated teachings at the time and was much more interested in the newly emerging natural philosophy, engaging with medicine. Boyle, who was also at Oxford at the time, was fervent in his experimentation and laying the foundations of modern chemistry, having published his most famous work, The Skeptical Chymist<\/em>, around this time. Boyle also championed the creation of the \u201cInvisible College\u201d, an association of natural philosophers that was a precursor to the Royal Society of London. It was through this society that Boyle and Locke met, and had the chance to bounce ideas off each other; Locke often assisted Boyle with his experiments by collecting data from Boyle\u2019s experiments. Boyle was more focused on experimentation and scientific discovery, while Locke was more philosophical. Locke found Boyle\u2019s work influential for his metaphysical ideas since Boyle\u2019s ideas were rooted in scientific evidence. Boyle and Locke developed such a close relationship that, when Boyle passed away in 1691, Locke was entrusted with a massive archive of Boyle\u2019s unreleased works, including many completed papers that were left unpublished. Locke contributed to the posthumous publication of Boyle\u2019s works, such as his 1692 The General History of the Air<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philosophically, the core connection between Boyle and Locke is their shared subscription to the corpuscular theory. Corpuscular theory, proposed by Boyle, was able to explain that all the properties of matter that are observed in the natural world could be due to the motion of tiny, unobservable particles called corpuscles. Boyle\u2019s reasoning for creating such a theory was to disprove the existing Aristotelian principles of the time, a sentiment that Locke shared. A major difference between Boyle and Locke, however, was the methodology they used when creating or employing the corpuscular theory. Boyle was an experimental philosopher. He used inductive, experimental reasoning in order to prove that his hypothesis about corpuscles had merit. Locke, on the other hand, was more of an epistemologist and associated himself with philosophy more than experimentation. Locke did not conduct any large experiments of his own, but rather concerned himself with the human mind. In his 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding<\/em>, Locke took the human mind and attempted to break it down into its constituent parts (what Locke referred to as \u201csimple ideas\u201d), and then seeing how the mind could be reconstructed. In order to do this, Locke needed a model for how the world worked as a base. This is where he used Boyle\u2019s corpuscular theory. Instead of attempting to prove the corpuscular theory, Locke instead accepted it as true, attempting to figure out what knowledge could be known or derived by the human mind given that the world was corpuscular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Boyle and Locke also arrived at the same, crucial distinction between primary and secondary qualities. As seen before, Boyle laid crucial scientific groundwork that Locke would later build upon. Boyle argued that observed features such as cold and heat were not inherent to objects but rather arose from the interactions of the corpuscles that make up objects that have these qualities interacting with our senses. Though the creation of the specific terms are credited to Locke, Boyle was the progenitor of the concept behind and distinction between \u201cprimary qualities\u201d and \u201csecondary qualities\u201d. The distinction between these two was elaborated upon by Locke, becoming a cornerstone of his epistemology. Primary qualities were defined as those that were inseparable from the body, what Boyle would define as features of the corpuscles themselves. Both Boyle and Locke cited size and shape as being primary qualities, with Locke also including number and motion (what Boyle incorporated as the formation of the corpuscles and the \u2018active principle\u2019). Secondary qualities were defined to be powers that objects have to produce sensations within our mind, and importantly, as Boyle also found, do not exist within the objects themselves, and include features such as colors, smells, sounds, and tastes. Locke tied this to his concept of ideas in that secondary qualities do exist within our ideas of objects in our mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where their philosophies diverge is when discussing substance, exactly what the universe is made up of. Boyle, concerned mainly with science and experimentation, remained largely unconcerned with substance. He certainly believed that matter was made up of corpuscles, but the question of whether these corpuscles were indivisible atoms did not interest him. He was much more interested in the mechanical motion of corpuscles and labeled the substance of the corpuscles as a metaphysical question for someone else to handle. Locke, on the other hand, was very troubled by the question of substance. After repeated skepticism, Locke was forced to draw the conclusion that the human mind could not perceive the substance that makes up the universe, however, for our knowledge to exist, we must infer that the substance does exist. Locke also provided additional elaboration on what we could know about objects in the natural world, particularly through his distinction between \u201creal essences\u201d, which involved the underlying corpuscular structure of an object, and \u201cnominal essences\u201d, which involved the observable properties of an object. Locke\u2019s point was that the mind could only know nominal essences of things and would never know the real essence of an object. Locke explained that our senses are not attuned enough to be able to discern the corpuscular structure of an object, and thus, it would be impossible for us to have truly scientific knowledge of the natural world since it is rooted in corpuscles. Locke and Boyle met during an exciting time when Boyle was developing his mechanical philosophy and bringing experimentation to the forefront of understanding the natural world. Locke was able to develop Boyle\u2019s ideas even further to produce a scientifically-rooted mechanism for how all human knowledge could have arisen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding<\/em>. 1690.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MacIntosh, J. J., and Peter Anstey. “Robert Boyle.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em>, 18 July 2023,      plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/boyle\/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uzgalis, William. “John Locke.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em>, 1 May 2024,      plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/locke\/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of Robert Boyle\u2019s closest contemporaries was John Locke. Boyle\u2019s work on corpuscularianism strongly influenced Locke\u2019s own views on the external, mechanical world. Boyle and…<\/p>\n

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