Letters and Laboratories

At some point during the 1650s, the celebrity chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle had a disturbing experience following a ride in the Mendip Hills. Unaware of any hazards that lay before him, Boyle galloped across a lead-rich landscape littered with mineshafts and pits, only to be horrified upon his return by an account from the local miners of the dangers he had faced. The experience clearly made a significant impression on the scientist, as he returned to it some ten years later when collecting memories for his Occasional Reflections:

How have I travell'd all this while upon the Brink of the Grave! I thought only to be out of my Way, but little dream'd to be so near the end of all my Journeys, in that of my Life; by Traversing to and fro amongst those deep and cover'd Pits, upon any one of which if my Horse had but chanc'd to stumble, (and the very Mine-men I at length met with, think it a kind of Miracle he did not) I had been Kill'd and Bury'd at once, and my Fate had been for ever as much conceal'd from my Friends as my Body.¹

Claire Preston introduces us to this incident in her new book, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth Century England, where it appears as just one of many lively, appealing anecdotes of early modern experience peppered across her five chapters. Preston is quick to acknowledge that Boyle's 'early reflection on mineshafts is primarily moral and without tincture of the inductive natural-philosophical [style] that characterises some of his other meletetics', Boyle's coined term from the Greek for his particular method of meditative reflection (p. 210). He proceeds in the Occasional reflections to thank God for his goodness in delivering him from those dangers that he 'fear'd not'. Nevertheless, what this memory does begin to show is the depth (no pun intended) of the contribution made by the exercise of the imagination to seventeenth-century scientific enquiry.

Boyle was the most prominent English natural philosopher of his day, but his response to the subterranean world he very nearly became intimately acquainted with–a world opened up by new technologies of mining–was to be reminded by the earth's chasms of the moral pitfalls of a mortal life. His imagination was captured by the dark mystery of what lay beneath. And it was this kind of imagination, Preston shows so compellingly in her monograph, that urged so much of the investigation and discourse of seventeenth-century science. She writes of Boyle's anecdote:

It shows the imaginative power technologies of the deep earth had over leading early-modern mineralogists, palaeontologists, agronomists, and geologists of the subterranean region. They were strangely, fearsomely, mortally troubled with the hazards of an unstable structure of chasms and pitfalls, most of them not man-made, and their discussions and speculations about them were heavily coloured by metaphorical, emblematic, and above all theological interpretations.

(p. 210)

Boyle was far from alone in bringing 'metaphorical, emblematic, and above all theological interpretations' to natural philosophical discussion. In the opening years of the seventeenth century, the mathematician and atomist Thomas Harriot corresponded with Johannes Kepler on the benefits of the atomic hypothesis. He memorably advised the Dutch astronomer in 1606 that, if he should find 'the doors of nature's house' too narrow to enter, he should 'abstract and contract' himself to an atom–then, says Harriot, 'you will easily enter, and when you have come out again, tell me what miraculous things you saw'.² Harriot's appeal to the imagination draws heavily on ideals of Christian humility, associated here with the atom, the smallest possible constituent of the material world. The philosophical difficulty in entering the 'doors of nature' strongly recalls an aphorism from the Gospels: 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man...