Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691

Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, and theologian and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Sceptical Chymist helped to transform alchemy into modern chemistry, while Boyle's law in pneumatics bears his name. The Origin of Forms and Qualities defended a corpuscularian, mechanical philosophy of nature against scholastic substantial forms. He was throughout his life a deeply religious thinker who viewed the experimental study of nature as the highest form of natural theology, an outlook he developed in The Christian Virtuoso.

Robert Boyle was born in 1627 at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, the fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, and one of the wealthiest men in seventeenth-century Britain. After Eton and a long Grand Tour, the English Civil War kept him in England; he settled at Stalbridge in Dorset and from 1655 in Oxford, where he joined the experimental philosophical discussions that would, after the Restoration, become the Royal Society of London.

His writings span natural philosophy, theology, and ethics. New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air (1660) presented the air-pump work that led to the law that bears his name; The Sceptical Chymist (1661) attacked the Aristotelian and Paracelsian doctrines of the elements and offered a corpuscular theory of matter; The Christian Virtuoso, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy, and the late tract A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things integrated his experimental program with Christian providence.

Boyle was the most articulate seventeenth-century English spokesman for the experimental, mathematical, and corpuscular natural philosophy that displaced Aristotelianism, and the founding patron of the Boyle Lectures, which sought to defend Christianity against atheism. He declined the presidency of the Royal Society and a peerage. He died at London in December 1691, exactly one week after his sister and lifelong companion Lady Ranelagh.