6 - The Grand Business of Nature

Summary

The natural philosopher Robert Boyle, mentor of John Locke, took the view that the aim of science was ‘the Empire over the Creatures’. The task of Chapter 6 is to show how Robert Boyle’s new political system for an economics of natural science, primarily involving the utilitarian exploitation of nature and of trade, connected with his contribution to the development of a form of natural law and natural philosophy shorn of moral natural law. That idea drew on classical theological teachings on dominion over creatures (as set out in Genesis 1:26) together with the economic goal of making natural sciences productive – also considering the significant expansion that the British Empire was undergoing at that point in time. Theological principles about an omnipotent and bountiful God were crucial to Boyle’s plans for the achievement of broader management of nature, but as a rule he avoided consideration of anthropological theology and moral natural law in his scientific writings. A close reading of Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy and of the Aretology helps in articulating these ideas.

6.1 The Oeconomy of Nature

Robert Boyle’s status as a scientific pioneer, and the many emotional insecurities that this entailed may have fuelled his notorious feud with the formidable author of Leviathan.¹ But whatever the reasons for their enmity and whoever prevailed in their feud, it is certain that Boyle’s philosophical work on natural law is mostly known nowadays only within specialist circles, while Hobbes, on account of his theory of natural law, is recognized today as the author of probably the most important theory of the state in modernity. The scope of Boyle’s influence in the context of natural law is, however, another matter entirely. This chapter is concerned with just one aspect of Boyle’s proposal regarding knowledge: the way in which he connected nature, theology and economy through science as a multiplier of sorts. The task of this chapter is thus to show how Boyle’s new political system for an economics of natural science, primarily involving the utilitarian exploitation of nature and of trade, connected with his contribution to the development of natural law and natural philosophy, stripped of moral natural law. Natural law was thus rendered non-human. The theoretical problem that Boyle set himself to address was to ascertain the way in which the activity of matter (as opposed to spirit) related to God.² Descartes’s denial of the activity of powers in nature, against Aristotle and Aquinas’s ideas, and his attribution of all the work in matter to God through his laws of nature may have acted as a spur to Boyle’s work in the realm of natural philosophy.³ Boyle, however, thought that human reason could carry out this theological exercise only by investigating matter. Remaining within the Baconian tradition, his goals were at once devotional and utilitarian: he sought to expand human beings’ dominion over ‘matter’. He did this as a transitional figure who operated within the broader intellectual context of early modern or Renaissance Europe characterized by the appearance of anti-Aristotelian perceptions of nature that increasingly enlarged the scope of human beings’ dominion over it.⁴ Theological principles about an omnipotent and bountiful God were crucial to Boyle’s plans for the achievement of broader management of nature, but as a rule, he avoided consideration of anthropological theology in his scientific writings.⁵ Boyle’s idea of recovering the bountiful God might well be compared with the provident ruler that the Arminians had recovered half a century earlier. They rejected the punitive God of Calvin and asserted that by attributing reason, will and affection to human beings, which were only diminished not destroyed by the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, God provided human beings with natural sociability.⁶ Only Boyle, instead of focusing on the moral aspects, he worked with the material aspects of human beings’ divine government. The disappearance of moral natural law from the concerns of seventeenth century natural philosophers, I argue, placed human beings outside nature and subjected nature to a new lord and master: the human being. The sophistication of Boyle’s philosophical investigation of the concept of nature was instrumental to this endeavour.

The first important natural philosopher of the seventeenth century to describe nature as an oeconomy was Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665).⁷ Peter Remien has recently reinstated Digby as the thinker of the oeconomy of nature, which, in Remien’s view, was predicated on an ontology that separated humanity from nature.⁸ Remien goes on to describe how Boyle employed Digby’s oeconomy for a different purpose – that of expressing God’s governance of the system that the natural world constituted.⁹ My reading of Digby differs from Remien’s, as I emphasize his project of defending the compatibility of the new science with faith. From within the ranks of mechanical and atomist philosophies, Digby, a prominent biologist in the history of science, wrote in protest against their impending turn to materialism, and hoped to show that the whole oeconomy of nature could not be merely a concatenation of material and causal effects, but the work of a designer.¹⁰

6.1.1 The Last Atom

The following interpretation offers a fresh context for Boyle’s work. I suggest that Boyle’s novelty lay not in showing God’s sovereignty over the oeconomy (something Digby had already done), but in seeking to perfect on an intellectual level Digby’s naturalist project by distancing through his use of chemistry the philosophical natural explanations of nature from moral or religious accounts.¹¹ Furthermore, Boyle did this by using utopian theology as a foundation that would also serve his utilitarian ideas. His atomism required the deconstruction of past knowledge, displacing moral or religious epistemologies about nature – for the goal was to enlarge knowledge – while a theology of abundance sanctioned the extraction of material benefits from the pursue of natural sciences. In more personal terms, as a scientist, Boyle appeared fascinated with matter and motion. Moreover, the fact that we know God and discover the composition of the world through matter and motion explains Boyle’s adoption of the method of isolating matter through mechanical theory, both philosophically and experimentally.¹²

Thomas Hobbes had noted in The Elements of Law that ‘every man by natural necessity desireth his own good’, and then he went on in Leviathan to attribute to each human being in the state of nature a natural right to everything, referring mostly to material goods in nature for which one may need to fight in times of scarcity.¹³ Thus arose the struggle characteristic of his state of nature. Boyle’s rejoinder to this sociological theory was that the desire for one’s good was not merely a ‘human thing’ or a ‘necessity’ – that it was God who desired the good(s) and knowledge for human beings, and took care that those who were industrious received them:

For, not content to have provided him all that was requisite either to Support or Accommodate him here, he hath been pleas’d to contrive the World so, that (if Man be not wanting himself) it may afford not onely Necessaries and Delights, but Instructions too.¹⁴

Nature was thus the solution for humanity, not, as Hobbes had claimed, the problem. In Boyle’s normative theory of nature, God the Creator and ‘munificent Benefactor’, who had endowed the earth richly, was the premise for producing a philosophy of nature. In turn, human beings disappeared from the ambit of the philosophical questions posed by the leading exponent of the new experimental philosophy.¹⁵ Human nature got lost in a theory describing two opposites – the intangible God and a system or oeconomy of physical nature. We saw in Chapter 2 that the individual remembering the now-disappeared corporeal world in Hobbes’s thought experiment of the annihilatio mundi was still able to remember its conception of body with some accuracy. Some centuries earlier Avicenna had carried out a similar experiment – about a floating man who does not feel or see the corporeal world but knows that he exists – to affirm the existence of the human soul. In Boyle’s experiment of the annihilatio mundi only an atom survives:

If we should conceive, that all the rest of the Universe were annihilated, except any of these entire and undivided Corpuscles (…) it is hard to say what could attributed to it, besides Matter, Motion (or Rest,) Bulk, and Shape.¹⁶

Hobbes had devised a political philosophy for the masses with the tools of his own version of mechanistic natural philosophy. Boyle would in turn produce a popular philosophy of nature with natural laws from which rational human beings were exempt.¹⁷ By means of that philosophy of nature, Boyle, who was at once a forceful and chaotic publicist, also developed economic science or, in other words, principles for making science economically productive for the state, an empire in the making.¹⁸ Michael Hunter noted years ago the danger of taking a narrow approach to the Royal Society’s appeal to utility by ‘assuming that it referred exclusively to practical, everyday needs’.¹⁹ The breadth and depth of Boyle’s thinking helps to overcome this danger, and to ascertain that – strikingly in his case – he was able to be attentive to both grand theory and, to a lesser extent, to daily needs. His economic science is rich, with a background in alchemy, and intriguingly, was destined to establish chemistry as real natural philosophy. At the same time, he articulated his ideas in simple terms destined to reach everyone. Boyle devoted many hundreds of pages to showing the interdependence between the new practical science, the products arriving from the empire and the welfare of the country.²⁰ Between utopia, represented by theology, and scepticism, presented as natural philosophy, human beings re-emerged in his economic science at once as passive subjects of needs and delights, and as lords of nature, and hence industrious agents of change and transmutation.²¹ Knowledge and the exploitation of physical nature thus formed a unity:

And ‘tis chiefly by the Knowledge, such as it is, that Experience, (not Art) hath taught Us, of these differing Qualities of Bodies, that we are enabled, by a due application of Agents to Patients, to exercise the little Empire, that we have either Acquired or Regained over the Creatures.²²

At the same time, consideration of how to multiply the goods of nature and rendering them profitable became a ubiquitous trope in Boyle’s studies, published writings and lists of enquiries to fellow scientists and fellow travellers.²³

6.1.2 The Multiplier

Multiplication through investment in science was in the air in the seventeenth century, as we saw in Chapter 4. Boyle’s closest friends would also use the argument of multiplication to interest him in rather far-fetched economic schemes. When, for instance, his sister, Lady Ranelagh mediated between him and Benjamin Worsley in 1666 to prompt her brother’s investment of 500 pounds in a new project, she argued in those terms. This time the business involved the cultivation of senna, herb with medicinal powers that Worsley had received from Barbados and for whose cultivation he wanted to obtain a patent from the King:

I may sudainely be able to give you a particular accoumpt of the course Mr. W. (Worsley) thinks of taking to make his senna presently a Commodety & to Multiplye it to great quantities which appears to me neither disingenuous not unpoliticke.²⁴

Boyle’s theorization of his ideas on economic science occurred through a series of lengthy writings entitled Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy published over a period of eight years (1663–1671).²⁵ It was nevertheless a theme that would appear in his writings more generally. Usefulness advocated the multiplication of commodified natural goods through two channels: naturalists’ activity, experiments, alchemy, the study of mines and so on; and managing trades and labour, the introduction or alteration of crafts, businesses or professions, their change of locality and the introduction of engines in manufacturing processes.²⁶

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Boyle and his collaborators raised the status to those practicing experimental science almost to become a social class of its own, as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer demonstrated some years ago.²⁷ Experience of scientific knowledge about nature was to be channelled towards utility for economic and theological purposes. Michael Ben Chaim has shown the ways in which Boyle considered experimental philosophy the paradigm of science at the service of a theology of divine workmanship. Boyle perfected the purification of the Christian religion from the supposedly vulgar metaphysics of the Schools that opened the way both to acknowledgment of God, Creator and Designer and to vast knowledge about His Design.²⁸ Moreover, Boyle was probably propelled into new realms of knowledge by the undeniable nationalism and Independency, both in political and scientific terms, of his millenarian mentors – particularly Benjamin Worsley – who operated outside the strictures of a formal education or school. The development of science, economy and religion were uniquely connected in mid-seventeenth-century, England through Boyle’s uncompromising boldness.²⁹ Certainly, the Reformers of the previous generation were no dilettanti. However, Boyle far outshone them in sophistication – Comenius’s basic ideas about a ‘professor of necessities’ that we saw in Chapter 4 and Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy are worlds apart, in particular due to Boyle’s intimate knowledge of the imperial trade – though Comenius is more profound in anthropological terms. As a matter of fact, Boyle became a professional politician of experimental science and sought to advance science and to make it profitable. This trait is visible even in his earliest works and was possibly inherited from his father, the luxury-loving Earl of Cork. It is also to be found in the work of the alchemical authors that inspired him and in that of the Baconian Reformers. In fact, knowledge and profit were the Royal Society’s two stated goals and were not merely declared defensively in response to criticism levelled in the 1660s that the Royal Society was made up of gentlemen who killed time by playing with experiments, but as congruent principles within the pragmatist ideas of the period.³⁰

Behind Boyle’s drive to deconstruct nature, as analysed in Chapter 7, was a thirst for knowledge and scientific curiosity for managing the system or oeconomy of nature to the utmost limits, which also ultimately aimed at imitating God the Creator. Boyle’s philosophical effort expressed in his own way the zeal for economic prosperity of the Reformers, who would, as a matter of course, transform that zeal into theology. In the last few decades, important studies have considered Boyle’s significance as a natural philosopher. Rose-Mary Sargent and Philip Anstey have rightly recovered from undeserved obscurity the systematic character of a philosophy that appears from the outset wonderfully asystematic. Later thinkers, such as John Locke and Isaac Newton (1643–1727), evidently found inspiration for their own theories in it.³¹ As a rule, however, Boyle’s ideas on the economics of science are glossed over, which is surprising as they appear to constitute a powerful engine in his theoretical effort. J. R. Jacob famously interpreted Boyle’s political programme for atomism as being solely a religious attack against the scholasticism of Jesuits and papists.³² Boyle’s programme does not, however, really justify that characterization when one takes account of the context in which he worked. Catholics, including the French Pierre Gassendi and the English Sir Kenelm Digby, among others, were the most prominent atomists of the period.³³ Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 4, the economic problem was also a religious problem.³⁴ Recently studies of Boyle have started to highlight the utilitarian aspects of his work not dealt with by previous scholars. For example, Matthew Day has noted that the extant textual evidence makes it impossible to argue that Boyle’s interest in political economy was comparable with his interest in nature. However, he argues that Boyle was involved in a project of framing economy as technology. Thus, his invention of an instrument to discriminate between real, degraded and counterfeit money amounted to an attempt to eliminate the human dimensions of money.³⁵ Also Michael Hunter argued not long ago that probably no one wrote more or better than Boyle in his time about the application of science.³⁶ But on the whole Boyle’s huge significance as a philosopher of nature has remained within the confines of what we would call today natural sciences, and not always without controversy.³⁷ His name is either absent from histories of the birth of seventeenth-century natural law and political economy or used to denote a peripheral figure who conceived corpuscularianism as a sort of conduit between atomism and Aristotelian and Cartesian natural philosophy and inspired others with his tour de force in experimental philosophy. Significantly, he is often linked to William Petty – whose genius was apparent, for instance, in Political Arithmetic (1676) – and to John Locke, possibly the natural lawyer of the seventeenth century whose influence remains strongest today.³⁸ Petty and Boyle’s mutual inspiration and friendship is well known, as is the fact that Locke started work as a theorist around the same time he began to work with Boyle.³⁹

‘Philosophers’, Boyle wrote, ‘may have Acquisition of wealth more in their power than in their aim.’⁴⁰ However, Boyle’s programmatic goal of uniting theology and philosophical knowledge with the goal of making that union useful and profitable is ubiquitous in his work.⁴¹ If his studies had any purpose beyond giving glory to God, generating knowledge and satisfying his prodigious curiosity, it was to achieve ‘substantiall Productions to answer the Necessities and Furnish the Accommodations of Humane Life’ and to facilitate that the ‘artificer learn to make the utmost profit’ in order to serve the ‘Oeconomical prudence’.⁴² In this manner, Boyle’s project of knowledge emerges as supported on three pillars: theology, natural science and economy. It is no coincidence that he rectified Bacon’s distinction between ‘Luciferous’ experiments, providing knowledge or light, and ‘Fructiferous’ experiments, which were to the advantage of one’s interests, by coining the term ‘Lucriferous’ – given that, to the attentive scientist, each implied the other.⁴³ His statement that the difference between a ‘trade’ and an ‘experiment’ lay ‘not so much in the Nature of the thing’, but in the fact that the former ‘had the Luck to be applied to Human Uses, or by a Company of Artificers made their Businesse, in order to their Profit’ offers a clue to his way of thinking.⁴⁴ Shorn of economic considerations, Boyle’s theology and science remain enigmatic and lacking in the extraordinary relevance they appear to have had in the broader social and political context of his time.⁴⁵

6.1.3 Natural Philosophy without Moral Natural Law

Boyle primarily promoted the study of chemistry, an eminently practical science emerging from alchemy and involved with elements, compounds and atoms – or corpuscles, as he called them – and this fact is of the utmost importance in this story.⁴⁶ A theory of matter is present in his work that entails interconnected – mechanical – elements that comprise a system and possess an intelligence – implying (mechanical) affections. According to Boyle, these attributes undoubtedly come from God and do not call for a theory about human beings or about analogies related to them.⁴⁷ William Newman has underlined that the fundamental characteristic of Boyle’s atomism is that it was studied from the perspective of a chemist – not from a physicalist – who observes the impossibility of further physical division and evoked images of autonomy and ultimately individualism.⁴⁸ More recently, it has been noted by Alexander Wragge-Morley that Boyle imagined God as ‘a transcendentally skilled chemist’.⁴⁹ That was certainly his own model to imitate.

Boyle’s investigations are rich and complex, combining Aristotelian ideas of atoms as substances that he borrowed from the German physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), only to reject the notion of substance in favour of that of the identity of atoms or corpuscles.⁵⁰ Those corpuscles, Boyle emphasized, gained particularity or identity in their interaction with their environment – that is, within the oeconomy of nature.⁵¹ This theory is both beautiful and far-reaching but strictly not concerned with human beings, whereas his economics of science employs the same method of ignoring the moral aspect of human agency while focusing on utility. This specific Boylean call would generate dramatic changes in future conceptions of natural philosophy and would emphasize his utilitarian goals. I have little doubt that he was one of the key artificers of the seventeenth-century transformation of natural law. Furthermore, his social importance, the relevance of his philosophical and theological work and his commitment to the discipline of chemistry far removed from human spirit justify the focus on his work in this chapter. Ethics and moral philosophy were of little relevance in the approach he took, which was based on chemical analysis, and in how he thought anew a theology about divine Creation and human beings’ dominion over nature (Genesis 1:26–31). Boyle’s laws of nature are laws of motion, not moral laws, and the dominion of human beings over nature is about deconstructing and reconstructing nature, traditionally reserved to the omnipotence of God – the Lord of the nature of things – and about extracting economic profit from it.⁵²

That was a blend of creationism, science and economy that constituted a fresh start for natural law in lieu of the great ethical contemporary traditions that may be summarized as falling into these four categories: (1) Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue ethics, or a morality of virtues (2) the ethics of the nature of the thing of the modern and late scholastics, expressed either as a morality of precepts or a morality of rights (3) the ethics of needs of the Greek-Arabic medical traditions, or a morality of needs and (4) the Puritan ethics, of a morality of industriousness and utility.⁵³ Robert Sanderson’s seventeenth century casuistic and mechanistic moral philosophy cannot be considered to be in competition with Boyle’s ideas, but rather to supplement them. Moral cases concocted with sceptical epistemologies backed by the institutional authority of the Anglican Church completed what experiments could not provide: guidance in respect of individuals’ moral behaviour. Thus, the traditional grand moral natural law theories experienced a substantial decline in the face of the underlying normative project of experimental science and of industriously exploiting, enjoying, and investigating nature as the way to God carried out by Boyle and others. Sorana Corneanu’s groundbreaking description of a species of morality that evolved in Europe during the seventeenth century – which she calls ‘Regimes of the Mind’ – also positions Boyle as legitimizing the experimental line of enquiry against speculative and metaphysical modes of thinking. The method of ascertaining truth through experimental philosophy had both scientific and therapeutic import, and therefore moral value for the mind.⁵⁴ However, as Boyle depicted it, the experience of training the mind is remarkably self-centred. It connected, as in a solipsism, the search for supernatural truths with the humility of the industrious scientist. In the absence of a study of human beings, core social and communitarian aspects and rules of morality also disappear.

Therefore, Boyle’s emphasis on multiplication, I argue, results from a lack of a solid doctrine of morality in his theoretical work. In the absence of a theory of virtues concerning social life, justice or other invocations of social morality founded on principles of natural law, multiplication and growth become the means of addressing human needs and of satisfying desires. Moreover, an ethics of multiplication placed no limit on the expectations concerning profiting from or exploiting nature by those involved in natural science and trades. Multiplication was at once a scientific method and a source of theological truths about the bountiful Creator by which the contemporary problem of poverty and that of overcoming Hobbes’ anthropology of struggle, with its atheist tendencies, could be approached.⁵⁵ Boyle employs ‘multiplication’ as the worldly and social counterpart to the solitary and therapeutic introspection of the individual. Experimental philosophy offered both. He regularly insisted that the love of God manifested itself in the bountiful material goods of nature, the suitability of human bodies to relish them, and the duty of human beings to multiply nature’s goods. This theology of abundance was fundamentally alien to the ascetism of the Puritans that Max Weber famously described at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁵⁶ It appears therefore that Boyle’s work opened a new avenue for thinking about morality among them. In Boyle’s written works only a very narrow set of virtues and desires appear to be relevant for human beings as creatures of God. Boyle has been described as a lay theologian, a description that is also supported statistically since almost half of his numerous texts are religious in nature.⁵⁷ When he wrote about natural philosophy and natural sciences, he candidly acknowledged that his aim was not to do theology, and yet his theological arguments often led to one all-encompassing and underlying theme: God has given human beings dominion over bountiful nature and creatures and it is good and right to know, relish, multiply and make them productive.

Boyle was an erudite author, gifted natural philosopher and a man of intense faith with a strong grounding in the Bible and deep scholastic knowledge. While his convoluted prose sometimes makes him appear slightly priggish, he was above all an extremely bold scientist.⁵⁸ He would approve of and employ any tools available for the acquisition of knowledge: theology, philosophy, experiments, alchemy, even perhaps private revelation.⁵⁹ Ironically, despite being guided in several respects by the supernatural and esoteric, his contribution to natural law represented a novel and intensively desacralized understanding of nature. The ethical significance of A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature and his devastating critique of the traditional personification of nature that even Reformers such as Jan Comenius rather reaffirmed than destroyed, entailed the disintegration of ‘human moral nature’ as a concept.⁶⁰ ‘Nature’ was substituted by a new complex system of mechanical forces – an oeconomy susceptible to and, in a sense, awaiting the intervention of the chemist. That was the highest expression of the dominion of human beings over natural goods. The oeconomy or system of nature constituted Boyle’s minimalist metaphysics, which was nevertheless remarkably more rational (and mechanistic) than the millenarian relativism of his friend Benjamin Worsley.⁶¹ Some sort of minimal system beyond the chaos of the Epicureans was necessary in order to make sense of the world.⁶² But ideas such as Hobbes’s metaphysics of necessity, let alone those of the scholastics, were only barriers to knowledge.

Germano Maifreda’s archaeology and Keith Tribe’s philological study of the concept of ‘economy’ in modern Europe help to ascertain how avant garde Boyle’s approach was.⁶³ He abandoned the traditional but narrow understanding of economy as management of the household, even if expanded to the state as advocated by Bodin.⁶⁴ The management of nature as a whole ensued. As noted above, Boyle probably borrowed the term oeconomy, attributed to nature, from Digby’s natural philosophy. However, it was Boyle who first combined three elements: (1) the new epistemological and metaphysical transformation of natural categories (that is, the grouping of the natural world into species etc.), thus diluting Aristotelian substances in his theory of atomism; (2) the socioeconomic purpose of pursuing ‘the Empire of Man’ in a systematic manner over ‘inferior’ creatures; and (3) lifting of ‘the boundaries of nature’, of how natural beings and things are found naturally, in order to multiply its ‘productions’.⁶⁵ A visionary of the British Empire and beyond, Boyle would identify nature with the physicality of the entire globe. Boyle’s economy did address the organization of the management of the world to meet human needs, but it did so with a breathtakingly global perspective. It had the goal of extracting from, imitating and multiplying productively a system called nature.⁶⁶

My analysis is simple. Boyle’s own project of exaggerating the economy and resources of nature was not Scriptural. Instead, it grew out of his scientific genius and the economy of the world in which he lived. This included the enjoyment of his immense inherited fortune, a trading and colonial empire in the making, and the urge felt by entrepreneurs or ‘projectors’, in the parlance of the time, planters and merchants, among others, to make the acquisition of wealth appear respectable. Whether he was personally candid or disingenuous has been much discussed in the literature, for he adopted a low profile and had a modest public persona.⁶⁷ However, the authenticity of his deep religious faith cannot be doubted. His outlook, in common with that of the Reformers, was utopian in combining care for the poor and contemplation of industrious labour, as the path to heaven, with the alluring promise of private richness, evolving autonomously from moral philosophy. The theology of abundance resulted from an independent interpretation of the Bible in accordance with the millenarian tradition of seventeenth-century English Puritans’ world view. Their belief in the promise of return to a bountiful Paradise on earth is portrayed in Charles Webster’s The Great Instauration.⁶⁸ Moreover, Boyle displayed a penchant for highlighting the value of pleasure that did not form part of a wider theory of moral philosophy but probably stemmed from his Epicureanism. Boyle was a critical scholar and a stoical experimental scientist, and his alchemical interests only rarely betrayed him; hence, he hardly raised the suspicion of being a charlatan. Moreover, he became a natural scientist due to the knowledge he acquired at an early age as to the increasing possibilities for public wealth offered by the dominions of the British Empire – if they were well managed. His intrepid scientific spirit worked hand in hand with an impatience in relation to finding means of obtaining wealth, which was typical of the alchemists but not unrealistic in his case, except for the fact that he tended to omit the vexing aspects of moral human nature in his theoretical works.⁶⁹ After all, human beings had been expelled from Paradise for some reason, a Christian belief that he tended to gloss over in his writings. Thus his position was marked by utopian optimism neglecting the dangerous aspects of human beings’ nature. Despite his massive theological discourse, the question that Boyle never asks is: will this activity, etc. result in a better, or more righteous individual or a more just society?

6.2 The Fact of Man

6.2.1 Voluntarist Law

In the longer perspective of Boyle’s many theological writings, it is perplexing that he eschewed any effort to rationalize the relationship between God and human beings. The Christian Virtuoso (1690), his last major work, defined law in moral terms as the positive law that God had explicated to human beings through supernatural Revelation, according to which intelligent and free agents ought to regulate their actions. Differently, inanimate bodies could not restrain, or incite their actions, and they were moved by ‘real Power’.⁷⁰

Thus, God’s noblest creatures – human beings – had been guaranteed ‘an explicit and positive law’ that showed them what kind of obedience and worship God expected. Notwithstanding the requirement of obedience to God’s law, a human being ‘can by reason, without it (Revelation) either not at all, or but rovingly, guess at’ the contents of that law. Motivation to comply with divine law thus stemmed less from human conscience than the threat of terrible penalties and the promise of eternal bliss.⁷¹ Boyle denied the Deist view that everything after the formation of the universe was directed by ‘the settled laws of nature’:

For, beside the insuperable difficulty there is to give an Account of the first formation of things, which many (especially Aristotelian) Deists will not ascribe to God, and besides that the Laws of Motion, without which the present State and Course of things could not be maintain’d, did not necessarily spring from the nature of Matter, but depended upon the Will of the Divine Author of things.⁷²

Deists thus disregarded providence, while Boyle considered or did not deny that the laws of motion may originate in the will of God and not ‘necessarily’ in any feature of matter. Non-rational bodies in nature were incapable of understanding or knowing the ‘Will of the Legislator’ and thus of obeying any law because, in Boyle’s voluntarist conception of law, such obedience always required a rational and free agent. As he plainly wrote in ‘Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature’:

But to speak strictly, (as becomes Philosophers in so weighty a matter) to say that the Nature of this or that Body, is but the Law of God prescrib’d to it, is but an improper and figurative Expression. For, besides that this gives us but a very defective Idea of Nature, since it omits the general Fabrick of the World, and the Contrivances of particular Bodies, which yet are as well necessary as Local Motion itself, to the production of particular Effects and Phaenomena’s; besides this, I say, and other imperfections of this Notion of Nature, that I shall not here insist on, I must freely observe, that, to speak properly, a Law being but a Notional Rule of Acting according to the declar’d Will of a Superior, ‘tis plain, that nothing but an Intellectual Being can be properly capable of receiving and acting by a Law.⁷³

Logically, therefore, non-rational bodies were ruled out from having any position in a system of (voluntarist) natural laws. Hence the laws of motion were not properly laws either, but the result of God’s providential acts of power, and also of divine endowments of power upon His creatures. This was the way in which Boyle combined God’s active involvement (or ‘general concourse’) in the laws of motion with the causal powers of matter in motion to give impulse to further movement in matter.⁷⁴ Boyle’s providential and voluntarist theology of power, defending, in relation to moral law, a voluntarist law and an anti-intellectualist position, represented the crowning moment of one of the most successful scientific careers in modern science. Margaret Osler famously attributed Boyle’s ideas to Gassendi’s influence and the latter’s ‘baptism of Epicure’.⁷⁵ I hope, however, to show that Boyle’s natural philosophy had important original aspects based on his own theology and political economy. Sincere and pious thoughts of devotion to God and of the importance of virtue, such as his youthful statement that ‘the Souuerain and greatest Necessity of all (for a man) is to be Vertuus’ abound in Boyle’s writings.⁷⁶ These were often coupled with an insistence on the centrality of desires and pleasure, which gives his ideas an aspect of realism that balances his more spiritual utterances. This approach also offers insight not devoid of value against intellectualist positions that seemed to belong to another world.⁷⁷ However, since Boyle’s ethical ideas are not unified by an overarching theory of morality and his approach to virtues is not systematic (only some of the virtues are addressed), they often appear unbalanced, reflective of the cultivation of individuality and generally confusing in terms of moral theory. Humility, gratitude, love and trust, delight in abstract truth, docility and openness to veiled truths, modesty of mind, government of reason and, crucially, industriousness are the virtues he mentions repeatedly. However, justice and other social virtues are conspicuously absent from his writings.⁷⁸

But the novelty of Boyle’s work as a natural philosopher lies in the remarkable inattention to human beings evinced by his system of nature. In The Origine of Formes and Qualities, probably his most important philosophical piece, Boyle introduced and explained the species of atomism he defended: corpuscularianism.⁷⁹ He developed in that text an understanding of nature and nature’s possibilities that was to be put at the service of chemistry and its profitable management. Certainly, human beings were the scientific and economic managers of the new system.⁸⁰ In this regard, Peter Remien notes in his ecological study on the concept of nature in early modern literature that Boyle’s ‘anthropocentric teleology’ of the ‘utility of man’ in tension with the welfare of other species would reappear forcefully later in Darwin’s understanding of species as ‘a diffuse set of interconnecting centres of interest’.⁸¹ My point here concerns the fact that human epistemology and human nature were not integrated in Boyle’s scientific project.Humans stand, as it were, outside nature. Human beings were ‘de facto in the world’, rational and sensible human beings that perceived the entities in the world in a manner that, in Boyle’s view, did not suit the way matter was ordered in reality, i.e. as a combination of atoms.⁸² Human beings also had spiritual souls, which also placed them beyond the range of the radar of atomism and consequently of the nature Boyle was studying.

Arguably, a more intense desacralization of non-human nature occurred when the human being was considered separately from nature, and taken to be merely as a user of the natural world. The next two sections discuss Boyle’s scattered ideas on morality, and Boyle’s paradoxical and alternative enchantment/disenchantment with nature.⁸³

6.2.2 Aretology: Embracing Human Body

Boyle chose not to publish his early work Ethics or Aretology for good reason. This piece, which rather amounts to a compilation of different texts, represents a youthful attempt to write a weighty piece, but falls a little short of succeeding. A mixture of interesting thoughts, borrowings from similar works by other authors, sanctimonious discourse and advice on education (when he started to write it, he was 18 years old!) are united in the 1991 edition of the work. The piece pales in comparison with his more mature works. However, John Harwood is right in noting that Boyle was already a naturalist when he composed the texts.⁸⁴ Although he perhaps had not yet discovered the delights of experiment, The Aretology is valuable in showing how Boyle’s thinking on ethics functions in relation to the body, and in particular the animal body, and in illuminating his method, which lays the foundations for his later work. The most remarkable aspect of the text is how Boyle combined exalted theological ideas about the happiness in contemplation with a close description of morality as a pathology, or doctrine of affections, and an emphasis on the pleasures of the body.⁸⁵ This duality of spirit and body in his exploration of morality and virtue, which is present throughout his works, seems to originate in his scepticism as to the capacity of reason to ascertain truth in practical terms and to recognize natural law, that, as we saw before, he explicitly articulated in The Christian Virtuoso near the end of his life. Among many other instances in that text, he referred to notions and principles ‘that God hath planted’ in the ‘Mind of Man’ that were ‘fit to make him sensible that he ought to Adore God’. His was a natural religion lived through ‘sentiments’ towards ‘the transcendent Goodness of God’, the ‘continual and munificent Benefactor’ that would allow human beings to pass ‘from Natural to Reveal’d Religion’. The radical spiritual and the sensuous are two extreme and recurrent positions in his works. After all, ‘experience’, one of his main working concepts, has its origins principally in the senses.⁸⁶

On the other hand, as early as in the Aretology Boyle declined to share the spiritualism of radical Puritans who, against all common sense, disregarded the need for, and possibility of, good works on the grounds of justification of believers by faith only. The workings of businesses, life experience, law and punishment, as well as the very nature of free will, attested to the fact that an individual was free and would thus be accordingly virtuous or vicious:

we wil onely heere set down the most Christian and Rationall Opinion: which is that tho in Spirituall and Supernaturall Matters, the Will be not indifferent to Good and Evill, but (not withstanding its Liberty) cannot but Sin yet in the Exercise of Civill Vertus (and Aeconomicall Arts) a man out of his owne Free-will may give himself either to Vertu or Vice, and approve or disapproveth thing proposed, as himself pleases: and by consequent that it is naturally in his Power to be Virtuus or Vitius as himself will.⁸⁷

The dualism is apparent: in spiritual matters the human will ‘cannot but sin’. But in real, practical life, Boyle argued in his unpublished work on ethics, the divine determinism typical of radical Puritans was useless. John Henry has argued that the link between the way in which the religious situation evolved in England and the spectacular development of science in the late seventeenth century, often termed the Scientific Revolution, was a theological method translated into natural science. Anglicans, Reformers and Puritans alike, constantly adapting to a middle way between Geneva and Rome, were wary of rationalist reason in theology, had a preference for commonsense reasoning and a commitment to minimalist doctrine. This method, Henry notes, was also employed in natural sciences to ascertain the truth about nature, as facts, without an ideological bias.⁸⁸ This picture fits some aspects of Boyle, who, exactly as Henry describes, took distance from both Puritan and Hobbesian ideas of corrupted human nature when discoursing about ‘civil life’ and opted, with English common sense, for a middle way of personal virtue. He thus rejected both ‘Aristoteliticians’ who, in not allowing ‘the Cherishing of passions so far as to enable them to discompose the mind’ lead people away from virtue, and ‘Stoicks’ who would have the ‘wise man’ settled ‘in that Immoveable Constancy, that no impulsions of the Sensitive Appetite should be able to make wander from the dictates of Reason’. Passions were good for many reasons that Boyle listed in Aretology, and renouncing them stemmed from and evidenced the ‘Blockish stupidity of the Stoicks’.⁸⁹

However, Boyle went further than this and was novel in certain respects. Probably influenced by French moralists, he celebrated a human nature created by God for delights, even though he lacked, as stated above, a serious theological anthropology. His fearlessness about the consequences of that deficiency may be perhaps attributed to satisfaction with his own version of right reason. In the context of the evolution of English views of right reason – as described in Chapter 5, and for instance expressed by John Spurr and Robert A. Greene – which faintly preserved some sort of illumination of principles of natural law in the capacity of reasoning, Boyle’s understanding of right reason is perplexing, distinctive and novel.⁹⁰ Sorana Corneanu has contributed greatly to illuminating Boyle’s approach. As she explains, Boyle’s right reason belongs neither to a tradition of illumination nor to principles of natural law. However, it is a moral conception, for it concerns the mastering of the passions and ordering of intellect and governing the mind through virtuous inquiry (of empirical, Baconian influence), possessing the interesting goal of ‘growing’ in (natural) knowledge.⁹¹ This idea is discussed further in the last two sections, but it is worth noting at this juncture that Boyle regarded also quantity as crucial in this area.⁹²

Also, religious axioms guided Boyle’s work, which places him outside the seventeenth-century trends of waning of the religion’s role in relation to doing science. It is more accurate to describe it as a straightforward example of the relatively recent separation between the realms of science and religion – in this case, moral laws being removed from the realm of natural philosophy – discussed by Peter Harrison.⁹³ Some contemporary authors had sought to integrate with creativity the array of main philosophical and theological foundations in the idea of moral reason, which also connects with the political principles of absolutism. Thus the light of nature had an extraordinary burden of tasks to perform in The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise by the physician Walter Charleton (1619–1707), a friend of Hobbes and Lady Margaret Cavendish and translator of Epicure. He described the light of nature as a ‘Domestick oracle’ and ‘the Magna charta of all temporal knowledge’, and in fact understood it as offering instruction about truth.⁹⁴ However, in respect of practical deliberation concerning moral action, Charleton referred also to an indifference both of will and of intellect (towards good or evil) on the basis of the experience of how inconstant and changing was an individual’s judgment about things. He illustrated his explanation of probabilities in respect of moral judgment by reference to scales. ‘Below uncontrollable Necessity’, rational judgment would not be absolutely indifferent, but experience or reasons would usually tip the scale in one direction or another, thus recognizing the good to be chosen.⁹⁵ Similarly to Hobbes’s determinism, Charleton argued as follows:

That every man, in whom the Light of Nature is not damp’t by Fatuity, either native and temperamental, or casually supervenient, hath this or impress of an especial Providence, decreeing and disposing all events, that have, do, or shall befall him.⁹⁶

The light of nature became thus an ‘intestine Dictator’.⁹⁷ Robert Sanderson’s efforts to construct a mechanical conscience, as discussed in Chapter 5, are indicative of the daunting challenge involved in producing a working concept of practical reason and conscience during that period. Ultimately, Boyle’s decision not to make moral philosophy part of his project of knowledge is captured in his statement in the Aretology that ‘knowledge of Ethicks, though helpful, was not absolutely necessary’.⁹⁸ Bypassing the middle ground of theories about the truth of practical reason or of moral natural law, he devoted his energies to the experimental sciences and his scientific interest remained constraint to physical body. Nevertheless, he took the view that his investigations into matter offered enough material for those searching for divine things. What he called ‘Inferior sort of truths’ might lead directly to ‘Divine truth’ and at the same time dispose the mind towards the habit of searching for truth.⁹⁹

In conclusion Boyle’s Aretology is indicative of the fact that from an early age he was too much of a student of the human body, and a naturalist – and one probably under the influence of Gassendi and perhaps Aquinas too – to neglect pleasure or desire. Gassendi’s doctrine of a moral psychology, structured by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain may have inspired him more than anything else: hence his apology for Epicure at the beginning of the text, which is similar to the one he inserted in The Usefulness.¹⁰⁰ Examples of and comparisons between human beings and how wolves, sheep and dogs act figured prominently in Boyle’s rather biological ethics in some parts of Aretology.¹⁰¹ Affections, he wrote, were so natural to ‘man’ that ‘he can as soone devest himself of being an animal, as exempt himself of the Commotions of his Appetites’. Beyond that and, not without some shade of unreality, he also noted that animals were usually content ‘to Satisfy nature’, whereas human beings’ passions were literally inexhaustible: ‘once overflown the Bankes of Reason’ they ‘ar like a Fire blowne up by the Feuel of their Enjoyments into a greater Flame’. However, Boyle was not a wholehearted Gassendist. Dmitri Levitin has also recently interpreted Boyle as increasingly rejecting the dogmatic reductionism of Epicurean atomism.¹⁰² Although observance of the fact of ‘unlimited desires’ of human beings keeps cropping up in his economic writings, in terms of theory, he seems to have approached the issue of morality from the other end: the animal body. But when dealing with the theme of the usefulness of science, Boyle milked the question of human beings’ unlimited desires for utilitarian purposes.

The question arises as to how he reconciled the economic promotion of the satisfaction of manifold and inexhaustible desires with his earnest entreaties to engage in contemplation and to have faith? How can godly piety triumph over hedonism if, as we will see below, science ought to serve economy through the promotion of unlimited pleasures? Boyle’s written works do not acknowledge any conflict between these two positions, and his repeated and ambiguous utterances with regard to Epicureanism, together with the fact that he set aside moral philosophy for good, make his work difficult to critique from this angle.¹⁰³ Boyle’s focus on hedonism largely resulted from his reluctance to delve into the complexities of human nature and his refusal to become a moral philosopher – as Gassendi was and John Locke would become – while amplifying human desires in his project for the utility of science.

6.3 The Grand Business of Nature

Utilitarian ideas as to the use of nature had appeared in different ways, sometimes in a subtle manner, often quite explicitly in the work of renowned Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century, such as Francisco de Vitoria.¹⁰⁴ In analysing the question of dominion as ‘use’, Vitoria elaborated on a common theme for Parisian theologians, at least after the early fourteenth century – the enjoyment of ‘the tree of life’ for the benefit of human beings.¹⁰⁵ Vitoria commented that God’s prohibition on eating from another tree, ‘the Tree of Paradise’ could be interpreted as a negation of the idea that human beings were true lords of the Earth. Instead, he argued, human dominion over goods was complete, despite the limitations that God had set in respect of that tree. In view of the specific definition of ‘dominion as a right to use’ – i.e. dominion divided into a bundle of rights – the prohibition concerning ‘the Tree of Paradise’ posed no difficulties. The Bible made it clear that God had prohibited human beings from eating from the tree. However, eating was only one of the possible uses that it offered. Human beings ‘could benefit from that tree through other uses, thus, to give the brutes of its fruits or to cut branches off it for his or her uses or for other uses’.¹⁰⁶ In short, the tree had multiple uses, some of which were allowed to human beings while others were not. Vitoria’s conclusion was that God gave human beings dominion over all things, notwithstanding the fact that he excluded some uses from that dominion. Because dominium signified a right to use, the prohibition of some uses did not hamper humanity’s dominion over all the goods of the earth.¹⁰⁷ The entitlement to use also entailed the important conclusion that human beings could employ the goods of creation ‘not for all, but only for the licit uses’.¹⁰⁸

6.3.1 Aquinas’s Theology of Use

There is little doubt that Thomas Aquinas’s theology was a theology of use, by which I mean a method of thinking about problems relating to the science of God in which a free agent, a human being, is thought to be acting, rightly or wrongly upon a reality that has been given or presented to her. At the deepest anthropological level, the ‘good’ of human beings is described in the Summa theologiae as the use with a good will of anything in the world – a world in which God also participates.¹⁰⁹ Hence, ‘the good of human beings, absolutely considered, is a good operation viz. the good use of things that are possessed’; the ultimate good to be possessed being, of course, God. In opposition to that, ‘sin’ amounts to the bad use of things.¹¹⁰ In response to the question of whether happiness may lie in riches, Aquinas answered that happiness lies neither in natural nor in artificial riches. The reasoning behind this conclusion is that natural riches simply sustain the lives of human beings, and surely happiness should be based on something more than that which achieves physical survival. On the other hand, Aquinas held that artificial riches were ‘for the sake of natural riches, since they would not be sought except that things necessary for the sustenance of life (necessariae ad usum vitae) are bought with them’.¹¹¹

Therefore, artificial riches had even less the character of an ultimate end, since their meaning merely reinforced that of natural riches in making possible human beings’ use of the gift of life.

Aquinas defined virtue as good use of free will (bonus usus libero arbitrio).¹¹² Furthermore, in the Prima Secundae, he described how the virtuous act of choosing was done either with regard to human acts or to doing or using things (facere re or uti re).¹¹³ In respect of doing things, Aquinas gave the example of the physician whose aim is to promote health; while in respect of using things, he gave the example of a greedy human being whose aim is to acquire money. He also defined pleasure as either ‘knowing’ only or ‘knowing that one possesses certain things’ such as honour or fame. The pleasure that accompanies the possession of things arises from the fact of ‘making use of them or being able to make use of them’.¹¹⁴

Coming closer to the topic of nature Aquinas also argued that in Paradise animals were inferior to human beings in terms of use, government and characteristics. In the order of nature superior beings use and govern inferior beings. The reason for human beings’ superiority was that only they possessed universally the virtue of prudence, while certain other animals have it to a limited extent.¹¹⁵ Finally, in the well-known passage on the use of natural goods in the section devoted to the sins against justice, Summa theologia q. 66 a.1. co, in response to the question of whether the use of goods was natural to human beings Aquinas famously answered:

I respond: There are two possible ways to think about an exterior thing:

1. (a) with respect to the nature of the thing, which is not subject to human power, but only to the power of God, whom all things obey at will;

2. (b) with respect to the use of the very thing – and in this sense a human being has natural dominion over exterior things, since by his reason and will he can make use of exterior things for his own utility as almost things made for his sake.

Human dominion over nature was therefore limited to the use of goods for their utility while human beings lacked the power over the configuration of ‘the nature of the thing’ that only God possessed. However, since human beings are endowed with reason, their dominion was not merely physical, like that of lower animals, but also involved a type of dominion over certain creatures:

For as was established above [q. 64, a. 1], things that are less perfect or less complete exist for the sake of things that are more perfect or more complete. And this is the line of reasoning by which the Philosopher proves in Politics I that the possession of exterior things is natural to human being. Now this natural dominion over other creatures that belongs to human being in accord with his reason, in which the image of God consists, is made manifest in the very creation of man in Genesis 1, where it says, “Let us make man to our likeness and image and set him above the fish of the sea, etc.

God the Creator was therefore, according to Aquinas, the sovereign with absolute power over the design of the Creation – a power which human beings did not enjoy. In his answer to the first objection, Aquinas made a distinction in relation to the concept of ‘dominion’. ‘God’ had ‘the principal dominion (principale dominium) over all things’. It was a result of God’s providence that certain things were ordered towards the bodily sustenance of human beings. This meant that human beings had ‘a natural dominion over things as regards the power to use them (ad potestam utendi ipsis)’. Aquinas therefore viewed human beings’ ‘natural dominium’ as ‘a power to use’. Their ‘natural dominion’ amounted to ‘use’.¹¹⁶

In response to the second objection, as to justice – the statement in the New Testament (Luke 12:18) that ‘the rich man is reprimanded’ and that accordingly material, exterior goods are unnatural for human beings – Aquinas explained that the rich man’s error was to think that the exterior goods were principally his own, in the sense that he had not received them from another (i.e. from God).¹¹⁷ In response to the third objection – Ambrosius’s statement that human beings ‘cannot transform nature’ – Aquinas replied that this argument was only about a dominion over things as regards ‘their natures’, which, as he had noted, belonged to God alone.

The fact that ‘use’ had such an important role in Aquinas’s theology about human beings in relation to nature derives from the supposition that human beings are free moral agents in a created world who act upon spirit and matter. Moreover, in order to have power, which may be Aquinas’s fundamental category in respect of human beings, there has to be something towards which the exercise of that power or dominion aims, apart from oneself.¹¹⁸ As Stathis Psillos has put it, in Aquinas’s work powers are both innate qualities and exist in relation to something else, there is a purpose to them.¹¹⁹ Human beings use their ‘will’ and ‘reason’ in the same way that they use ‘money’ or ‘food’. The use of the material world, ‘reason’ or ‘will’ could be good and then they led to God or, in the opposite case, to evil.

6.3.2 Knowing the Bountiful Nature

Boyle’s utopian theology furnishes what I have referred to above as the ‘multiplier’, i.e. his project of turning science into a real agent of the economy. This comprised, first, an anthropology of unlimited desires that resulted in a perhaps not eternal but definitively exponential increase in consumption of divinely designed, inexhaustible and, to that point, mostly unknown natural resources that were hidden in the bowels of the earth, situated in faraway and exotic territories or within potential or invisible (atomic) mixtures. Second, the multiplier emerges in the improvement of production through the multiplication of trades, by which Boyle appears to have meant the specialization and refinement of works, crafts and techniques that he saw taking place around him and that would greatly increase production. Scientists were crucial in improving knowledge of the products of nature, developing new working techniques and acting as mediators of knowledge between economic actors. Scientists like Boyle began the study of political economy in the modern sense of concentrating on the usefulness of (natural) objects for economic production.¹²⁰ This, I argue, is Boyle’s paradigm shift.

His most characteristic stance appeared in the seminal Of the Study of the Booke of Nature of around 1650 in which he wrote that ‘God created the World for a Double End’, being ‘the manifestation of his owne Glory’ and ‘the Good of Men, principally of the Elect’.¹²¹ But he was also specific in repeatedly stating his position in respect of a qualified utilitarianism of creation as universal knowledge:

tho’ I judge it erroneous to say in the strictest sense, that every thing in the Visible World was made for the Use of Man; yet I think’tis more erroneous to deny, that any thing was made for ends Investigable by Man.¹²²

Utopian theology also comprised the complex vocation of ‘priest’, ‘natural scientist’ and citizen of the British Empire that Boyle himself seemed to embody. With regard to the rest of inanimate and irrational creatures unable to acknowledge how much they owe their Creator, ‘Man’ he wrote in the Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy was ‘born the Priest of Nature’; by investigating nature, God received glory. To praise God was human beings’ ‘natural right’.¹²³ Not only did pleasures abound in the world, but also knowledge, which implied industriousness, even perhaps martyrdom. Similarly to the ancient right to priesthood among the Jews, so ‘Reason’ was ‘a Natural Dignity’ and ‘Knowledge a Prerogative’ that could ‘confer a Priesthood without Unction or Imposition of Hands’.¹²⁴ The world was a ‘sacrament’ (Verbum visibile) – a visible sign of God.¹²⁵ Boyle’s beautiful and groundbreaking stance is clear here. That was a very concrete means of praising God that went beyond specialized circles of virtuosi and was being proposed, in fact, to anyone who cared about natural sciences and the Empire. However, he was also breaking with theological tradition in two ways. As it classically considered that inanimate and irrational creatures praised God just by the fact of being; secondly, without a theory of morality, the danger of utopian pragmatism in Boyle’s proposal loomed large. Around the years he wrote The Usefulness Boyle became a member of the Council for Foreign Plantations (1660–1664) and was appointed to the committees of Jamaica and New England, and it is not unreasonable to think that his new situation as a civil servant put Boyle’s rare imagination to work.¹²⁶

Few other modern English writers were more sophisticated than Boyle in combining natural philosophy, faith and economy. Intimations about the expansion of the empire underlined his image of the ‘World’ as a ‘Ship’.¹²⁷ Such metaphors, of which he used plenty, adapted the traditional theological metaphors on the economy of salvation to the exigencies of the British Empire.¹²⁸ The world, he argued, was not merely an ‘Inne’, as the divines noted, with the idea that life is a journey and Christians found in the world every refreshment in the manner of a traveller who finds a place to stop. The world indeed offered everything ‘to feed Man and delight him’. However, references to the ‘Inne’ suggested interruption of one’s journey, whereas the image of ‘the Ship’ gave the impression of the traveller being helped ‘to convey him towards his Journey’s end’. Moreover, the image of the ship illuminated the fact that God had created nature, not only for Christians’ satisfaction, but also for their instruction. On this point, Boyle employed another metaphor – that of God as a benevolent donor, who would not withdraw from human beings’ knowledge concerning his endowment. It would be irreverent to assume that God ‘sends them to Sea disprovided of Sea-Charts and Mariners Compass, and other requisite helps to steer their Course by, to the desired Harbour’.¹²⁹ An elaboration of the older and remarkable paragraph of Of the Study of the Book of Nature that was mentioned in Chapter 4 appears in The Usefulnesse of (Experimentall) Naturall Philosophy.¹³⁰ It summarizes Boyle’s ideas with regard to theological principles about the design of God in the creation of nature and of human beings and about a realist emphasis on body. As mentioned, the work contains no reflection on possible moral tensions arising in relation to the fulfilment of unlimited desires, but merely enthusiasm for their multiplying effect in terms of consumption, industriousness and knowledge. The passage merits being quoted at length:

And ‘twas perhaps, Pyrophilus, to ingage us to an industrious indagation of the Creatures, that God made Man so indigent, and furnish’d him with such a multiplicity of Desires; so that whereas other Creatures are content with those few obvious and easily attainable necessaries, that Nature has every where provided for them; In Man alone, every sense has a store of greedy Appetites, for the most part of Superfluities and Dainties, that to relieve his numerous Wants, or satisfie his more numerous Desires, He might be oblig’d with and inquisitive Industry to Range, Anatomize, and Ransack Nature, and by that concern’d survey come to a more exquisite Admiration of the Omniscient Author. To illustrate this subject yet a little further, Pyrophilus, give me leave to observe to you, That Philosophers of almost all Religion have been, by the contemplation of the World, mov’d to consider it under the notion of a Temple.¹³¹

The Epicurean tone of praising desires is habitual in Boyle’s work – he never appears austere or abstemious, and certainly not Puritan, rather touching on the merry aspect of Creation. Particularly in The Usefulness, in which this paragraph appears, Boyle observed the ‘indigence’ of human beings and their inclination to satisfy not only necessities but multifold and unlimited desires. In the context of the project of applying science, unlimited human desires become a manifestation, even an opportunity, to relish the bounty of the Creator, and not a negative tendency. Moreover, many of Boyle’s theological, philosophical and metaphysical convictions are disclosed gradually in that important text of The Usefulnesse. Boyle explained his apologetic style by stating that he was addressing it to some religious people, afraid that the scientific knowledge of nature would shake belief. On the contrary, he argued, explaining that observation of God’s ‘Workmanship’ in nature was one of the main methods for strengthening faith. Accepting his own explanation, and as mentioned before, Boyle’s insistence on the usefulness of science has been in the literature partly attributed to critiques concerning irreligiosity and impractical activities carried out by the Royal Society.¹³² However, the text is much more than a pious exercise of apology. At once a normative programme and a manifesto for scientists, Boyle brings out the big guns within the text in the form of the economic possibilities hidden in nature and in natural science. On the other hand, in the second part, which deals with ‘Physick’ (medicine) and the amelioration of medicinal remedies, the discourse is about ‘necessity’ and the economic aspect recedes from view almost completely, save that the importance of providing cheaper remedies for the poor is mentioned.¹³³ The economic discourse returns in the lengthy second part of Section II, which is devoted to proving the usefulness of natural philosophy in contributing to the profitability of trades.

With their capacity for pleasure and for praising the Almighty in the creatures human beings were singled out from the rest. Moreover, since human beings were the only ones capable of ‘enjoy, use and relish’ the rest of the beings, living and inanimate, the latter had been made for the former, not for God, not for themselves:

For it is no great presumption to conceive, that the rest of the Creatures were made for Man, since He alone of the Visible World is able to enjoy, use, and relish many of the other Creatures, and to discerne the Omniscience, Almightinesse and Goodnesse of their Author in them, and returne Him praises for them.¹³⁴

The ‘necessaries of life’ were abundantly provided in nature for every creature. However, the other animals were limited to ‘necessaries’, whereas all the material goods in the entire Creation were at the disposal of human beings:

The Earth produces him an innumerable multitude of Beasts to feed, cloath, and carrie him; of Flowers and Jewels to delight and adorne him; of Fruits to sustaine and refresh him; of Stones and Timber, to lodg him; of Simples, to cure him; and in Summe, the whole sublunary World is but his Magazine. And it seems the grand businesse of restlesse Nature so to constitute and manage his Productions, as to furnish him with Necessaries, Accommodations and Pleasures.¹³⁵

More than anything desires were the means decreed by God to prevent human beings’ passivity towards nature and promote their (intellectual) industriousness. In the first three essays contained in Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy, Boyle urges the argument that the industrious study of nature was a source of power, riches and faith – industriousness and its variants is probably the most repeated word in the text. Natural philosophy ‘is not only Delightful, as it teaches us to Know Nature, but also as it teaches us in many Cases to Master and Command her’.¹³⁶ The possibilities that studying nature gave to the naturalist to imitate, multiply and improve its wonderful phenomena was in a sense the ‘Empire of Man, as a Naturalist over the Creatures’. It consisted in ‘a much more satisfactory kind of Power or Sovereignty’ than the most common forms of political sovereignty. The latter was often the consequence of ambition, bloody struggles, crime or even simply chance. The former, Boyle argued, was innocent.¹³⁷

6.3.3 Technology from the Plantations

Boyle’s most remarkable employment of economic ideas appeared in the third part of Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy, in which he was already thinking in terms of industrial manufacture. His distinction between bare necessities and what may now be termed luxuries was again introduced. ‘It is not only to the Trades that minister to the necessities of Mankind’ he noted ‘but to those also that serve for man’s accommodation and delight, that Experimentall philosophie may bring Improvements’, including, ‘perfums’, ‘making seweet-meats’, embelleshing ‘the Face with cosmeticks, and divers others of the like voluptuous nature’.¹³⁸ Boyle’s innovation here lay not so much in his proposal for the improvement of crafts but in his ability to mediate between all economic positions involved as a spokesman for science.¹³⁹ In this process it was essential that artisans trusted the natural scientists. If ‘tradesmen’ were to disclose some of their experiments to ‘practicall Naturalists’, Boyle argued, ‘the difussed knowledge and sagacity of Philosophers’ would be able to improve them markedly.¹⁴⁰ Furthermore, his narration of how a combination of transplanting commodities¹⁴¹ to which improved techniques were applied, with the result of multiplying the employment of workers (‘mechanical hands’) reveals him as something akin to a seer in respect of the future Industrial Revolution. Firstly, importing and exporting commodities would also bring about the idea of the multiplying effect. For foreign natural goods were sometimes more productive, such as the wonderful exuberance of the Indian corn or the Chinese rice. Moreover, exploiting new ideas had a direct impact in augmenting production, and thus profit:

For these Inventions of ingenious heads doe, when once grown into request, set many Mechanical hands a worke, and supply Tradesmen with new meanes of setting a livelihood or even enriching themselves.¹⁴²

It is important to emphasize Boyle’s originality here in noting the possibilities of profit for the entrepreneur in allegiance with ‘science’. In studies of the cultural roots of the Industrial Revolution, reducing labour costs through mechanization in order to gain profit for the entrepreneur is considered to be the vital insight, in contradistinction to the public policy mantra of putting the poor to work. However, this principle is situated much later in time, around the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁴³ But Boyle’s advice for combining new technologies with an increase in ‘mechanical hands’ to the trader or owner of a manufactory in the widely read Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy, as ‘more advantagious to him’ was given a century earlier. Sometimes Boyle urged the employment of more chemical processes, where mechanic devices were common. In cases where no technology was applied, he noted again with his futuristic emphasis in multiplication that things ‘that ought to be done mechanically’ still undertaken ‘by the labour of the Hand, may with far more ease and Expedition (the quantity considered) be performed by Engines’.¹⁴⁴

Boyle’s own notorious report of ‘a recent Instance of the transplanting of Arts and Manifactures’ may conclude this section. He recalls how a foreigner travelling from Brazil to Europe with some sugar canes happened to stop in Barbados, and there ‘an English Planter that was curious’ obtained not only some sugar canes from him but also ‘some Hints of the way of cultivating and using them’.¹⁴⁵ The importance of the story was for him that ‘the Introduction of one Physico-Mechanical Art’ may put many hands to work. Without offering further detail, he added that ‘I had the particular opportunity to learn by Enquiry, that … the Blacks, living as Slaves upon that spot of the Ground, and imploy’d almost to tally about the planting of Sugar, amount at least to between five and twenty, and twenty thousand persons’. He also gave some figures to show ‘how Lucriferous in that place this so recent Art of making Sugar is, not onely to private man, but to the publick’.¹⁴⁶ Boyle’s conclusion was, in his own words, ‘That the Experimentall philosopher may not only Improve Trades, but multiply them’ (emphasis by Boyle).¹⁴⁷

Two things are noticeable in this narration. Boyle was thinking in this case of a lucrative endeavour for private individuals and the public – in sum, for the economy of the empire as a whole. Moreover, his exposition of the conditions of labour of the slaves in Barbados seems to suggest that he not only approved of them but wanted to see them adopted in his own country. Workers in England ought to be employed as the slaves were employed already in the Plantations – this is what his suggestions as to importing the labour techniques used in Barbados appears to suggest. The ‘mechanical art’ applied to slaves’ work in the plantations would equally make trades and manufacturers in England more profitable, which, with hindsight, would appear to make the slaves on the plantations the unwilling initiators of the English Industrial Revolution. Boyle’s mention of the mechanical arts used in Barbados refers to a manufacturing process used in sugar mills involving advanced chemical and mechanical technologies that raised sugar production and consumption in England to much higher levels than had previously been the case.¹⁴⁸ Eric Otremba describes how the English scientific community attributed the success of sugar-making in Barbados to the ingenios, a type of furnace or mill for processing sugar cane, and to the clever plantation owners who ran them. However, this view neglected the contribution of the sugar-making know-how possessed by slaves and servants, which, as Otremba argues, was ultimately the critical factor in the entire enterprise.¹⁴⁹ Richard Ligon’s well-known A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) both describes and sketches the ingenio in detail and gives a very melancholy account of the conditions of life and work of the European servants and slaves involved in operating it. He thereby informed the English and European public of both the incredible possibilities offered by the island and of the conditions under which these possibilities were being exploited. Both African slaves and Christian servants, who were of Irish extraction or European captives of war, were ‘commodities’: the former were owned by the plant owners for life, the latter for five years. Ligon emphasized the terrible heat common in the island for eight months of the year, under which the thousands of servile workers laboured for ten hours a day in the field. Then there was the ingenios furnace to contend with. Some masters were good, some not. Ligon’s narration makes clear that under these conditions slaves often committed suicide or ran away.¹⁵⁰ Boyle had read Ligon’s history of Barbados thoroughly and made numerous annotations.¹⁵¹ To see him engrossed in the technological and horticultural detail of the natural history of the ‘ingenious Lingon’ but apparently unengaged by the sociological aspects of the narrative casts his remarks on the virtues of Barbados’s ‘mechanical hands’ in a sombre light. I contend that his declaration of the usefulness of the scheme while remaining silent on the conditions of labour results directly from Boyle’s glossing over human nature in the context of his studies of nature. That would evolve into the tragic side of the Scientific Revolution. The European practice of slavery was almost two centuries old by that point, with the Spanish Empire’s requirements for workers promoting the horrific business, but without offering any justification for it. This only happened when utilitarian ideology gained ground among European philosophers. In her study on the justifications of slavery through political economy Anne Charlotte Martineau explains how around sixty years later the physiocrat François Melon (1675–1738) pointed out in an Essai politique sur le commerce (1734) that the significance of slavery lay in its ‘utility’ rather than whether it was contrary to morality or religion.¹⁵²

Therefore, the salient issue is not how far Boyle was prepared to go in order to defend his project of useful experimental science, but rather to observe how soon a utility-oriented science that made no attempt to incorporate the moral nature of human beings within its epistemic realm would render compromises with matters contrary to fundamental morality and prejudicial to human beings unavoidable – even in the hands of its best practitioners. As a consequence of the utilitarianism human beings become the exploitators of nature, instead of their guardians, as well as utilitarianism’s victims. The utilitarian lack of moral anthropology in science, which place human beings outside nature, leaves nature and human nature unprotected on the face of future utilitarian schemes.