FOUR

Robert Boyle: Experience

as Paideia

The limits and the “perfection” of reason

In his diatribe against the “vanity of dogmatizing,” Glanvill inserted between the account of the Fall and the thorough investigation of the “disease of our Intellectuals” a four-chapter survey of “instances of our intellectual blindness,” offered as a “curbe to confidence” and as a plea for modest Socratic “nescience.”¹ The survey includes such “unexplicable” natural philosophical puzzles as the nature of the soul, its origin, and the manner of its union with the body; the way in which the soul moves the body; the nature of the faculties of the soul; the manner in which bodies are formed; the cohesion of the parts of matter; the divisibility or indivisibility of the building blocks of matter. The list of such “unconceivables” could continue, Glanvill says, with the “Mysteries of Motion, Gravity, Light, Colours, Vision, Sound, and infinite such like (things obvious, yet unknown).”² Although various philosophical theories are proposed in each case, none of them is completely satisfactory, and we might well accept the fact, if immodest “confidence,” and thus “dogmatism,” is to be cured.

Glanvill probably looked back to Gassendi for his identification of the inexplicable natural things that point to the limits of human reason, but stressed the causes of man’s ignorance and error (the fallen/uncultured state of the soul) and the remedial capacities of the regulation of judgment in a manner closer to the cultura animi tradition investigated so far. The same approach to the limits and the possibilities of reason is taken up in Robert Boyle’s Discourse of Things Above Reason (1681). Originally, the theme of “things above reason” was a point of theological controversy about the competence of reason in judging matters of revelation. For Boyle, the theme served to point out parallels between theology and natural philosophy as to the types of things that may be said to transcend reason in the specific sense of being hard to understand or explain, although capable of being discovered by reason.³ There are an important number of things, Boyle notes, of which we have no or only confused ideas; for which we lack explanations as to the mode of their operation; and which to the best of our power of understanding appear contradictory. Boyle’s labels for these classes of things above reason are “incomprehensible truths,” “inexplicable truths,” and “unsociable truths,” respectively. Examples of the first class include the idea of infinity and the ideas of space, time, place, and motion. The second category covers most of the puzzles of the natural philosophy of the day: the way mind and body interact; the way the will and the understanding interact; the way memory functions; the cohesion of the parts of matter; the infinite divisibility of matter; the motion of bodies—these are things that are obviously perceived to be the case but of which we cannot give a definitive explanatory account. The third class includes things that appear contradictory to our limited vision, such as for instance the problem of the endless divisibility of a straight line, which is on a par with the theological “paradox” of the coexistence of divine foreknowledge and human free will.⁴

Jan Wojcik has explored the theological roots of Boyle’s views on the limits of reason, which, she argues, were aligned with the Nonconformist stance on the issue and which “affected his conception of the proper goals and methodology of the new natural philosophy”: Boyle’s quest for intelligible rather than true explanations, and the provisional nature of his claims, sprang from his assumptions about the creation of man with limited powers of reason.⁵ Awareness of the centrality of the limits-of-reason theme in Boyle’s thought, Wojcik argues, should lead us to conclude that “the rationality of Boyle’s thought has been greatly exaggerated.”⁶ In contrast with the promoters of the Restoration “rational religion,” who emphasized the competence of human reason, Boyle vigorously defended a position of “diffidence” toward reason’s claims. Rose-Mary Sargent’s 1995 study on Boyle’s philosophy, which Wojcik thus invokes, has indeed captured an essential dimension of Boyle’s vision in the label “the diffident naturalist.” But there is another side to Sargent’s story, which, although not as resonant as the title of her work, is equally essential to understanding Boyle’s conception of reason: Sargent also speaks of the “dynamic approach to knowledge acquisition” that shaped his attitude to the study of both nature and Scripture, pursued via a “complex process of interpretation,” which was at the same time a learning process.⁷ Emphasis on the limits of reason alone, I would say, suggests a static picture of Boyle’s views, which does not do justice to his quest for a way of reasoning and a method of inquiry that could prove flexible enough in dealing with the truths of nature and of revelation, while remaining diffident about the definitive nature of the results.⁸ I would like to add here that Boyle’s dynamic approach to knowledge is at the same time a dynamic approach to the human faculties, one that emphasizes their educability and progress conjointly with an awareness of their limits. As such, I propose, Boyle’s view of the possibilities of human nature is closer to the anthropology I described in this book, which is as adamant about the limits and weaknesses of the human mind as the Nonconformists’ anthropology, while at the same time allowing for an account of the work on the human faculties as the proper task of a rational, even if fallen/weak, creature.

Boyle’s concern with the state and possibilities of our faculties is indeed the framework of his approach to the questions of the limits of reason and of certain knowledge. In Things Above Reason, he speaks of the “dependency and limitedness of our Natures” and of the “limited nature of the Intellect”⁹ but also extracts a number of important lessons from the fact. One is the significance, due possibly to the divine plan, of such a mediocre state of the human faculties. It may be that the existence of things above reason is “partly to make us sensible of the imperfections of our Natures, and partly to make us aspire to that condition, wherein our faculties shall be much enlarged and heightned.”¹⁰ The first part of this quotation confirms Wojcik’s argument that the question of the limits of reason is a question of the condition of human nature in its relation to its Creator. But the second part of the quotation points to an understanding of the task of man that avoids the strictures of a radical Augustinian anthropology. Boyle seems to point to an active task: the things lying “above reason” are a pointer not just of our infirmity but also of a horizon of fulfillment. That horizon may never be reached in this life (and thus complete knowledge and full certainty remain unattainable, too), but it is man’s task, because his condition, to strive toward it. This striving is understood in terms of a search for truth (rather than for certainty per se) accompanied by an “enlargement” of the powers of the faculties. Reason’s task in this context, as Boyle’s spokesman in the dialogue, Sophronius, describes it, is to “perfect” the intellect through rightful exercise: “I assign Reason its most noble and genuine Exercise, which is to close with discovered Truths, in whose embraces the perfection of the Intellect . . . consists.” The exercise of reason is a “perfective action” of the understanding, which to recognize as limited is no disparagement, but actually a sane refusal to “idolize” it. The form the exercise takes is Boyle’s version of the discipline of judgment that the virtuosi shared with the cultura animi approach: “And a sincere understanding is to give, or refuse its assent to propositions according as they are or are not true, not according as we could or could not wish they were so.”¹¹

Another lesson Boyle draws from the existence of things above reason has to do with the human power of self-estimation, itself an important ingredient in man’s task. By means of its power to recognize truths that do not admit of complete understanding and of definitive explanation, the mind will become engaged in an exercise of recognizing proportions: it will see that its own measures “in the searching or judging of Truth, are but such as are proportionable to Gods designs in creating us,” and it will learn to distinguish things above from things within the reach of reason, thereby learning to discern the former “to be disproportionate to the powers with which it [the understanding] uses throughly to penetrate Subjects, that are not impervious to it.”¹² The mind is so framed as to judge both of things without, and of its own nature, infirmities, and powers: it is “as well a Looking-glass as a Sensory, since it does not only see other things but it self too, and can discern its own blemishes or bad conformation, or whatever other infirmities it labours under.”¹³ Thus, the problem of the limits of reason is not only embedded in an account of the state of the faculties but related to a program for the exercise of the faculties in which a fundamental step (itself the object of a renewed exercise) is the careful assessment of their capacities. There is room here not only for the advancement of knowledge (again, an advancement within the confines of a limited degree of certainty) but also for the perfecting of the mind.

Boyle’s conception of both the limits and the perfecting exercise of reason is best understood, I propose, within a cultura animi framework. I will argue that Boyle’s rules for inquiry are an expression of virtuoso Socratic skepticism: they are construed as guidelines for a practice of the regulation of assent invested with the role of a mind-ordering discipline—a discipline premised indeed on a doctrine of the limits of the intellect, but also on the possibility of curing its weaknesses, improving its capacities, and building its virtues.¹⁴ Such a view of inquiry, I want to show, rests on a redefinition of the skeptical problem of the standard of truth in keeping with Boyle’s conception of the growth of knowledge, which in turn informs his notions of “right reason” and “experience”: Boyle frames experience as a paideic practice and right reason as a horizon of the perfected mind. His model figure, the Christian Virtuoso, is a figure of the exemplary inquirer, shaped by these notions. It represents, moreover, a development of Boyle’s early moral preoccupation with the government of the mind, reinterpreted as the province of the Christian philosopher—a province as inter-or supradisciplinary as that of the physician of the soul.

This chapter looks at Boyle’s views on the discipline of the examination of opinions and of self, while the next approaches the same topic in Locke’s thought. These philosophers’ conceptions of the work of reason and of the rightful conduct of the understanding in inquiry, I want to argue, rely on the integrated approach to the mind’s distempers and virtues that formed the common ground of the cultura animi genres and that were also explored by Bacon and the Royal Society virtuosi. Against this background, their guidelines for inquiry and for regulating assent acquire the function of a method for governing and training the mind, and are thus the equivalent of Bacon’s art of direction or of the virtuoso discipline of judgment. Chapters 6 and 7 will flesh out Boyle’s and Locke’s notion of inquiry thus framed, by looking at the way it is put to work in their experimental methodology, natural theology, and biblical hermeneutics. The central argument of these chapters is that inquiry for Boyle and Locke is an activity firmly placed within these authors’ conceptions of both the frailties and the educability of the mind, and that as such it is presented not as a methodized set of formal procedures meant to secure impersonally objective knowledge but rather as a package of guidelines to be used as instruments in a curative and cultivating regimen, assumed as the task of a Christian philosopher.

The weak mind and the virtues of a free inquiry

Boyle’s preoccupation with the examination and the remedy of what in Things Above Reason he called the “infirmities,” “blemishes,” and “bad conformation” of the mind is a constant streak in his works, from the early devotional writings of the 1640s to the texts of the natural philosophical period in which he assessed the merits of the experimental study of nature from the perspective of a Christian philosopher’s duty, from the 1650s to the 1680s and up to his death in 1691.

The ethical value of self-examination features prominently in Boyle’s essays written in the latter half of the 1640s at Stalbridge. In his “Doctrine of Thinking,” for instance, he writes that he finds the “Contemplation” of one’s thoughts a most noble and worthy employment.¹⁵ This text is concerned with the inspection of the mind’s “motions” in its tendency to “raving” and “wandering,” and with devising a program for training its attention and perseverance in meditation, in a manner that recalls the similar endeavors of the works on the regimen of the soul, most notably, among the texts I have investigated in the second chapter, those of Thomas Wright.¹⁶ Similar concerns are expressed in his Occasional Reflections, which was also composed during his Stalbridge years but published in 1665, that is, during his Oxford period, when he had already become associated with the Wilkins circle and produced his first series of air-pump experiments. Boyle compares his text with the religious meditations of Bishop Joseph Hall and says that where he differs from this worthy author is in explaining the “Usefulness of [this] way of thinking.”¹⁷ Part of that usefulness has to do, Boyle explains, with the capacity of meditation to compose and strengthen the mind’s powers in its service to God. The “mental Exercises” that meditation consists in are a fit remedy against self-love, passions, and evil thoughts and thus are themselves to be considered “Expressions of Devotion.”¹⁸ A large section of Boyle’s prefatory discourse about the usefulness of occasional meditation is consequently devoted to the way it “conduces to the exercise and improvement of divers of the faculties of the mind”: the faculty of observation, the rational faculty, and the will and affections. Exercise, Boyle notes, is the key conduit to improved faculties. To reinforce the point, he uses the same analogy with the training of the body that Bacon employed in describing the arts for mending the intellect: it is through exercise, Boyle says, that the faculties of the mind, just like the limbs of the body, are made “vigorous and nimble.”¹⁹

Boyle’s early expressions of personal piety are thus phrased in terms of the discipline for the mind that combined “spiritual physick” and “Socratic medicine” in the cultura animi genres. Also in keeping with the general approach of this literature to the importance of practical versus speculative knowledge, Boyle explains that he is interested in the “Practicall Part of the Doctrine of Thoughts,” which deals with mind regulation and improvement, rather than in the “Nice and Perplext Speculations” of “[School] hermits.”²⁰ In Occasional Reflections, he similarly commends the mind-ordering effects of the books of practical devotion: unlike “Speculative and Polemical Divinity,” which teaches their readers how to talk “with more Acuteness, and Applause,” the books of devotion can “cleanse” men’s consciences, “pacifie the troubles of their Minds,” and instill pious joy; they are, as a consequence, also apt to promote in their readers the mental disposition required for social and religious peace, and thus “heal the Wounds” wrought by “Schism or Scandal.”²¹ If religion must be of such a practical nature for it to have the expected religious effect, so does the study of the various philosophical disciplines need to be pursued with a view to cultivating a virtuous mind: in his Aretology, Boyle enlists the study of physics, metaphysics, and mathematics in his program for the pursuit of “useful” knowledge in the service of “Ethicks.”²² Boyle’s early views on the uses of religion and of the curriculum, as well as on the rooting of social order in well-ordered minds, are thus on a par with those of the physicians of the soul and of Glanvill’s Bensalemite divines. And like the latter, as well as the less radical Augustinians of the former, Boyle thinks that the way to salvation is through a collaboration of divine assistance and human effort: this is the theme of the first “occasional reflection,” whose moral is that “though we cannot reach Heaven by our good Works, we shall not obtain it without them.”²³

Boyle gradually came to think that the study of nature, seen as a study of God’s works, had a rightful place among the disciplines that, rightly pursued, are useful for the twofold increase of man’s knowledge and piety. In Occasional Reflections, the whole of the “Productions of Nature, and Art,” be they God’s or man’s, formed the world on which the meditator applied his mental powers.²⁴ There, the world, and the book of nature as part of it, functioned like a reservoir of moral exempla and emblems, out of which the pious Christian translated useful spiritual meaning.²⁵ But the potential of a natural philosophical rather than emblem-book type of investigation of the world of nature is signaled by Boyle’s epigraph to the book, a quotation from the second book of Seneca’s Natural Questions. The passage is from the conclusion of Seneca’s discussion of the phenomenon of lightning, which considers the ethical (mind-composing) “use” of that investigation; in the 1614 edition, it reads: “For in all things, and in all speeches, we ought to intermix somewhat that is holesome and profitable. When as we sound into the secrets of Nature, when as we entreate of divine things the mind must be freed from all passions, and setled likewise in some sort.”²⁶ The same passage features again in Boyle’s Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (published in 1663, before the Occasional Reflections, but composed later, in the early 1650s), where Boyle’s natural philosophical interest supersedes that of the emblem-book meditator, although the concern with what he calls the “usefulnesse” of the study of nature “for the Minde of Man” remains as strong.²⁷ The use in question is again of the order of the improvement of the faculties of the understanding and the will, which, “perfectionated” by knowledge and devotion, are capable of “wearing the Glorious Image of Its [the mind’s] Author.”²⁸

The “perfecting” of the mind’s capacities remains a prominent aspect of Boyle’s conception of the utility of experimental investigations in his later work. The framework within which this theme is increasingly explored is the reflection on the limits and powers of reason, which I touched upon at the beginning of this chapter—a type of reflection characteristic of the general epistemic modesty promoted by the Royal Society virtuosi, which Boyle pursued in a number of works penned around and after the time he moved to London in 1668, while being fully engaged in experimental work. The general common concern of such works as The Excellency of Theology Compar’d with Natural Philosophy (1674), Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (1675)—both composed in the mid-1660s—or A Discourse of Things Above Reason and Advices in Judging of Things said to Transcend Reason (both 1681) is the role of reason in philosophy and religion. While the theme of the limits of reason per se is an epistemological theme that for Boyle, we have seen, is grounded in a theological conception of the human faculties, the recognition of those limits, and of the imperfections of human reasoning, by the side of the conduct of the mind in inquiry so that those imperfections are remedied, are themes that exceed a strictly epistemological approach and represent the counterpart of Boyle’s “doctrine of thinking” in the context of his mature reflection on philosophical inquiry.

The problems Boyle identifies as the core impediments to the rightful, and thus “perfecting,” work of reason are the same cognitive-cum-moral failings of the mind detailed by the line of thought I have investigated so far. There is no extended chart of the passions and errors of the mind in Boyle paralleling those in Bacon, Glanvill, Hooke, or the cultura animi texts, but the main themes are present. Here is, for instance, Boyle’s description of the weak mind in Reason and Religion:

Our Intellectual Weaknesses, or our Prejudices or Prepossession by Custom, Education, &c. our Interest, Passions, Vices, and I know not how many other things, have so great and swaying an Influence on them, that there are very few Conclusions that we make, or Opinions that we espouse, that are so much the pure Results of our Reason, that no personal Disability, Prejudice, or Fault, has any Interest in them.²⁹

Boyle reinforces his reference to the “weaknesses” and “prepossessions” of the mind by alluding to Descartes and Bacon. He invokes Descartes on the question of the misguiding effects of the notions imprinted on young heads in early education. From Bacon, he quotes the doctrine of the idols, in particular the Idola Tribus (the idols founded on human nature in general), and “divers other innate prejudices of Mankind, which he [Bacon] sollicitously as well as judiciously endeavours to remove.”³⁰ Be it because of education, innate tendencies of the intellect, or, indeed, the “fall of our first Parents,” it is a fact that “our Understandings are so universally byass’d, and impos’d upon by our Wills and Affections” that truth is rarely sought for its own sake. Rather, the common motor of knowledge is the “inbred pride of man,” which explains why “almost every man in particular makes the Notions he has entertain’d already, and his Senses, his Inclinations and his Interests, the Standards by which he estimates and judges of all other things, whether natural or reveal’d.”³¹ In the case of both natural and revealed things, Boyle warns, men are apt to dismiss those things they cannot understand, explain, or reconcile with their already formed beliefs as “contrary” to reason. This is, for Boyle, an immoderate intellectual-cum-moral behavior, due to the ordinary mechanism of forming beliefs, which he analyzes precisely in the cultura animi terms of the conjoined action of flawed judgment, intemperate affections, and the narrowing perspective of pride or self-love.

The combined result of this mechanism is what Boyle calls “prepossession” or “prejudice” (note that in the passage quoted above Boyle uses “prejudices” as an equivalent of Bacon’s “idols”): moved by its self-loving propensity, the mind is “possessed” by its insufficiently examined and passion-driven opinions, which it no longer recognizes as only partial and narrow results, but embraces as definitive dicta. In the Excellency of Theology, Boyle explains: “For we have in our nature so much of Imperfection, and withall so much of Inclination to self-love, that we do too confidently proportion our Idea’s of what God can do for us, to what we have already the knowledge or the possession of.”³² In Things Above Reason, errors are said to be the result both of a “want of a competent History of Nature” and of “erroneous Prepossessions” or “want of freedom and attention in our speculations.”³³ A prepossessed mind, Boyle thinks with the other virtuosi, is a sure step to a dogmatic mind, which cancels inquiry and closes down upon itself in the fashioning of a definitive doctrine or system. In contrast, a “free” mind recognizes that the search into God’s truths as expressed in all his works (natural and revealed) cannot be complete, since the object far exceeds the capacities of the created mind. It thus realizes that a theoretical system is actually the fruit of “weaknesses” and “prepossessions,” and it can do that because it has become aware, through self-examination, of the distempered tendencies inherent in the human mind, and because it has resolved to keep them at bay. Such a profession of faith in the value of a “free inquiry” is voiced in the preface to the Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature (composed around the time he was working on Things Above Reason, but published in 1686),³⁴ and detailed in its substance in Advices in Judging of Things said to Transcend Reason.

Crucial to the success of a free inquiry into the realm of things above reason or “privileg’d things,” we learn from the Advices, is a constant denial of self-satisfaction and a steady preparedness to revise formed opinions in light of new discoveries. Such flexibility of mind cannot be mistaken for instability, or wavering. Tentative conclusions need to be formed on the basis of “cogent proofs” and are a form of what in Things Above Reason Boyle called the perfecting action of “closing with discovered truth”; but they should always be recognized as only tentative, and the search continued. As a rule of that perfecting action, Boyle formulates the core principle of the regulation of assent; he writes that “a sincere understanding is to give, or refuse its assent to propositions according as they are or are not true, not according as we could or could not wish they were so” and calls this virtue “impartiality.”³⁵ In Advices, he elaborates on the subject in a list of six “advices” or, as he also calls them, “paradoxes.” First, we need sufficient proofs: they may be only probable (“it being sufficient that they are strong enough to deserve a wise mans Acquiescence in them”)³⁶ but must be cogent and concurrent, so that assent can be rationally accorded rather than given irrationally, or by chance. The measures of our beliefs should be the things themselves rather than our wishes. A particularly intruding species of wish, Boyle warns, is the wish that “all things were penetrable to our humane Understandings.” That must especially be resisted, as a crowning delusion.³⁷ Second, hasty dismissal of “privileg’d” things as absurd or impossible should be resisted (in conformity also with the resistance to the wish that they be completely penetrable to human reason; cf. the first rule). Here, where things seem particularly hard to comprehend, one may choose either to suspend judgment when no sufficiently ponderous proof appears to the mind, or, more difficultly, one may attempt a virtuoso exercise in flexibility: “such a wary and unprejudic’d assent to opinions that are but faintly probable, that the mind may be ready to receive, without either obstinacy, or surprise, any better argument that shall conclude the contrary of the opinion we favour’d before.”³⁸ Third, we should refrain from denying the existence of things whose manner of operation remains inexplicable. Fourth (as a corollary to the second and third rules), we should refrain from declaring false everything that seems to contradict some received “Dictate of Reason.”³⁹ Such “dictates” may well come under revision in inquiry. Fifth, we should refrain from rejecting as false those things that we do not know how to reconcile with what we already know to be true.⁴⁰ Sixth, we must not condemn a well-grounded opinion simply because it is inconvenient or may lead to bad consequences.⁴¹

The second, third, and fifth rules refer specifically to “incomprehensible,” “inexplicable,” and “unsociable” truths, respectively. The fundamental rule behind all three is the one formulated in the fourth advice and extended in the sixth: do not reject (in the sense of reject as impossible, reject as absurd, reject the existence of, or reject because inconvenient) things that at first sight seem to question one’s already formulated notions of, or propositions about, things. But such an exercise in cautiousness and freedom of mind must be built on the careful trial of “proofs,” always oriented toward the truth of things rather than toward the satisfaction of one’s “wishes,” which is postulated in the first rule. There are two important things to notice about these rules: In the first place, they do not form a set of formalized procedures but are rather meant to function as prudential guidelines for inquiry. Arnobius, Boyle’s spokesman in Things Above Reason, warns that the “advices” are best taken not as “rules” but as “directions” that can “regulate the Ratiocinations we make” and as “cautions” apt to help us avoid errors and mistakes.⁴² Thus, in the second place, they are governed by a concern with the care of the inquirer’s mind and take the form of “ways of avoiding to be imposed on by our selves or others.”⁴³ Their role is to guide the mind’s work against the prepossessions, the hastiness of ungoverned assent, the self-satisfying wishes, and the self-love that are responsible for the dogmatic, as opposed to the free, management of knowledge. Their aim, moreover, is the establishment not of objective impersonal knowledge but rather of a species of “objectivity” (or “impartiality”) that stands for the disposition of a mind that has undergone a virtuous reformation.

A true student of God’s works, Boyle believes, is one who has begun to purge his mind of errors and passions; at the same time, this study is itself one privileged way to help with the training of the mind. In The Christian Virtuoso (a work published in 1690 but composed around 1681, i.e., at the time of his reflections on things above reason), Boyle makes such a virtuous circle revolve around what he calls a “well-dispos’d mind,” the qualities of which are to be “both docile, and inclin’d to make pious applications of the Truths he discovers.”⁴⁴ This disposition of mind is both requisite for engaging in the study of nature and, in a perfected form, one of the fruits of it. “Docility” in the sense Boyle uses it is the quality of a mind both discerning and flexible, and a mind devoted to truth. It echoes the “humility” of mind that Du Moulin, for instance, translated as the disposition of “being alwayes ready to receive better information and submit himselfe unto reason,” which is part of man’s “labour to heale himselfe of all arrogant opinions and obstinate prejudices.”⁴⁵ It is also an echo of Sprat’s description of the “Character of a True Philosopher” as one that is rooted in the “modest, humble, friendly Vertues,” whose main sign is a “willing[ness] to be taught,” and that distinguishes true learners from dogmatic “assertors.”⁴⁶ Similarly, for Boyle, a “docile” man “will easily discern that he needs further Information” when his evidence is not clear, and he has a “Habit of discerning the Cogency of an Argument or way of Probation.”⁴⁷ Docility in this sense is opposed both to credulity and to the usual suspect of the new philosophy, the disputing way of the Schools, which encourages vanity and the elevation of wit above “Sincere Love of Truth.” Experimental inquiry, Boyle claims, is apt to cultivate just this habitual quality of mind in its adepts: “an Accustomance of endeavouring to give Clear Explications of the Phaenomena of Nature, and discover the weakness of those Solutions that Superficial Wits are wont to make and acquiesce in, does insensibly work in him a great and ingenuous Modesty of Mind.”⁴⁸ Boyle calls this “modesty of mind” an “Intellectual, as well as Moral, Virtue” and describes it in the same terms, familiar by now, of the flexible regulation of assent: to be wary of giving assent too hastily, to form always tentative conclusions, to remain always open to new information, and to be ready to change or discard your own opinions on the basis of new proofs even if your opinions are agreeable to you. Thus, docility is the eminent disposition of a free inquiry. It is also a good example of the move I discussed in the previous chapter, whereby epistemological themes are reshaped in cultura animi terms: moderate skepticism is seen as an adequate response to an anthropological position about the limits and weaknesses of reason, as well as the guide of a therapeutic, Socratic practice meant to regulate and “perfect” the operations of the mind.

In the same work, Boyle points to a related virtue of inquiry: a flexible mind is at the same time a probing and attentive mind, capable of “a Serious and Setled application,” and used to “Attentive and Lasting Speculations.”⁴⁹ Boyle eloquently compares the experimental philosopher possessed of such qualities of mind to a “skilful Diver” who, unlike the “ordinary Swimmer, who can reach but such things as float upon the Water,” is fit to “make his way to the very Bottom of it; and thence fetch up Pearl, Corals, and other precious things, that in those Depths lye conceal’d from other men’s Sight and Reach.”⁵⁰ In Occasional Reflections, Boyle already emphasized the benefit of occasional meditations for the sharpening of an “attentive observation” of particulars in their multifarious attributes and relations, and contrasted the deep student of the world with the “ordinary regardless beholder.”⁵¹ Similar references to “attention” in the context of a defense of experimental inquiry reappear in his texts that adopt a more marked natural philosophical voice. True penetration of the grand architecture (or the grand book) of the world, Boyle says in his Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, is the work of the “Intelligent Spectator” but not of the “ordinary Gazer.”⁵² In the Christian Virtuoso, he expands on this theme and correlates the idea of a training of the capacity to observe with that of the need to remedy the mind’s frailties. There is a hierarchy of observers of nature, depending on degrees of attention, which are at the same time degrees of freedom from the passions and prepossessions of the mind:

For some Men, that have but superficial, tho’ conspicuous, Wits, are not fitted to penetrate such Truths, as require a lasting and attentive Speculation; and divers, that want not Abilities, are so taken up by their Secular Affairs, and their Sensual Pleasures, that they neither have Disposition, nor will have Leisure, to discover those Truths, that require both an Attentive and Penetrating Mind. And more than of either of these sorts of Men there are, whom their Prejudices do so forestal, or their Interest byas, or their Appetites blind, or their Passions discompose, too much, to allow them a clear Discernment, and right Judgment, of Divine Things.⁵³

Not only does the experimental study of nature require such virtuous qualities of mind as discerning attention to particulars, docility of learning, and flexibility and impartiality of judgment, but it is also a way, Boyle proposes, toward the cultivation of such qualities. We can see here how the concern with the proper regimen of the mind provides Boyle with one major line of legitimation for the experimental, against the metaphysical or theoretical, mode of inquiry. The way this legitimation is grounded in a fundamental conception of the relation between the human mind and the created world will be the subject of the next sections, and I will expand on it in chapter 6. I will note here in addition that Boyle also thinks that the disposition of mind that the experimental study of nature breeds in the inquirer is such as to make experimental philosophy an excellent way to “the reception of a Reveal’d Religion.”⁵⁴ The core claim is that the docile habit of mind is most agreeable to the study of revealed religion precisely on account of its recognition of and openness to the “dark and abstruse,” which is also a (moral) guard against private “laziness” and “presumption”: “A Sober and Experienc’d Naturalist, that knows what Difficulties remain, yet unsurmounted, in the presumedly clear Conception and Explications even of things Corporeal, will not, by a lazy or arrogant presumption, that his knowledge about things Supernatural is already sufficient, be induc’d to Reject, or to Neglect, any Information that may encrease it.”⁵⁵

Impartiality, flexibility, docility, and attention are virtues of the mind that for Boyle are the fruit of a free inquiry. The “perfecting” role of such inquiry is that of a curing and cultivating program conceived in strong cultura animi terms: the discipline of attention, of epistemic modesty, and of flexible judgment in inquiry is seen to work on a datum of “imperfection” (in which errors, passions, and self-love coalesce) toward a habituation (“accustomance”) of the mind into a healthy epistemic behavior with moral value.

In keeping with such a program, Boyle has a fine-grained conception of reason that encompasses the whole spectrum of the stages of the education of the mind: its uncultured state, the cultivating process, and the (ideal) horizon of the process. In the section of Reason and Religion that describes the weak mind, Boyle distinguishes between men’s “Ratiocinations,” which are often corrupt (by weaknesses and prejudices), and “the Principles or the Dictates of right Reason.”⁵⁶ I take “ratiocinations” thus described to stand for products of the uncultured state of the mind, and the exercise of reason in the discipline of inquiry detailed above as the cultivating, “perfecting” instrument. I would like to argue in what follows that “right reason” stands for the horizon of the perfected mind and that it is allied with a paideic conception of “experience.”

Reason and experience

“Right reason”

The notion of “right reason” had had a long history by the time Boyle was writing. It is not my purpose to review that history here in any detail; I wish only to suggest the way in which I think Boyle refashioned the notion for his own purposes. In the medieval scholastic conception, right reason was the instrument through which man’s intellectual soul was supposed to recognize and obey, through the light of nature, the moral principles of natural law. Conceived either as the higher intellect, the “law written in the heart” (cf. Romans 2:15), or the “candle of the Lord” (cf. Proverbs 20:27) still shining (or perhaps only flickering) in man’s soul, it was the repository of basic notions or principles through the activation of which man could insert himself in the rational and divine order of the universe.⁵⁷ With the Protestant Reformation, the light of nature was felt to be insufficient for man’s obedience to God, and the supernatural light of grace and illumination through the word of God was called upon to assist man’s otherwise depraved intellect. As Robert Greene has shown, right reason was losing ground with the strict Protestants’ attack on human reason, but it did survive thanks to a number of Christian humanist and moderate Protestant transformations of the idea, largely indebted to the Neostoic revival.⁵⁸

Thus loaded, “right reason” came to inform the debates about rational religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. John Spurr has argued that these debates, in which the Anglican Church strived to keep the higher ground against both its strictly rationalist and its “enthusiastic” opponents, threw into the game at least two notions of reason that were, Spurr maintains, unwittingly conflated: on the one hand, a (new) notion of discursive, morally neutral, “mechanical” reason, involved in devising the Anglican arguments about the capacity of reason to prove that the Scriptures were indeed the Word of God; on the other, an (older) notion that connoted an idea about the reordering of the postlapsarian corrupt human faculties, in particular the command over one’s passions and errant will achieved by means of obedience to God’s promises and commands as expressed in Scripture.⁵⁹

The interest of Spurr’s thesis for the discussion here is that it has been invoked to back up two very different accounts of Boyle’s use of “right reason.” On the one hand, Thomas Holden takes Boyle to stand at the end point of a shift in the meanings of the term from “the older connotations of virtue, piety, and grace” to “a narrower emphasis on correct ratiocination,” understood as reason correctly used and appropriately informed.⁶⁰ On the other, Lotte Mulligan, in an article whose thesis is explicitly rejected by Holden, argues that Boyle’s notion of “right reason” actually preserves all the old connotations of “reason seasoned by revelation.” In Mulligan’s reconstruction, “reason seasoned by revelation” seems to mean both (in scholastic or else Stoic fashion) the moral principles of natural law and (in a Christian mystic or alchemical sense) reason illuminated by supernatural revelation, equal to the illumination achieved by prayer, and similarly providing a “mysterious knowledge” that could unravel the secrets of nature.⁶¹

I would like to suggest that Boyle’s notion of right reason does preserve moral connotations that are nevertheless neither of the order of principles of natural law nor of the order of illumination in Mulligan’s sense. The moral connotations are rather related to a task of ordering the intellect and mastering the passions, but they are also, against Holden, consistent with the conception of reason as correct ratiocination. As such, Boyle’s use is closer to the load of the term “right reason” in the Neostoic cultura animi context I described in chapter 2.

The standard of truth and the growth of knowledge

In the Appendix to the Christian Virtuoso, Boyle writes: “Our philosophy is so little fit to be taken for a sure and adequate standard of truth, I mean of that knowledge, that is attainable by right reason, that we can have no certain and stable standard of philosophy itself.” Human knowledge, just like the human child, needs to go through stages of growth before it can reach maturity: “So that philosophy, as well as knowledge, being a growing thing, we can as little take stable measure of it, as a taylor can take such measures of a child of seven years old, as will continue to fit him during his whole life.”⁶² “Right reason” appears thus within a definition of truth as the “knowledge that is attainable by right reason,” which is placed in the framework of the question of the standard of truth. Boyle’s position here is in stark contrast with a Cartesian rooting of philosophy in a number of foundational, infallibly true metaphysical principles from which subordinate truths can be deduced. For Boyle, the key concept is not “foundation” but “growth,” and the standard of truth cannot be firmly and definitively established through intuition but is a horizon of the process of the growth of philosophy. Philosophy is to be understood as “a comprehension of all the sciences, arts, disciplines, and other considerable parts of useful knowledge, that the rational mind can attain to, without supernatural revelation, by reason, that is improved by meditation, literature, exercise, experience, and any other help to knowledge.”⁶³ It cannot thus be equated with the doctrine of this or that sect of philosophy. At the same time, the growth of philosophy is a growth of reason itself: philosophy is “reason improved by meditation, conferences, observations, and experiments, and the arts and disciplines produced by them.”⁶⁴ Conversely, reason, in one of the meanings of the term, is the faculty “informed” by the liberal disciplines (the arts and sciences), which, once it frames them itself, become fit instruments for its instruction and improvement. This is what we should call “philosophical (or merely natural) reason,”⁶⁵ which therefore develops with the growth of knowledge, a process in which the measure of philosophy is modified.

It is true that in his Advices, Boyle addressed the question of the standard of truth in a Cartesian manner, required by the context of a skeptical objection to his rules of a free inquiry. In response to the rule that we might do well to accept, on enough evidence, things that at first sight seem to contradict some received “Dictate of Reason,” the objection is readily formulated in terms of the question of the criterion: if new rules of reason are devised against the old ones, “by what Rules shall we judge of those Rules?” Boyle’s spokesman in the dialogue, Arnobius, replies with a refutation of the skeptical argument by appeal to the “clear light” affordable to our ultimately trustworthy faculties: “there is no progress in infinitum in the Criteria of truth, and . . . our faculties are the best instruments that God has given us to discover, and to examine it by.”⁶⁶ There is an innate light of the rational faculty that can be relied on over and above both the temporary propositions (“dictates”) the intellect frames about things and the very rules of reasoning. The things that are perceived “immediately and by intuition” include sense perceptions (e.g., “that Snow is white, not black”), metaphysical axioms and “prime notions” (e.g., “contradictory propositions cannot both be true” or “from truth nothing but truth can legitimately be deduc’d”), and “primitive ideas or notions” (e.g., those of “extended Substance or Body, Divisibility, or Local Motion, a streight Line, a Circle, a right Angle”).⁶⁷ While aimed at placating the skeptical “criterion” attack and its dangerous consequences, Arnobius’s quasi-Cartesian answer does not nevertheless involve a conception of the construction of philosophy on the foundation of the “inner light” of intuitive truths. For Boyle, inquiry into nature cannot rest entirely on confidence in sense perceptions, metaphysical axioms, or primitive notions.

Boyle’s examples of truths known intuitively match his examples of what in the Appendix he calls “absolute” or “primary” truths, which he sets in opposition with “probationary” truths, which are conditional and hold “upon supposition.”⁶⁸ Absolute truths form a type of “dictates of reason” that are primary, self-evident, and thus universally valid principles. Other constructions of reason, based on probationary truths, are only subordinate, inferior dictates of reason, which hold in most cases but not in all.⁶⁹ The categories of the inferior dictates of reason and of probationary truths are of crucial importance to Boyle, since, for him, both natural philosophy and theology work with them, rather than with the absolute truths of metaphysical and mathematical axioms. The latter may have a role to play in guiding reasoning (inference, for instance, obeys the maxim that ex vero nil nisi verum sequintur),⁷⁰ in offering general tests for new judgments, or perhaps in providing the highest term of assurance by which more moderate degrees of confidence in belief may be measured. But the bulk of judgments in natural philosophical and theological inquiry are of the order of inferior dictates of reason and of probationary truths. No “metaphysical certainty” is available in these domains, but only “physical” or else “moral” certainty. “Moral certainty” in its strict sense is used in the domain of practical philosophy, but the model of inquiry it provides (a judicial model of relying upon “cogent proofs” and of comparing a sufficient number of testimonies, or “concurrence of probabilities”) proved so powerful and cogent for the situation in natural philosophy that Boyle often uses the term instead of “physical certainty.” In the Excellency of Theology, Boyle concludes: “And there are I know not how many things in Physicks, that men presume they believe upon Physical and Cogent Arguments, wherein they really have but a Moral assurance.”⁷¹

These views about the type of truth and the degree of certainty that obtain in both natural philosophy and theology are a good example of the “mitigated skeptical” position described by Richard Popkin.⁷² But the use Boyle makes of this epistemological category is in keeping with a cultura animi project: it is correlated with the notions of the growth of knowledge and of the tailoring of the measure of philosophy that is consequent upon it, as well as with the conception of the education of the mind in inquiry on which they depend. The standard of truth cannot be provided by the probationary dictates of this or that stage in the process of informing reason, nor can it be reduced to the dictates of this or that philosophical sect. All such “dictates” can only be provisional and only “morally” certain. The growth of knowledge is not an accumulation of new items that can be safely assessed by the measure of an already established criterion, but is geared toward the attainment of that criterion. The principles of the “free inquiry” Boyle described in his Advices were meant to ensure precisely such a substantively understood growth. But we have seen that the impediments to a free inquiry were mainly of the order of the corrupt tendencies of a weak mind. Considered through this lens, the problem of the standard of truth becomes the problem of the false standards that a distempered mind gives itself owing to its “prepossessions,” fueled by passions, wishes, and self-love. In Reason and Religion, Boyle warned that

if we consider the inbred pride of man, which is such, that if we will believe the Sacred story, ev’n Adam in Paradise affected to be like God knowing good and evil, we shall not so much marvel, that almost every man in particular makes the Notions he has enter­tain’d already, and his Senses, his Inclinations and his Interests, the Standards by which he estimates and judges of all other things, whether natural or reveal’d.⁷³

 

The probationary dictates embraced for ultimate rules are the fruit of prejudices, partiality, and corrupt affections. They block the growth of reason and thus the revision of dictates and of doctrines in light of new discoveries, because when they are themselves taken as standards, the result is not simply error but the “destruction” of reason: in an eloquent image in the Appendix, those who are led by “corrupt affections” in their ratiocinations are compared to the flies that “court a light” but in so doing strike it with their wings and thus actually tend to destroy it, just as finally they themselves will be destroyed by it. The false standards are apt to arrest the growth of reason and the attendant growth of knowledge. On the contrary, a mind that does not vote for definitive “dictates,” does not rest in its own affections and pride, and manages to escape its partiality and prepossessions is a mind that comes to be “sui juris again.”⁷⁴ For Boyle, an important role in this coming back to self-mastery is played by the very discipline of judgment and inquiry that is associated with his view of knowledge as a “growing thing.”

Given this reformulation of the problem of the standard of truth, we can look again at the definition of truth as the “knowledge that is attainable by right reason.” If the attainment of the standard of truth through the growth of knowledge depends on the mind’s capacity to master its in­­temperate tendencies, then self-government and the cultivation of moral-cum-intellectual virtues of the mind are of the essence for the attainment of right reason. That capacity translates, for Boyle, as the capacity to learn “unobvious truths,” which in the Christian Virtuoso appeared under the name “docility.” This virtue is explicitly placed in the context of the problem of the standard of truth, of which a poor measure is given by what Boyle calls “mere, abstracted reason”:

And on the score of this Intellectual, as well as Moral, Virtue, not only he will be very inclinable, both to Desire and Admit further Information, about things which he perceives to be Dark and Abstruse; but he will be very unapt to take, for the adaequate Standard of Truth, a thing so Imperfectly inform’d, and Narrowly limited, as his mere or abstracted Reason.⁷⁵

The notion of “abstracted reason” and the contrast with reason that seeks and admits new “information” represent a further elaboration on the idea of the growth of knowledge and of reason, which is apt to throw more light on the notion of “right reason.” A critical element introduced by this elaboration is the relation between reason and experience, which is also the main thrust of Boyle’s defense of the experimental versus the speculative as the legitimate form of philosophy.

Abstracted reason and the scope of experience

In several places, Boyle distinguishes among several meanings of “reason.” One, which featured in the discussion above, is (a) reason as informed by the liberal disciplines (or the whole scope of philosophy), i.e., “philosophical” or “natural” reason. There are two other meanings: (b) the faculty “furnished with its own original notions and axioms, and with vulgar or popular notices,” and (c) the faculty informed by “supernatural discoveries and revelations.”⁷⁶ The crucial descriptor in these definitions is the way in which reason is “informed” from various sources. A roughly parallel distinction is between “reason in abstracto,” which covers meaning (b), i.e., the faculty furnished with its original mathematical and metaphysical axioms, and “reason in concreto,” which embraces meanings (a) and (c), i.e., the faculty that through its exercise on the data derived from natural and supernatural sources (nature and Scripture) forms beliefs that exceed the stock of original axioms.⁷⁷ Note that there is also some measure of overlap between meaning (b) and Boyle’s categories of “absolute truths” and of “primary dictates of reason,” and between meanings (a) and (c) and the categories of “probationary truths” and of “inferior dictates of reason.”

These senses of “reason” are also captured, but with an important twist, in the distinction Boyle makes in the Christian Virtuoso between reason “addressed” to experience and “abstracted reason.” The twist comes with the evaluative load placed on “abstracted reason.” It is not simply “reason in abstracto” (a descriptive category) but reason relying only on its original axioms, on common, “vulgar” observations, and also on poorly examined doctrines when what is at stake is the discovery of truths about the world (the world of both natural and supernatural things). “Abstracted reason” is thus a negative normative category pointing to a failure in inquiry. It is “that, which is furnish’d only with its own, either Congenite, or very easily and very early Acquir’d, Notions and Idea’s, and with Popular Notices.”⁷⁸ As such,

[it is] but a narrow Thing, and reaches but to a very small share of the Multitude of Things knowable, whether Human or Divine, that may be obtain’d by the help of further Experience, and Supernatural Revelation. This Reason, furnish’d with no other Notices than it can supply it self with, is so narrow and deceitful a Thing, that He that seeks for Knowledge only within Himself, shall be sure to be quite Ignorant of far the greater part of Things, and will scarce escape being Mistaken about a good part of Those he thinks he knows.⁷⁹

 

Abstracted reason is prejudicial to inquiry: truth is rather to be sought after through a judicious use of experience. Boyle defines “experience” as “not only those Phaenomena that Nature or Art exhibits to our Outward Senses, but those things that we perceive to pass Within our selves; and all those ways of Information, whereby we attain any Knowledge that we do not owe to abstracted Reason.”⁸⁰ These “ways of information” are distributed among three main sources: personal (by sense perception and by the observation of the functioning of one’s own faculties and passions), historical (by human testimony), and theological (by divine testimony).⁸¹ The first two sources may be grouped together under the category of “physical” (or natural, as opposed to supernatural) experience, while the third source is of supernatural or theological experience, which comprises testimonies from the Bible or from inspired persons. All these are sources from which reason should cull cogent information if judgment is to be fair and rational, that is, judgment that approximates right reason. Such judgment is the mark of a true philosopher capable of self-mastery: in contrast to those who rely on “abstracted reason” and thus idolize it, the Christian Virtuosi “Address Reason to Physical and Theological Experience, and direct it how to Consult them, and take its Informations from them.”⁸²

Thus, right reason is reason informed from all sources (Scripture included), while natural reason is only partially informed, since it does not look to theological experience. Indeed, Boyle says that right reason is “a catholick principle, of which philosophy is but an application” and equates it with reason “in its full extent,” i.e., “a comprehension of true notions or propositions, both universal and particular.”⁸³ In describing what it is for a judgment to be in conformity with right reason, Boyle puts the emphasis on “information” (or on the extended sense of “experience”) rather than on “illumination” in a mystic religious sense: it is to rely on “the best and fullest Informations it [the rational faculty] can procure.”⁸⁴ Holden is right to object to Mulligan’s thesis that revelation is “just one more source of information for right reason, and in fact right reason must authenticate and interpret any alleged revelation before it can draw upon it.”⁸⁵ On the other hand, though, the contrast with “abstracted reason” (and not just with “reason in abstracto”) adds a specific moral dimension to “right reason,” which is not captured by its being equated with correct ratiocination alone. In fact, for Boyle correct ratiocination itself involves a moral dimension represented by the self-mastery involved in his conception of the discipline of (correct) judgment. “Abstracted reason” is not simply a descriptive notion but is charged with the whole moral load of the critique of the weak, self-loving, and “prepossessed” mind, incapable of the virtue of docility. To rely on reason abstracted from the information of experience in the inquiry into the truths of God is to measure the standard of truth by inadequate “dictates,” which is the result of the combination of weak assent, pride, and corrupt affections in a mind that does not master itself. It is thus to arrest the growth of knowledge.

Knowledge about both human and divine things, Boyle wrote in the passage on abstracted reason quoted above, cannot be found by man “only within Himself.” Similarly, writing on the subject of the best direction of the mind in natural inquiry, Boyle sets experimental inquiry in opposition not only with the scholastic way but also with mathematics “and other Demonstrative parts of Philosophy.” Demonstrations, he says, may have the advantage of strict examination, but they deal with “Truths a Man knows.” In contrast, an inquiry that seeks information in the whole expanse of “experience” leads to true discoveries, i.e., discoveries of truths that one could not just find in one’s own head. The superiority of this mode of inquiry lies in its capacity to teach the mind the capacity of seeing and accepting unexpected truths, i.e., truths that do not conform to the beliefs the mind has already formed (either its original axioms or the “probationary” truths or doctrines it has already discovered). In learning that, the inquirer also learns that the stock of what he knows already is very small and that there is more to find out.⁸⁶ Thus, learning to open up to the world is learning to downplay your private perspective (and pride): it is to learn docility and modesty of mind. Many truths may appear “improbable” to a mind unaccustomed to probe the territory lying “above reason” either because they are hard to comprehend or hard to explain, because they seem to contradict accepted truths, or because they seem to flout accepted positions. To reject them without inquiry is the danger the “advices” seek to avoid.

This view of the critical role experience has in the growth and education of reason is premised on two fundamental notions about the makeup of the world and of the intellect of man, which underlie Boyle’s defense of the legitimacy of experimental philosophy over speculative or rationalist forms of the pursuit of knowledge about the world (let me stress again that the “world” for Boyle is the world of both natural and supernatural things, the entire scope of God’s creation and testimonies, available to man through both “physical” and “theological” experience).

First, there is the richness of the world, one that cannot be reduced to the mathematical or metaphysical axioms, and of which the popular notions and even the philosophical theories can give only a pale reflection. The idea comes out in Boyle’s musings on whether the mind is more likely to be a blank slate or furnished with innate notions. Whatever the case, he says, whether the supposedly innate ideas are indeed innate or acquired early in life, they are too few and impotent for right judgment in either natural philosophy or theology to be grounded on them:

For in the Divine Nature, Power, Wisdom, and other Attributes, there is a Faecundity that has produc’d a World of Contrivances, Laws, and other things, that exceedingly surpass both the Number and Variety, that the dim and limited Intellect of Man could reach to, by framing and compounding Idea’s, without the assistance of the Patterns, afforded by the Works and Declarations of God.⁸⁷

The conception of a rich and fecund world, both natural and supernatural, is at bottom a theological conception of the creation and preservation of the world through divine concourse and of the divine wisdom and power manifested in creation. This conception informs Boyle’s ontological doctrine of the “cosmical mechanism” of the natural corporeal world, which is most clearly spelled out in his Notion of Nature. But in the Excellency of Theology Boyle indicates that he conceives of both the corporeal and the spiritual worlds as part of the same “Great and Universal System of God’s Contrivances,” and the natural philosophical as well as theological doctrines as part of “the more general Theory of things, knowable by the Light of Nature, improv’d by the Information of the Scriptures.”⁸⁸ The idea of the richness and fecundity of divine contrivances that man cannot intuit or deduce by “abstracted reason” is fundamental to Boyle’s conception of the experimental study of God’s works.

Second, the counterpart of the richness and fecundity of the world is a view about the naturally ignorant but gradually teachable intellect of man, which is expressed by two interrelated images. The “dim and limited Intellect of Man” mentioned in the passage above is a recurrent image in early modern, particularly Protestant writings, pointing to the diminished if not entirely corrupt powers of the intellect after the Fall. But Boyle gives a specific twist to the image: the intellect is dim if it rests within itself (if it rests in “abstracted reason”), but although it cannot surpass its natural limitations, it may become enlightened and improve its capacities by experience of the world outside man’s head. His anthropology is thus intrinsically related to a cultivating project, which is typical of the cultura animi approach to the human mind. A related image is that of the mind as a stranger in the world. It is briefly spelled out in a passage that speaks of the role of reason in dealing with the gathered experience, a passage that casts reason in the role of “an able Judge, who comes to Hear and Decide Causes in a strange Country” (emphasis mine): although furnished with “general notions” and “dictates of justice,” the able judge cannot frame right judgments about the cases in that unfamiliar country until “an Authentick and sufficient Testimony has clear’d Things to him, [on which] he then pronounces, according to the Light of Reason, he is Master of.”⁸⁹

The intellect is not just dim in itself but a stranger to the rich world. The process of experience is a learning process whereby the human mind may become acquainted with the fecundity of the divine contrivances. It is with such learning that the use of reason comes out most fully: in making sense of all the sorts of testimonies (natural or divine) that it must learn to see, which it can do only if guided by the virtue of docility. The discipline of judgment that Boyle’s method of inquiry formulates is a paideic instrument, which builds both knowledge and a virtuous mind. If judgment in conformity with right reason is judgment appropriately informed, the emphasis in Boyle’s texts is on the gathering of information (i.e., “experience”) as a paideia that involves, crucially, the gradual shedding of bad intellectual tendencies that are at the same time presented as moral failures in an integrated account of the weak or “blemished” mind. Closing inquiry with some partial dictate is often the result of “jealousie” or desire of “repute,”⁹⁰ of corrupt affections, prejudices, or prepossessions. Such dogmatic inquiry is the mark of demonstrative philosophies, embraced by those who rest in self-satisfied abstracted reason. A truly free inquiry is pursued by those who address reason to experience and thus cultivate the mind’s impartiality, docility, patience, and perseverance. It is thus the legitimate response to a correct evaluation of human nature and its possibilities. It is also, ultimately, for Boyle, what distinguishes the “Seekers” from the “Despisers” of Truth.⁹¹

The search for truth is not only the guiding principle of philosophy but a duty and an office of the rational creature in her relation with the Creator. To seek truth (the truth of God as expressed in his works and “declarations”) “becomes a Rational Creature and a Christian.”⁹² To be rational in the sense of employing reason in the search for truth is the highest duty of man as endowed with reason as a “gift of heaven.”⁹³ It is a duty primarily because it is the function of a God-given faculty, rather than an injunction assisted by promises and commands. To use that faculty well is indeed to perform correct ratiocinations, but to perform them as they serve the search for God’s truths, which is to cultivate reason by experience of all the testimonies available to man, natural and supernatural alike. Boyle’s notion of “right reason” points indeed, as Holden puts it, to the well-informed and well-exercised faculty, producing correct ratiocinations. But Boyle includes these features in a story about the use of the gift of reason, which is an office (a function and a duty) of man and a perfective action that makes possible the growth of knowledge and of mind. Thus understood, right reason is the horizon of the moral and intellectual excellence of the mind. It is that not because it is the repository of principles of natural law or the receptacle of supernatural illumination, but rather because it governs man’s striving to leave behind abstracted reason, passions, or hasty conclusions and engage in virtuous inquiry.

The Christian philosopher

For Boyle, the world was intended by its Creator as a “School of Virtue” or else as a “Ship” that “helps to convey him [the Christian] towards his Journey’s End.”⁹⁴ The paradigmatic student or traveler is of course the Christian Virtuoso, who stands for a figure alternatively called “a Rational Creature and a Christian” or “a Christian Philosopher.”⁹⁵ Steven Shapin has rightly pointed out that this figure did not conform to any predefined disciplinary or professional role in the intellectual space of early modern England.⁹⁶ Boyle’s original cultural contribution, Shapin claims, was to fashion a new intellectual identity out of reshaped elements of what were considered the discrete and largely incompatible identities of the gentleman, the pious Christian, and the philosopher/ scholar.⁹⁷ Shapin’s concern is with the legitimacy of this new identity in terms of credibility and trustworthiness; as a consequence his analysis focuses on what he sees as strategies for the presentation and recognition of self in the social space. I have moved the focus of attention onto the question of the mental discipline involved in the education of the Christian philosopher as an object worthy of historical investigation in itself, and not only as an element of the presentation of a (new) credible identity. From this perspective, Boyle’s exemplary figure belongs with the (older) culture of regimens that had already developed a cross-disciplinary core doctrine about the cure and cultivation of the mind that could be put to use in the grooming of the devout Christian, the philosopher, and the actor in “civil conversation” alike. An early admirer and practitioner of the philosophical and religious “physick” for the soul, Boyle continued and strengthened the move begun in England by Bacon and continued by the Royal Society virtuosi, of claiming for experimental philosophy a rightful place among the disciplines serving a cultura animi program. He gave an articulate defense of experimental philosophy in cultura animi terms by devising a powerful account of experience as paideia (applied to the entirety of God’s creation and testimonies), as well as a view of reason as a learning capacity apt to “perfect” a weak, ignorant, but teachable mind, on condition that it applies itself to the world of experience.

Placed in this perspective, the Christian Virtuoso, seen as the protagonist of a paideic scenario, is emblematic not only as a social but also as a solitary figure. The distinction does not overlap with the terms of the controversy over the merits of the active versus the contemplative life but refers to the aspects under which the student of God’s works could represent to himself the sites of the cultivation of the mind, within the territory of an active life. In the previous chapter I showed that the community of natural philosophers was valued by the virtuosi not only as a forum for establishing norms of credibility but also for its therapeutic benefits. Boyle also gestures toward such values of the community of “friends,” whose rational conversation can enhance both civility and mental vigor and health. At the same time, though, the training of the mind is to a large extent a personal, solitary affair, insofar as the stage of the fight with one’s own frailties is ultimately one’s own self. The preface to the Christian Virtuoso paints (the mind of) its author as an exemplary theater of such a trial and effort. Boyle’s speaker tells us that the text was chiefly written for his friends, yet,

I did not write it for them only; but was willing to lay hold on some of the Occasions that the Series of my Discourse offered me, to excite in myself those Dispositions that I endeavoured to produce in others: And, by insisting upon some Reflections, impress them more deeply upon my own Mind.⁹⁸

The double aspect—the social and the individual—of the effort of self-examination and self-cultivation is actually recurrent in the various trends of the cultura animi tradition. Socrates and the philosophical physicians of the soul conducted their therapeutic scrutiny both within their own selves and in searching conversation. Augustine and the spiritual physicians had both the “inner man” and the community of “brethren” to serve as arenas of self-inspection and soul purging.⁹⁹ In a similar way, Bacon represented the sites of the arduous search for truth as both the community of friends and the theater of the individual mind, wherein “I have committed myself to the uncertainties and difficulties and solitudes of the ways.”¹⁰⁰ And so, too, Boyle’s Christian philosopher relies on the combined help of self and friends.

The construal of the exercise of reason as the office of a rational creature whereby it fulfills a role assigned by its Creator is also an indication that the social and the solitary aspects of the work on the soul do not overlap with the spheres of the public and the private man any more than they do with those of the active and the contemplative lives. Conal Condren’s study of the language of “office” in the early modern period has drawn attention to the fact that the set of functions, responsibilities, and virtues associated with the idea of rightly performing one’s office extended to the realm of what, from the perspective of the private-public dichotomy, would be considered the most intimately private sphere: man’s soul or conscience. It was the absence of office, and thus the thwarting of its moral economy, that was labeled (derogatorily) as “private.”¹⁰¹ For Boyle, the duty to God of a rational creature—and thus of the Christian philosopher, seen as the exemplary model of such a creature—included the “official” responsibility of the right management of the gift of reason in the service of useful knowledge and piety. This duty was located in the innermost sphere of human life (the soul) while at the same time carving the moral space of a relational existence—the soul’s relation to God and to other human beings.