Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (review)

The concept of the Scientific Revolution has, from the start, been about physics and astronomy, about matter and motion, and about the replacement of Aristotelian and scholastic natural philosophy with a quantified and mechanistic understanding of nature. Developments in other spheres of the study of nature were often considered marginal and ancillary at best and, in the case of alchemy and chemical studies, retrograde and irrelevant. The fundamental transformation of early modern science took place in physics and derived only from physical considerations. Despite much scholarship that has attempted to broaden the terrain of early modern natural philosophy, physics is still at the center of the received picture of the Scientific Revolution.

William R. Newman's recent book is the latest and most decisive contribution to establishing the critical role that early modern alchemy-chemistry, or chymistry, played in the transformation of natural philosophy. Newman argues that the evolution of a "mechanical philosophy" that replaced Aristotelian-scholastic hylomorphism was the direct and integral result of an experimental, corpuscular chymistry derived from medieval alchemy and culminating in Robert Boyle. Newman's argument is grounded in a detailed and technically exacting examination of medieval and early modern matter theory that is not for the philosophically faint of heart.

The following is the broad trajectory of Newman's complex story. The dominant medieval Aristotelian matter theory held that substance consisted of prime matter and substantial form. In a true compound of multiple substances, previous forms are destroyed and replaced by a new substantial form. There is no particulate structure to matter and the original components of a compound can not be recovered. An alternative theory based on the more empirical Aristotle of the Meteorology and the De generatione et corruptione was elaborated in a chymical context by Paul of Taranto (Geber of the Summa Perfectionis). This posited a corpuscular concept of matter in which components of a compound retain their identity as demonstrated experimentally by their recovery through chymical procedures resulting in "reductions to the pristine state" (24, 41–43). The process of recovering original constituents through chymical analysis was an important strand in Paracelsus and Renaissance alchemy, and was also vigorously attacked from the stance traditional Aristotelian theory by figures such as Erastus. This stimulated efforts by figures such as Andreas Libavius and Daniel Sennert to draw on the corpuscular Aristotelianism of Geberian alchemy to support an understanding of chymical analysis and synthesis. Although he does not fully abandon substantial forms, Sennert most fully develops a corpuscular theory of matter based on chymical experiments to undermine the Aristotelian theory of mixtures as ruling out the persistence of atoms or other particulate structures. His recovery of silver from solution in aqua fortis showed the persistence of unchanged silver and supported its microparticulate structure. This process is nicely illustrated in the plates showing the stages of Newman's replication of this experiment. Robert Boyle was aware of Sennert's work and reductions to the pristine state inspired by Sennert were Boyle's "most important experimental evidence for the persistence of micro level corpuscles and for the mechanical character of the accidental qualities induced upon and removed from those corpuscles" (217) by which Boyle replaced substantial forms with the mechanical origin of qualities.

Newman's recovery of this heritage that was not acknowledged by Boyle and has been given little consideration by historians is a tour-de-force that nonetheless also precisely delineates the revolutionary contribution Boyle does make as well as the integral role of experimental chymistry in the Scientific Revolution. Newman has also launched something of a methodological manifesto. Contra the claims of newer historiographical approaches to yield new insights, Newman argues that they have merely repackaged the established grand narrative. He strongly asserts, and recommends by example, the value of the close reading of original primary...