ABSTRACT
Other than with the attempted infusion of mathematical-experimental science with corpuscles in motion, which was almost exclusively an effort of just two individuals, the effort undertaken at about the same time to infuse fact-finding experimental science with them took place against a recognizably national background. Fact-finding experimental science was practiced in Britain as well as on the Continent (the Society of Jesus, the Paris Académie, a variety of individual practitioners). In partial contrast, the ‘Baconian Brew’ mixed in the 1660s out of Bacon-inspired experimentation, particles in motion, and a broadly ‘spiritual’ dose of active principles was an exclusively British affair. It came about by way of cross-cultural transplantation. Compared to earlier transplantations (Greek→Arabic, Arabic→Latin, and Greek→Latin), where truly distinct civilizations were involved, it was a decidedly minor one. Still, as so often when a set of ideas developed in one place is suddenly dropped in another, it produced genuine novelty. The Baconian Brew served to make the experimental search for natural phenomena and causal accounts of them in terms of corpuscular movements reinforce one another by turning the former less haphazard and the latter less arbitrary. In the process, the nature of these causal accounts changed. Not only were matter and motion taken as (in Boyle’s expression) ‘catholick principles’ to be handled as the occasion required rather than as rigid dogma of the strictly Cartesian or strictly Gassendist variety. But also, in the Baconian Brew kinetic-corpuscularian explanations and the component of natural magic that remained part and parcel of much 17th-century experimentation began to interact in such a way as to make ‘spirit’ more material and matter more ‘spiritual’.
