Robert Boyle: Other

Robert Boyle was English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Explore interesting quotes on other.

Robert Boyle: 42 quotes3 likes

“I need not tell you, what complaints the more candid and judicious of the Chymists themselves are wont to make of those boasters, that confidently pretend, that they have extracted the salt or sulphur of quicksilver, when they have disguised it by additaments, wherewith it resembles the concretes, whose names are given it; whereas by a skilful and rigid examen, it may be easily enough stripped of its disguises, and made to appear again in the pristine form of running mercury. The pretended salts and sulphurs being so far from being elementary parts extracted out of the body of mercury, that they are rather… de-compound bodies, made up of the whole metal and the menstruum, or other additaments employed to disguise it.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Part I
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

“There are some mixt bodies, from which it has not been yet made appear, that any degree of fire can separate either salt, or sulphur, or mercury, much less all the three. The most obvious instance of this truth is gold, which is a body so fixed, and wherein the elementary ingredients (if it have any) are so firmly united to each other, that we find not in the operations, wherein gold is exposed to the fire, how violent soever, that it does discernably so much as lose of its fixedness or weight, so far is it from being dissipated into those principles, whereof one at least is acknowledged to be fugitive enough.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Part I
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

“Being Gentlemen and very far from the litigious humour of loving to wrangle about words or terms or notions as empty; they had before his coming in, readily agreed promiscuously to use when they pleased Elements and Principles as terms equivalent: and to understand both by the one and the other, those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Physiological Considerations Part of the First Dialogue (16)
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

“It seems not absurd to conceive, that at first production of mixt bodies, the universal matter, whereof they among other parts of the universe consisted, was actually divided, into little particles, of several sizes and shapes, variously moved.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Part I, Proposition I
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

“Epicurus… supposes not only all mixt bodies, but all others to be produced by the various and casual occursions of atoms, moving themselves to and fro by an internal principle in the immense or rather infinite vacuum.”

Robert Boyle book The Sceptical Chymist

Part I, Carneades speaking
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)

“Among Latin writers, the acceptations of the word nature are so many, that I remember, one author reckons up no less than fourteen or fifteen. Hence we see how easy 'tis for the generality of men, without excepting those who write of natural things, to impose upon others and themselves, in the use of a word so apt to be mis-employ'd... the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein 'tis employ'd either unintelligible, improper, or false.”

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature" Sect.1 ibid.

“But I will not... trouble you with what I have largely discoursed in the Sceptical Chymist, to call in question the grounds on which Chymists assert, that all mixt bodies are compounded of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. For it may suffice me now to tell you that, whatsoever they may be able to obtain from other bodies, it does not appear by Experience, which is the grand, if not the onely, Argument they rely on, that all mixt bodies that have Qualities consist of their tria prima, since they have not been able, that we know, truly, and without new Compositions, to resolve into those three, either Gold, or Silver, or Crystal, or Venetian Talck, or some other bodies, that I elsewhere name; & yet these bodies are endowed with divers Qualities, as the two former with Fusibleness and Malleability, and all of them with Weight and Fixity; so that in these and the like bodies, whence Chymisats have not made it yet appear, that their Salt, Sulphur and Mercury, can be truly and adequately separated, 'twill scarce be other than precarious to derive the malleableness, colour, and other Qualities of such bodies from those Principles.”

Of the Imperfection of The Chymist's Doctrine of Qualities (1675)