ABSTRACT
Robert Boyle's Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature is one of the key texts of the Scientific Revolution. Quite apart from their significance for illustrating the stages in the chronological development of A Free Enquiry, both the manuscripts of c. 1680 and those of the 1660s are also illuminating for what they reveal about Boyle's method of composition. The Free Enquiry thus 'provided the theological and philosophical underpinnings for the corpuscular philosophy that lay at the heart of all of Boyle's work in natural philosophy', in the words of a modern scholar, Margaret Osler. In part, A Free Enquiry is important for laying out what Boyle saw as the superior intelligibility of mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena over the more teleological and qualitative ones that he associated with the 'vulgar' conception of nature.
