Robert Boyle is
today seen as the supreme experimentalist of his era. Boyle
believed in practical analysis and was more concerned with how a
phenomenon occurred, rather than why it
happened.
Boyle tried to unite
elements of Descartes's philosophy of a mechanistic universe with
the revived atomic theory, but he did not subscribe to the
contention that God had no role in the physical world. After
God initiated primal movement, like Gassendi, he held that God's
'general concourse' was continually needed to keep the mechanical
universe working. But a greater contribution to the study of matter
and energy was his demonstration of the fallacy of Aristotle's
notion of the four elements.
Boyle illustrated
how fire could not be considered a basic element and that
Aristotle's claim that fire could resolve things into their
elements was false. He demonstrated that, contrary to Aristotle's
belief, gold can withstand fire and can also be alloyed with other
metals and then recovered in its original form, suggesting the
existence of unalterable 'corpuscles' of gold. He also showed that
even when fire did break down materials it required different
degrees of heat and different time periods to succeed, and more
often than not it produced new substances that were also complex.
Finally, he showed that some materials could not be reduced by fire
alone.
