Matter theory and natural philosophy

In Chapter 5 we saw that Bacon's account of method is closely tied to his advocacy of matter theory as the foundational natural-philosophical discipline. His natural-philosophical interests range across what we might now think of as cosmology, chemistry/alchemy, and physiology, and we can consider the means by which natural philosophy was pursued in these three areas in the seventeenth century in terms of two fundamental disciplines, mechanics and matter theory. The first deals with physical processes in terms of the motions undergone by bodies and the nature of the forces responsible for these motions. The second deals with how the physical behaviour of a body is determined by what it is made of, and in the seventeenth century it typically achieves this in a corpus-cularian fashion, by investigating how the nature and arrangement of the constituent parts of a body determine its behaviour. Traditionally, matter theory had been constitutive of natural philosophy, and it was generally assumed from the Presocratics up to the seventeenth century that the key to understanding physical processes lay in understanding the nature of matter and its behaviour, whether this understanding took the form of a theory about how matter is regulated by external immaterial principles, internal immaterial principles, or by the behaviour of the internal material constituents of macroscopic bodies.

Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, there was an attempt to draw on the traditional disciplines of practical mathematics – geometrical optics, positional astronomy, harmonics, and statics were the best developed – and to incorporate these into natural philosophy.