Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
From Corpuscles to Elements: Chemical
Ontologies from Van Helmont to Lavoisier
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino
10.1
Introduction
From a philosophical point of view, one of the more significant changes in chemical
ontology from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century is the shift from a
vitalistic conception of fundamental corpuscles, to a mechanistic atomism, to an
operational notion of chemical elements. This essay proposes to discuss some of the
key figures in this ontological shift, focusing on the ideas of van Helmont, Sennert,
Gassendi, Boyle, and Lavoisier. The essay will examine the relationship between
the work of late sixteenth century chymists and that of the mechanistic atomists to
illustrate the fact that the atomistic framework of the late seventeenth century was
intimately dependent upon the earlier work of vitalistic corpuscularian alchemists
and chymists.
1
Several mechanistic thinkers, in fact, deplored the revival of
atomism because they understood its relationship to the vitalistic chemical philos-
ophy. They worried that this phenomenon might present “an incipient danger to the
new mathematically oriented science. The favoring of innate powers within the
atoms, corpuscles, or seeds of substances came to distinguish this chemical
influence from the work of physically oriented natural philosophers later in the
century.”
2
As this paper will point out, although modern Epicurean atomism
rejected all vitalistic conceptions of matter, mechanistic natural philosophers such
as Boyle retained some key concepts of Paracelsian and Helmontian chemical
philosophy, while rejecting others. The mechanistic natural philosophers, thus,
were “neither
ancients
nor
moderns
but rather eclectics who consciously relied
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1
Debus (
1977
), pp. 545-547.
2
Ibid
.
