Rearranging Seventeenth-Century Natural History into Natural Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Editions of Boyle’s Works

This chapter suggests a context for understanding the implications of the eighteenth-century production of epitomised, systematised editions of the works of Robert Boyle. It suggests that Richard Boulton’s 1699 epitome, and Peter Shaw’s 1725 abridged, methodised edition of Boyle’s works operate within the seventeenth-century conception of an inductive process whereby individuated ‘historical’ knowledge is transformed into systematic ‘philosophical’ knowledge through textual rearrangement. Bacon’s new logic, which aims to produce formal natural philosophy, is essentially a process of organising data, and illustrates the crucial epistemological importance of the arrangement of particulars. Natural philosophy begins with the enumeration of instances: ‘first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all’. This sense of the importance of the arrangement of natural knowledge provides a new basis for assessing the eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works.