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Book Review: Locke, Science, and Politics1 8 5(37). The regularities seen in nature derive not from forms but from matteritself, motion, and the laws of matter and motion. Intellectual intuitionor noesis supplemented by logical deductions from supposed noetic insightswill get us nowhere; empirical observation of particulars, aided by the inductivelogic of experiment—torturing nature to reveal her secrets, in Bacon’sphrase—will obtain the only knowledge of nature we can have, which turnsout to be enough for the project of mastery. We need to torture nature becausenature consists fundamentally of atoms; not only is an atomistic nature toocomplex to understand adequately by noetic apprehension of forms, butatoms themselves are too small to see. Both our minds and our senses areinadequate to understand nature, unaided by the method of torture. To theobvious question—Why are there atoms in the first place?—Bacon replies,simply, that’s the way it is; it is “one of the follies of the human mind to seekan explanation beyond this, a ‘why’” (42). One might as well ask a theologianwhy God exists. In any philosophic or theological system, there must be some“given.” For Bacon, atoms are as far back as we can get.Because matter is always in motion, so are forms. What we call kindsor species are the shapes in which atoms now manifest themselves. As inOckham, natural reality consists of two levels: ordinary or regular, mechanicalnature—“nature in its species and activities as we find them today”—and“metaphysical,” nature’s “fundamental and universal laws which constituteforms” (44). God has disappeared from the picture. We will know that weknow nature insofar as we can control it; this, not noesis and not divine revelation,is the new source of intellectual certainty for human beings, insofar aswe can reach certainty. Such a project will “require the labor of many hands,and many minds” (45)—hence the formation of the Royal Society in Englandin 1660, the institutionalization of the Baconian project.Locke’s friend Robert Boyle became a charter member of the Society,and remained one of its most distinguished. Aristotelianism does not—thenew scientists maintain that it cannot—tell us “how exactly…form exert[s]its influence” over matter (51). How does the form of the oak actually causethe acorn “to develop properly” (52)? Boyle defends atomism by claiming thatthe “corpuscles” or atoms can cause forms to exist because they differ in their“texture”—that is, in their size and shape. Form derives from the textureof the corpuscles that combine to make an object; “when an object changescolor, or becomes liquid, this is not the supervention of a new Aristotelianform, but merely a change in the body,” a rearrangement of its corpuscles.Crucially, the size and shapes of material corpuscles are not Aristotelian