Volume 2

Essays in historical chemistry / by T.E. Thorpe.

  • Thorpe, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1845-1925.
Date:
1902
    an investigator, his quick perception and receptive mind, his great power of co-ordination, his insight, his logic, his patient care and scrupulous accuracy. It exhibits, too, his weakness; for it must be admitted that it is wanting in that grasp of principle and faculty of generalisation which we see in the work of the illustrious author of the Novum Organum. It lacks, too, the Forscherblick and power of divination so characteristic of the genius of Newton. But to say that Boyle is only inferior to Bacon and Newton is to assign him one of the first niches in the Walhalla of the heroes of science. But Boyle’s work, as I have before hinted, was not allowed to go forth unchallenged ; and the Elaterists were quickly taken to task, on the one hand by one Franciscus Linus, and on the other by a far more important personage—Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury. Hobbes has been styled the subtlest dialectician of his time, and a master of precise and luminous language; too frequently, however, that language lost more in elegance than it gained in force. Hobbes, although not a professed Peripatetic or a Cartesian, was a very pronounced Plenist. He utterly failed to see any virtue in the new philosophy, and the disparagement of the Gresham set, or “the experimentarian philosophers,” as he sneeringly called them, was the chief design of his Dialogus Pliysicus de Natura Aeris, the book in which he attempts to write down Boyle and his work. Boyle hated contention; but he and his friends felt that the new doctrines were at stake. It is unnecessary for me to take up your time by examining Mr. Hobbes’s argu¬ ments or Boyle’s refutation of them; it is sufficient to say that Mr. Hobbes, who had, with singular indiscretion, laid himself open by quoting Vespasian’s law, “ That it is unlawful to give ill language first, but civil and
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