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Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 400-401



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Book Review

Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles:
A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century


Antonio Clericuzio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Pp. xi + 223. Cloth, $89.00.

Over the last few decades, historians of early-modern philosophy have tried to relate the main figures in the canon to contemporary developments in the sciences. Chief among these scientific developments has been the rise of the mechanical/corpuscular philosophy. On that view, everything in the physical world can be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the tiny corpuscles that make up the gross bodies of everyday experience. The general assumption has been that the corpuscularian philosophy was invariably mechanist, that to explain the gross behavior of bodies in terms of their smaller parts is to explain them in terms of size, shape, and motion.

This simple picture turns out to be something of a distortion. As some recent scholars have emphasized (William Newman, Lawrence Principe, Christoph Lüthy, for example), the corpuscular philosophy was not always mechanist in its orientation. On the view of many seventeenth-century thinkers, the tiny corpuscles of which bodies are made are, themselves, the smallest parts of the different elements, and so are essentially different from one another. On this view, not everything can be explained in terms of size, shape, and motion. In this way, the mechanist corpuscularianism that has dominated in the literature is only one kind of corpuscularianism.

Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles is an attempt to set out the influence of alchemy on seventeenth-century corpuscularianism. Clericuzio presents a broad history of the rise of seventeenth-century atomism and corpuscularianism, showing its close connection to the alchemical tradition, and offering some significant reinterpretations of figures, such as Robert Boyle, who have been read as paradigmatic of the mechanist approach to nature. (Following recent scholarly practice, Clericuzio does not distinguish sharply between chemistry and alchemy.)

Clericuzio begins in chapter 1 with an account of the origin of alchemical corpuscularianism, which he traces to two earlier sources, the tradition of semina rerum (seeds of things) and minima naturalia (natural minima) tradition. Clericuzio shows how later thinkers, Paracelsus and his followers, and especially the great alchemist and physician Daniel Sennert, reinterpreted these notions in corpuscular terms. For them, the world is made up of tiny corpuscles that instantiate the alchemical elements. This alchemical atomism is fully consistent with a kind of Aristotelianism; Sennert held that these elemental corpuscles are to be understood in terms of form and matter.

Clericuzio's main theme is that alchemical and non-mechanist conceptions of corpuscularianism were central to the rest of the seventeenth century. In chapter 2, Clericuzio discusses alchemical atomism in France. In addition to discussing the corpuscularianism of some straightforward alchemists, such as De Clave, Davidson (Davisson), and Van Helmont, he shows the importance of alchemical considerations to some figures usually considered more mechanist in their orientation, including Mersenne and Gassendi. In chapter 3, he turns to England before Boyle, and shows how early atomists, [End Page 400] such as Hill, Bacon, Charleton, Digby, White, and Willis all held non-mechanist versions of corpuscularianism.

The central chapter in the book, and the hardest sell, as it were, is the discussion of Boyle in chapter 4. Boyle was the person who introduced the term 'corpuscular philosophy,' which he, himself, seemed to identify with the mechanical philosophy, and also the author of the Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy, a brief for the new mechanism. Clericuzio does not deny that Boyle was a mechanist. Rather, he emphasizes that although in principle everything is reducible to size, shape, and motion, much of Boyle's work is conducted at the level of "subordinate causes," in which one can talk about bodies endowed with chemical properties. Though his views were grounded in size, shape, and motion, Boyle was generally uninterested...

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