The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle.

  • Robert Boyle
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    not to think the answering such trifles worth the loss of it. And now having said thus much for Carneades, I hope the reader will give me leave to say something for myself. And first, if some morose readers shall find fault with my having made the interlocutors upon occasion comple- ment with one another, and that I have almost all along written these dialogues in a style more fashionable than that of mere scholars is wont to be, I hope I shall be excused by them that shall consider, that to keep a due decorum in the discourses it was fit that in a book written by a gentleman, and wherein only gentlemen are intro- duced as speakers, the language should be more smooth and the expressions more civil than is usual in the more scholastic way of writing. And indeed, I am not sorry to have this opportunity of giving an example how to manage even disputes with civility; whence perhaps some readers will be assisted to discern a difference betwixt bluntness of speech and strength of reason, and find that a man may be a champion for truth without being an enemy to civility; and may confute an opinion without railing at them that hold it; to whom he that desires to convince and not to provoke them, must make some amends by his civility to their persons, for his severity to their mistakes; and must say as little else as he can to displease them, when he says that they are in an error. But perhaps other readers will be less apt to find fault with the civility of my disputants than the chymists will be, upon the reading of some passages of the following dialogue, to accuse Carneades of asperity. But if I have made my sceptic sometimes speak slightingly of the opinions he opposes, I hope it will not be found that I have done any more than became the part he was to act of an opponent: especially if what I have made him say be com- pared with what the prince of the Romane orators himself makes both great persons and friends say of one another’s opinions, in his excellent dialogues, De Natura Deorum: and I shall scarce be suspected of partiality in the case, by them that take notice that there is full as much (if not far more) liberty of slighting their adversaries tenets
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