The Sceptical Chymist

The Sceptical Chymist, whose full title is "The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes", is Robert Boyle's principal scientific work. Published in London in 1661, it takes the form of a dialogue. For this and its other contributions, Boyle is sometimes called the founder of modern chemistry.

The action takes place in a private garden, where five interlocutors discuss the constituents of mixed bodies. They include Carneades, the host and skeptic, who voices Boyle's ideas; Philoponus, a chymist; Themistius, an Aristotelian; Eleutherius, an impartial judge; and an unnamed narrator. The book holds that matter consists of corpuscles and clusters of corpuscles in motion, so that every phenomenon results from their collisions. Boyle rejects Aristotle's doctrine of four elements (earth, air, fire and water) and also Paracelsus's three principles (salt, sulphur and mercury). In their place he defines elements as simple, perfectly unmingled bodies, though he concedes that no known substance qualifies, since even gold or sulphur are compounds.

The work insists that every theory must be tested by experiment and that chemistry should cease serving medicine or alchemy in order to take its place as a science. Its tone is lively and ironic: Boyle likens the alchemists to the sailors of Solomon's fleet of Tarshish, who brought home peacocks and monkeys along with gold, showy but unsound.

Its reception was considerable. After its appearance, the doctrines of the four elements and the three principles gradually fell out of use. Its influence can also be seen in Nicholas Brady's "Ode to St. Cecilia", set by Henry Purcell in 1691, which refers to the "jarring seeds" of matter.