Curley on Locke and Boyle

Abstract

CURLEY, in a recent article,' has helped to correct long-standing misinterpretation of Locke's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. He is right to stress the importance of Boyle's influence on Locke; for an understanding of Locke it is vital to see that he accepts Boyle's corpuscular hypothesis and its essential feature, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as the best available scientific view of the world.2 I believe, however, that Curley has misinterpreted both Boyle and Locke on the nature of the power of a body to affect other bodies. Curley argues that Boyle says inconsistent things about powers and qualities, sometimes identifying a body's power to affect other bodies with its intrinsic qualities and sometimes taking the power to be something which might be acquired or lost without any change in the body's intrinsic qualities (p. 446). Curley attributes this alleged tendency of Boyle to waver between two ways of regarding powers to a genuine ambivalence about the concept of power. Boyle, he says, was drawn in different directions on the question: Do objects acquire new powers when the other objects necessary for the exercise of these powers come into existence or are discovered to exist? (p. 447). If I understand him, Curley sees this ambivalence as the result of Boyle's