Abstract
Robert Boyle and John Beale had connections with Samuel Hartlib and his correspondence circle. The position of these three figures can be taken as an ‘empirical’ one in the sense that they favoured ‘particulars’ over ‘systems’. But differences emerge if we consider their attitudes towards the role of memory in Baconian natural histories. Hartlib’s call for empirical particulars coexisted with an expectation that information could be reduced and arranged to aid both memory and thinking. As one model, William Petty promoted John Pell’s reductions of mathematical knowledge. Beale’s letters to Boyle (in the 1660s) urged systematic ordering of empirical data in the service of memory and hypotheses. Although Boyle did believe that a disciplined individual memory could embody multifarious experiences, he resisted Beale’s advice. What we accept as Boyle’s ‘empirical’ attitude was not so much a distinctive commitment to gathering matters of fact – something also professed by Hartlib and Beale – but a refusal to condense and arrange material in the way they demanded. Beale’s promotion of memory techniques that relied on highly structured arrangements of units seems to have aggravated Boyle’s existing suspicion of premature systems.
I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding the larger project to which this chapter belongs. For their advice and comments, I thank Peter Anstey, Mary Louise Yeo, an anonymous referee, and participants at a workshop at Sydney University convened by Charles Wolfe. I also thank Jacky Hodgson and her staff in Special Collections, University of Sheffield Library, for access to the original Hartlib Papers.
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Notes
- 1.
Hobbes 1651, 16.
- 2.
- 3.
See van Fraassen 2002.
- 4.
Power 1663–1664, 184 and 192; my emphasis. Here, and in all subsequent quotations from primary sources, I preserve the original spelling and punctuation.
- 5.
Peter Anstey (2005) contrasts ‘experimental’ and ‘speculative’ philosophy. I think the other kinds of empirical data that I mention here need to be added to the ‘experimental’ side of this contrast.
- 6.
Boyle 1690, 54; also 4–5. I leave aside the question of the various meanings of the word information (and ‘informations’) in this period.
- 7.
Ibid., 57; see also 53–7; this quotation also in Boyle 1999–2000, 11, 306.
- 8.
Boyle 1690, 5.
- 9.
- 10.
For the tension created by Bacon’s linkage of Memoria and Historia, see Yeo 2007.
- 11.
- 12.
Boyle 1692, 150 for Title XIX, ‘Of the Heat and Coldness of the Air’; also in Boyle 1999–2000, 12, 100. The material for this work was gathered from the 1660s onwards. The Title XIX cited here appeared as no. 18 in a copy of a list of thirty-one Titles dating from 1682; this is in Bodleian Locke MS c. 42, part 1, 16–17. Apart from this clue, I have not attempted to establish the likely date of this specific Title. See the editors’ discussion in Boyle 1999–2000, 12, xii–xxi.
- 13.
In this instance, Boyle was not referring to grand systems, but to a doctrine about the nature of air and some of its effects in climatic regions.
- 14.
- 15.
See Greengrass et al. 1994.
- 16.
- 17.
Boyle to Hartlib, [early 1647], in Boyle 2001, 1, 51; and Hartlib, Ephemerides, January–June 1648, HP31/22/1A. Hereafter, all citations from the Hartlib Papers (Hartlib 2002) are given in this format. For Boyle’s early links with Hartlib’s circle, including Beale, William Petty, Benjamin Worsely, William Brereton and John Worthington, see Maddison 1969, 61–63, 68, 71 and 95. See also O’Brien 1965; Shapin 1994, 137, 144, 175.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, August 1640, HP30/4/53B. Hartlib’s stance matches the spirit of Bacon’s plea, in his Novum organum, for ‘a greater abundance of experiments’ and a ‘store of particulars’ as a foundation for further inquiry. See Bacon 1963, 4, part I, aphorism nos. 100 and 103, 95–96; also in Bacon 2004, 159–61.
- 21.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, January 1640, HP30/4/42A.
- 22.
See Hartlib, Ephemerides, HP30/4/3A: ‘Cartes in his apriori philosophizing’ against ‘the sonder a posterior path of Junguis’.
- 23.
Hartlib to Dury [or Durie], 13 September 1630, HP7/12/1B.
- 24.
See also Webster 1970, 76–77.
- 25.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1635, HP29/3/13A.
- 26.
On Bacon’s view of aphorisms, see Clucas 1997.
- 27.
- 28.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1640, HP30/4/42B and HP30/4/39A.
- 29.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1640, HP30/4/43A.
- 30.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1640, part 2, HP 30/4/49B; this echoes aphorism no. 19 in Bacon’s Novum Organum, Bacon 1963, 4, 50; also in Bacon 2004, 71.
- 31.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, HP30/4/22A.
- 32.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1650, HP28/1/53B.
- 33.
Copy in scribal hand of Beale to Hartlib, 2 December 1661, HP67/22/13B.
- 34.
Beale to Boyle, 29 September 1663, Boyle 2001, 2, 134.
- 35.
See Bacon’s De Augmentis, Bacon 1963, 4, 290: ‘… the true remedy is not to destroy the old books, but to make more good ones’.
- 36.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, HP30/4/22B.
- 37.
- 38.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, part 1, HP30/4/4B. See also Hartlib, ‘Notes on Preaching, from Perkins, in Hartlib’s hand’, April–August 1655, HP27/8/12B: ‘Artificial Memorie is not to bee used at all. Because it is vaine or impious, in the inventing of Images, and also it is burdensome in the threefold apprehension of places, images and the thing to bee apprehended of, and so it dulleth wit and memorie’.
- 39.
- 40.
Hartlib, undated, ‘Tract on Logic in Hartlib’s hand’, HP24/6/12A.
- 41.
- 42.
Pell’s Idea was printed as a folio broadsheet in 1638. See Wallis 1967, 141–45. The English version appeared as an addition to Dury [or Durie] 1650 and again in the second edition of 1651. I cite from the former. Robert Hooke published the Latin version, together with comments from Marin Mersenne and René Descartes, in the Philosophical collections; see Pell 1681/1682.
- 43.
Petty 1647, 5.
- 44.
- 45.
For a highpoint of the typical Renaissance desire to reduce knowledge in books to common topics, see Nelles 2009 on Conrad Gessner’s Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium (1548–1549).
- 46.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, part 3, HP30/4/25B.
- 47.
Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1640, part 2, HP30/4/45B; and part 3, HP30/4/53B.
- 48.
Pell 1650, 45 and 40.
- 49.
Ibid., 44–5. Beale used these words in his writings about the art of memory copied by Pell in 1663. See BL Add MS 4384, fols 64–117; dated ‘June xi.1663’, at fol. 64r: ‘And in pursuance of Mr Pell’s Idea of Mathematics, viz: That men may consider what meanes may be used to fortify the imagination, to prompt the Memory, or regulate our Reason, and what effects may be produced by the uniting of these meanes, and the constant exercise of them.’
- 50.
- 51.
- 52.
Hunter 1994, Sixteen.
- 53.
- 54.
For Boyle’s sense of his ‘Ethics’ (that is, his ‘Aretology’ begun in 1645) as part of his studies, see Boyle to Isaac Marcombes, 22 October 1646, Boyle 2001, 1, 37. Marcombes was his tutor during his time in Geneva from 1639. Boyle returned to England in 1644.
- 55.
See ‘Another Advertisement’ in Seraphic Love (1659), Boyle 1999–2000, 1, 60 for the explanation by a friend that Boyle had not dropped his scientific work, but would continue to publish ‘those Experimentall Essay’s and other Physiologicall Writings, which he is known to have, lying by him’.
- 56.
- 57.
Boyle, ‘An account of Philaretus during his Minority’, in Maddison 1969, 2–45, at 15; also in Boyle 1772, 1, xii–xxvi; and in Hunter 1994, 1–22. Boyle’s amanuensis, Robin Bacon, said he had a good memory. See BL Add MSS 4229, fol. 66, cited in Boyle 1991, 194, n. 21. But compare Boyle to Hartlib, 8 April 1647 in Boyle 2001, 1, 56: ‘the treacherousness of my memory’.
- 58.
Maddison 1969, 11 citing a letter of [December] 1635.
- 59.
Boyle, ‘The Dayly Reflection’, BP 7, fols 269–87, printed in Boyle 1991, 203–35, at 232–33. I use this edition, edited by John T. Harwood, for all subsequent page references.
- 60.
Boyle, ‘The Doctrine of Thinking’, Boyle 1991, 194.
- 61.
Ibid., 195–201, at 200–01.
- 62.
Boyle, ‘The Dayly Reflection’, Boyle 1991, 222.
- 63.
Ibid., 208.
- 64.
Ibid., 207.
- 65.
Ibid., 208.
- 66.
Boyle 1665, 29 and 30–1.
- 67.
- 68.
- 69.
- 70.
- 71.
Boyle 1665, 25.
- 72.
Boyle, ‘Of the Study of the Book of Nature, For the first Section of my Treatise of Occasional Reflections ’, 1650s, BP 8, fols 123–39, at fol. 137r in Boyle 1999–2000, 13, 168; and editors’ comments, vol. 1, xxxi. See Boyle to Lady Katherine Ranelagh, 31 August 1649, Boyle 2001, 1, 82–83 for mention of this work; and Principe 1995b, 393 on the continuity here between Boyle’s moral and scientific attitudes.
- 73.
- 74.
Boyle, ‘Doctrine of Thinking’, in Boyle 1991, 198–99.
- 75.
Compare Petrarch’s account of a friend’s amazing power of recollection, apparently achieved by ‘personalizing bits of information’; Carruthers 1990, 61.
- 76.
Annas 1992, 307–10 especially 308. Boyle accepted the standard view that memory was a ‘corporeal faculty’, and therefore wondered how ‘a multitude of various things’ can be stored and found again. See Boyle, Christian Virtuoso. The Second Part, in Boyle 1999–2000, 12, 463. With many of his contemporaries, Boyle did not believe that there was a satisfactory account of the relationship between classical mnemonic practices and contemporary views of the physical workings of memory.
- 77.
- 78.
- 79.
Petty to Boyle, 15 April 1653, Boyle 2001, 1, 142–43.
- 80.
Harwood, ‘Introduction’, in Boyle 1991, xli.
- 81.
For Boyle’s use of Heads, see Hunter 2007a.
- 82.
Hartlib to Boyle, 27 April 1658, Boyle 2001, 1, 268. Maddison 1969, 14 (in notes) says Beale ‘was a near contemporary’ of Boyle at Eton, ‘though a trifle earlier’. This is understated, since Beale enrolled at Eton in 1622 and Boyle did not do so until October 1635. Beale was twenty years older than Boyle. For Boyle’s possible reference to Beale as ‘a particular friend, (a great virtuoso of the Royall Society)’, see Hunter 2000, 230, n. 27 citing RS, MS 187, fols 32v–34 reprinted in Boyle 1999–2000, 11, lxvii.
- 83.
Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP25/6/1A and 4B; but some of these words also appear (crossed through) in a fragment dated 18 March 1656, HP52/4A.
- 84.
Beale to Boyle, 25 February 1663, Boyle 2001, 2, 62–68, especially 66; and Beale to Boyle, 28 September 1663, ibid., 127.
- 85.
Beale to Boyle, 29 September 1663, ibid., 128–42, at 129–30.
- 86.
See the editors’ ‘Introduction’ to Boyle 2001, 1, xii.
- 87.
Of course there were other topics, including religious ones. See Wojcik 1997, 22–23.
- 88.
Beale to Boyle, 29 September 1663, Boyle 2001, 2, 128–42.
- 89.
Ibid., 132, 135.
- 90.
Beale had discussed the art of memory and the prospect of ‘an Universall character’ with Hartlib on 9 January 1658, HP31/1/61A–63A, at 61B; he had circulated comments on Caleb Morley’s memory treatise on 23 December 1656, HP31/1/7A–8B and 2 December 1661, HP67/22/13A–14B. See also Lewis 2005.
- 91.
Copy in scribal hand of Beale to Hartlib, 4 October 1661, HP67/22/11B; see also the version copied by John Pell, titled ‘The Mnemonicall Probleme’, BL Add MS 4384, fols 64–117 (dated ‘June xi.1663’) at fol. 64r.
- 92.
Copy in scribal hand of Beale to Hartlib, 4 October 1661, HP67/22/12A; another copy at HP71/6/1A–2B. See also BL Add MS 4384, fols 64–117, at fol. 64r.
- 93.
Beale to Boyle, 29 September 1663, Boyle 2001, 2, 141. A similar confidence underlay Beale’s belief that an artificial language of the kind proposed by John Wilkins could be quickly learnt, that ‘the reall Character may be easily taught in few dayes’ (Beale to Boyle, 23 June 1682, Boyle 2001, 5, 301). For a detailed account of Beale’s views, see Lewis 2005; and more generally, Lewis 2007, especially chapter 5.
- 94.
Beale to Boyle, 25 February1665, Boyle 2001, 2, 69.
- 95.
This point is developed in ‘Notes upon Mr Hartlib’s Accompt of Mr Morleys Art of Memory’, BL Add MS 4384, fol. 65r.
- 96.
- 97.
Beale to Boyle, 29 September 1663, Boyle 2001, 2, 132.
- 98.
Beale to Boyle, 2 October 1663, ibid., 145.
- 99.
- 100.
Beale to Boyle, 13 July 1666, Boyle 2001, 3, 187.
- 101.
Beale to Boyle, 10 August 1666, ibid., 200. The editors of Boyle’s Works note that after the peak of his publications in 1666 (that is, after his correspondence with Beale) he changed to books resembling ‘short essays’ (Boyle 1999–2000, 1, xxxvii). I cannot say whether this indicates Beale’s influence.
- 102.
Beale to Boyle, 18 April 1666, Boyle 2001, 3, 139–40. Boyle’s workdiary entitled ‘Promiscuous Experiments, Observations, and Notes’ (no. 21 in BP 27, 5–159) dates from the ‘late 1660s’, according to Hunter 2007b, 414. Boyle made entries in these workdiaries in sets of 100, thus ‘centuries’. Beale had earlier alluded to the ‘Sylva of promiscuous Experiments, Upon which you may discharge such of your papers & informations’. Beale to Boyle, 28 September 1663, in Boyle 2001, 2, 127.
- 103.
Beale to Boyle, 10 August 1666, Boyle 2001, 3, 208.
- 104.
Beale to Boyle, 10 August 1666, ibid., 205; italics in original. Beale made similar points in a letter to an unidentified recipient of 2 December 1661, HP67/22/13A–14B.
- 105.
- 106.
Beale to Boyle, 10 August 1666, Boyle 2001, 3, 198–210, at 198. Here Beale muted Boyle’s resistance to systems. Compare note 11 above.
- 107.
Beale to Boyle, 10 August 1666, ibid., 200. See also editors’ comments in Boyle, 1999–2000, 1, lxxxiv.
- 108.
- 109.
- 110.
Beale to Boyle, 28 April 1666, Boyle 2001, 3, 159; see also 18 April 1666, 138 for ‘Cribo divino’.
- 111.
Beale to Boyle, ibid., 192.
- 112.
- 113.
- 114.
My emphasis. Hartlib copied this to John Worthington, 26 August 1661; printed in Worthington 1847–1886, 1, 365–76, at 369; original letter in BL Add MS 32498; a copy in Add MS 6271, fols 12r–13v, at fol. 13r.
- 115.
- 116.
Oldenburg to Boyle, 27 January 1666 in Boyle 2001, 3, 46. He was probably referring to Hooke’s ‘General Scheme’, composed about this time.
- 117.
- 118.
Boyle, BP 9, fols 72–3; see transcription in Hunter and Anstey 2008, p.7.
- 119.
Lewis 2009a, 355–58.
- 120.
Boyle, RS, MS 198, circa 1680, fol. 104r.
- 121.
Boyle, RS, MS 189, 1689–90, fols 27v–28r.
- 122.
Abbreviations
- HP:
-
Samuel Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University
- BL:
-
British Library
- BP:
-
Robert Boyle Papers, Royal Society of London
- RS:
-
Royal Society papers
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Yeo, R. (2010). Memory and Empirical Information: Samuel Hartlib, John Beale and Robert Boyle. In: Wolfe, C.T., Gal, O. (eds) The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3686-5_10
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