ABSTRACT
The title of this paper 1 embodies a reference to Radcliffe-Brown's citation, at the end of his plea for what he called a Natural Science of Society, of the Honourable Robert Boyle's work The Sceptical Chymist . Radcliffe-Brown noted that Boyle argued for bypassing ‘practical’ problems, what he called ‘frugiferous’ research, in favour of enlighten-ment of a theoretical order—‘luminiferous’ research—and so was able to found a real science of chemistry out of alchemy and metallurgy. Radcliffe-Brown would have liked to have been able to emulate Boyle, and create a ‘purely theoretical science of human society’ (1957: 14–78), though he thought that demands for practical results are so insistent that such an aim will be unlikely of proper attention in our times. Now this picks out a significant view, and I recall it later. But Boyle saw theory as basic to practice, not as supplanting it. Granted his concern for theoretical research, when he published his book in 1661 Boyle had joined what was called ‘a new philosophical college that values no knowledge but as it has a tendency to use’. This very down-to-earth body of people afterwards became the Royal Society of London, with Boyle as a founder Fellow and member of its first Council. What strikes me also in Boyle's book is his emphasis on experiment, and his refusal to accept assertion not backed by evidence. A lusty controversialist, he rejected what he termed the ‘intolerable ambiguity’ his opponents allowed themselves in their expressions. If, following Radcliffe-Brown, we take Boyle as a guide we find he makes two further points. He believed in flexibility of interpretation. ‘It is not necessary that all the things a Sceptick Proposes, should be consonant.… It is allowable for him to propose two or more several Hypotheses about the same thing.…’ And in a pre-marxist, even pre-Hegelian, world he distrusted the then version of the dialectic: ‘those Dialectical subtleties… are wont much more to declare the wit of him that uses them, than increase the knowledge or remove the doubts of sober lovers of truth’ (Boyle 1661: A2–4, 14–15; 1964: viii).
