Leviathan and The Air-Pump - Chapter VII: Natural Philosophy and The Restoration: Interests in Dispute

Chapter VII: Natural Philosophy and The Restoration: Interests in Dispute

"Hobbes and Boyle used the work of the 1640s and 1650s to give rival accounts of the right way to conduct natural philosophy" and, in chapter 7, Shapin and Schaffer show how those models were interpreted and supported by Restoration society. "The experience of the War and the Republic showed that disputed knowledge produced civil strife...Boyle's technologies could only gain assent within a secure social space for experimental practice... Hobbes assaulted the security of that space because it was yet one more case of divided power."

In essence, Boyle's theory and Hobbes's theory are inspired by the same problem: what to do when people can't agree on the truth. Boyle's supporters "Wilkins and Ward were ejected from the universities...they argued against each other about the virtues of toleration or suppression of Dissent. Wilkins attacked the Uniformity Act as too coercive: he would have preferred that the Church 'stand without whipping.'" "These exchanges give considerable point to the proposals that Boyle and his allies produced for the establishment of a social space in which dissent would be safe and tolerable." In addition, "Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) labeled Hobbesian dogmatism as tyranny, and uncontrolled private judgement as enthusiasm. Such dangers were to be excluded from the community - otherwise debate would not be safe." "The works of Barlow, Pett, and Dury argued that the balance of disputing sects was better than a state that included a cowed and disaffected party coerced into silence." "With Hobbes in view...Glanvill insisted that 'dogmatizing is the great disturber both of our selves, and the world with-out us: for while we wed an opinion, we resolvedly ingage against every one that opposeth it...hence grow Schisms, heresies, and anomalies beyond Arithmetick."

Adversaries of the experimental method took offense in two ways. The first was to "satirize the low status of experimental labour" and label their discipline as little more than children playing with toys. And the second, more social ingrained argument, was that the division between Church and the discovery of "matters of fact" "would weaken, rather than strengthen, the fortunes of the Church." "Boyle portrayed the work of experiment as distinct from that of the Church. Yet its work was also valuable for the churchmen. If the rules of the experimental game were obeyed, then the game would work well for the godly. These were the aspects of experimental philosophy that More and his allies found useful at the Restoration." As we have seen previously, this allied relationship between natural philosophy and the clergy was unacceptable to Hobbes because it undermined the political authority of the King and caused social instability by splitting the allegiances of the his subjects between his own temporal authority over their bodies and the spiritual authority harnessed by the clergy