| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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Galileo and distrusted by Robert Boyle. Like Galileo, whom he visited while abroad, Hobbes held experimentation to be secondary to the application of reason to nature and the formation of rational axioms. Boyle, on the other hand, was a committed experimentalist whose famous quarrel with Hobbes over the proper foundations of science, known as the “air pump” controversy, exemplifies their basic differences. The dispute turned on the cause of death of a dog encased in a glass globe from which the air was drawn by means of a “pneumatical Engine.” Boyle contended that a vacuum was thus created, depriving the dog of air. Hobbes, who challenged the entire notion of the existence of vacua, argued that the glass vessel was not entirely void of air because the pump was defective, and that the dog actually drowned, as it were, in the violently circulating air (Martinich 304–305). Hobbes’ rationale rested on his axiom of the ubiquity of motion. But Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer note that “[o]f greater epistemological importance” than the operation of the air pump was Hobbes’ goal of discrediting Boyle’s experimental basis for incontestable knowledge. To amplify, in Dialogus Physicus(1661) he pointedly attacked Boyle’s position on
Boyle’s experimental approach could provide only probable truths which, in Hobbes’ mind, devalued it in favor of the incontrovertible truths that he felt philosophy established. But other scientists and members of the Royal Society, an organization to which Hobbes wished haplessly to belong, took Boyle’s side. Hobbes’ standing as a natural philosopher