MECHANISM, RESEMBLANCE AND SECONDARY QUALITIES

It is well known that Descartes viewed the deliverances of colour experience with suspicion. Less widely discussed is the bearing of this on Locke’s famous distinction between primary qualities, like shape, size and texture, and secondary qualities, like colour, taste and sound. To the near exclusion of all other seventeenth century mechanists, it is Boyle who dominates discussions of the background to Locke’s distinction. This is rather surprising. In the first place, Boyle’s “corpuscularian theory of matter ” is supposed to be neutral on the points of doctrine that differentiate broadly mechanistic theories of matter: being “a person of a reconciling disposition”, Boyle prefers to regard theories which explicate natural phenomena mechanistically by way of minute bodies, or corpuscles, as “one philosophy”.1 Acknowledging Boyle’s influence on Locke is therefore consistent with recognising the influence on Locke of corpuscularians other than Boyle. The influence of one corpuscularian in particular—Descartes—is particularly well-documented. During his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, for instance, Locke made detailed notes on the most complete statement of Descartes’s mechanistic science, The Principles of Philosophy.2 The experience was obviously beneficial, as in response to Edwar