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Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720

to Epicurus’s perdurable atom. As my reference to alchemy may already intimate, a difficulty arises over the course of the book’s second half. This is the fact that Gorman’s atom stops resembling Lucretius’s indivisible particle and seems often to possess the attributes of the more complexly qualified particles known in the history of chymistry as corpuscles. Gorman warns that she does not aim to “conduct a continuist study of the history of ‘atoms’ in seventeenth-century literature” (p. 32); but a perplexing opacity, of which the scare-quoted “atoms” is a harbinger, concerns this atom’s relation to early modern chymical science. Chymists like Daniel Sennert and Robert Boyle employ a welter of words, including “atom,” for more or less stable micromaterial units, but many contemporary scholars underscore these units’ difference from Epicurean indivisibles with the word “corpuscle.” Throughout her book, however, Gorman refers to her putative indivisibles indifferently as atoms or corpuscles. She alludes to the historians of science Antonio Clericuzio andWilliam R. Newman, among others, but her nomenclature does not reflect their major intervention: that the corpuscle of early modern experimental chymistry diverges from the Epicurean atom because it is not absolutely but contingently and experimentally indivisible. By calling Lucretian atoms corpuscles and vice-versa, Gorman elides the long experimental genealogy of a particle that is not indivisible in the classical sense even as, over the course of her study, Gorman’s literary atom becomes protean, complexly composed, and chymically reactive. Gorman powerfully elucidates the poetics of a seventeenth-century particle whose world-making capacities may owe as much to early modern chymistry as they do to Epicurean materialism.