Reduction to the pristine state

Already in the 1619 Dr chymicorum, Sennert presents the following example of his famous proof for the existence of atoms by means of a reduction to the pristine state (reductio in pristinum statum). The demonstration relies on nitric acid as a means of separating silver from an alloy of that metal and gold (often called electrum) ... 

One could certainly point to other early modem chymical writers who employed the reduction to the pristine state before Sennert, such as the Nivernais lawyer and chymist Gaston Duclo, or the writer on medical chymistry Angelus Sala. And indeed, these authors also fused earlier... 

The major early source for Boyle s experimental support of his corpuscular philosophy—and a highly important one throughout his career— was Sennert s experimental reduction to the pristine state. Like Sennert, Boyle would use this phenomenon as direct evidence for the persistence of semipermanent corpuscles during mixmre. Still, if we... 

What we will find above all is that Boyle borrowed and adapted Sennert s use of the reduction to the pristine state and employed it in ways that Sennert himself had not dreamed of. There is, in fact, a considerable irony in this, since the German physician had viewed the reduction to the pristine state as the primary means of establishing the reality of semipermanent substances equipped with their own substantial forms. As we will see, Boyle ultimately used the same reversible reactions and others to demonstrate that the substantial form was an unnecessary assumption and hence an entity to be discarded. Nonetheless, he shared Sennert s belief that the reduction to the pristine state provided the surest evidence of material particles that could resist the assaults of powerful analytical agents and therefore supplied an empirical basis for the claim that matter was made up of corpuscles that did not, in the ordinary course of nature, lose their identity. 

There is one highly significant difference between the two accounts, however. In the Atomicall Philosophy, Boyle has no desire to attack the scholastic theory of resolution to the four elements or the prime matter, as Sennert had done. What had provided Sennert with compelling evidence against the mixture theories of the Thomists and Averroists had become, in Boyle s hands, a bald affirmation of atomism. Having appropriated the groundwork, Boyle could afford to dispense with the superstructure. Nonetheless, in The Sceptical Chymist and The Ori ne of Formes and Qualities, Boyle would reintegrate a Sennertian attack on scholastic mixture theory into his discussion of the reduction to the pristine state. 

It is clear, then, that Boyle himself considered only the examples at the beginning of AtomicallPhilosophy to argue directly for the existence of atoms. And here only the chymical reductions to the pristine state provide experimental evidence for the claim that there are Atomes, since only these examples argue for the semipermanence of the material corpuscles. It is precisely this semipermanence that makes them atomic as opposed to being just any bits of matter. The second and third sections, to reiterate, argue about the properties of corpuscles that are now assumed to be atomic on the basis of the first argument. Such properties include, above all, the facts that atoms are very small and that they steam out of other bodies. 

Boyle s Use of Chymical Corpuscles and the Reduction to the Pristine State to Demonstrate the Mechanical Origin of Qualities... 

To summarize, then, we have shown that Boyle relied on Sennert s reductions to the pristine state in two quite different, though related, ways. First, the Sennertian examples of metals simply dissolved in acids and then reduced or metals combined with other substances and then restored to their former state by reduction, provided Boyle with the necessary evidence to make the claim that minima of their own genus ... 

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