Crucial Experiments: Priestley and Lavoisier

Author(s): S. E. Toulmin
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1957), pp. 205-220
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY AND LAVOISIER

BY S. E. TOULMIN

Any one who begins to study the history of science at all critically
soon learns to distrust all second-hand statements, even those which
are most confidently and most often repeated. Lessons which have
long been learnt in other branches of history have, in the history of
science, yet to make their full effect felt, and meanwhile a mass of his-
torical and philosophical preconceptions stands in the way of knowl-
edge. Lately, it is true, we have begun to see something in the way
of a revolution in the subject, in which the University of Cambridge
is playing a distinguished part; 1 but one cannot afford to have any
illusions about the amount that remains to be done to disentangle the
issues in even the most familiar and discussed historical episodes.
Perhaps, indeed, it is the most discussed episodes which need the most
careful attention, since it is around them that the greatest accretion of
misconceptions has formed. So one need not apologize for raising
again the question, what was really in dispute between Priestley and
Lavoisier, and just how mortally the Phlogiston Theory was wounded
by Lavoisier's work.
In any case there are philosophical as well as historical motives for
disinterring this question. For one of the preconceptions which has
done most to cloud our understanding of the science, both of our own
and of earlier generations, is a logical one: the idea that a new theory
supersedes an old one as a result of a direct, hand-to-hand contest.
According to this doctrine, a new theory can prove its merits over an
old through a single, 'crucial' experiment, as a result of which the
old theory is left dead upon the field and the young contender, as in
Fraser's account of primitive societies, reigns in its place in the sacred
grove.
This picture of the progress of science has a certain appeal, both to
our logical sense of tidiness, and to our historical self-esteem. For it
would make the logical analysis of scientific theories a good deal
neater if their acceptance or rejection could, in appropriate circum-
stances, be justified by reference to a single experimental observation
-theoretical doctrines could then be comfortably assimilated to those
straightforward statements of fact which, we think, we understand so
much better. As a matter of history, too, we are happier if we can be-
lieve that the abandoned ideas of our predecessors were plain false, if
not ridiculous, and that our own ideas stand as firmly as could be
asked. So, looking back on the history of earlier science, we find our-
selves continually tempted to pick on this experiment or that, this ob-
1 This paper was originallydeliveredat a
meeting of the CambridgeUniversity
Philosophyof ScienceClub, 21 November,1955.
205

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206 s. E. TOULMIN

servation or the other, as a truly crucial one, in Francis Bacon's

original sense-as being the parting of the ways from which only two
roads lead, a true one leading up of course to us, and a false one lead-
ing back into the realm of error and superstition. Even the most
honored historians of science sometimes find this temptation too
strong for them, as those will know who have read Professor Sarton
on the subject of Aristotle and Plato.2
Many people realize nowadays how false, in fact and in logic, this
picture of the progress of science is. " The more we treat the theories
of our predecessors as myths, the more inclined we shall be to treat
our own theories as dogmas; " 3 the task is to get both sets of theories
into proper focus. But it will take a long time to adjust completely
the binoculars through which we survey the history of science in the
way in which this new understanding requires, and to correct the pro-
portion and the perspective in which all the chief steps in the develop-
ment of the sciences are presented. The aim of this paper is to add a
further item to the agenda, and to suggest some of the points which
will have to be covered in dealing with it.
I
Lavoisier's revolution in chemistry has commonly been presented,
like every other major advance in science, as a decisive one. It was
forced upon him, writers suggest, by experimental observations which
admit of only one interpretation, and which are fatal, in the eyes of
all but the perverse and the blind, to all previous theories and notably
to the phlogiston theory. The experiment which is most often pre-
sented as playing a crucial part is the famous experiment with the red
calx of mercury, in which Lavoisier first obtained the calx from mer-
cury by heating, and subsequently reversed the reaction, showing how
the volume of gas in a container attached to the vessel in which the
reaction took place first decreased by one-sixth as the calx formed, and
then returned to its original volume as the mercury appeared again on
reduction.4 There is no need to say how very striking this experiment
is if one sees it, and must also have been to Lavoisier himself. As we
watch the volume of gas changing, we find it hard to deny that here,
before our eyes, is an irresistible proof that the calx is a compound not
an element; and that it is converted into a metal not by imbibing
anything from outside, but by giving off the extra gas which we see in
Lavoisier's container, and whose loss from the calx the balance con-
firms. Any supporter of the phlogiston theory who saw this experi-
2 See, for instance,A History of Science,Vol. I (Harvard, 1953), ChaptersXVI
and XIX.
3 This way of putting the point I owe to Dr. J. B. Thorntonof the New South
Wales University of Technology.
4 Traite Elementairede Chimie
(Paris, 1789), Part I, ChapterIII.

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 207

ment, we feel, would have had to recognize its force. He would find
himself in a position like that of the Dutch explorers who first landed
in Western Australia and found black swans swimming on the river
near the place where the city of Perth now stands: for them it could
never again be possible in honesty to declare that whiteness was a uni-
versal characteristic of swans; and the Phlogistonian too, we think,
must concede the force of Lavoisier's empirical demonstrations and
abandon forever his long-held ideas. Dr. Holmyard, indeed, has even
made for Imperial Chemical Industries a film called The Discovery of
Oxygen in which this view of the matter is taken. On the screen we
see the mercury experiment re-enacted at the hands of a gentleman in
period costume-I say 'the hands' advisedly as we never see his face
-and the commentary implies that, after this, there ean no longer be
any question of preferring the phlogiston theory of calcination to
Lavoisier's explanation in terms of oxygen.
It comes as a momentary surprise to us to recall that this experi-
ment was in fact devised originally, not by Lavoisier, but by Joseph
Priestley, and that Priestley himself, though he lived for twenty more
years until 1804, was never reconciled to Lavoisier's new system of
chemistry. But the surprise does not last long, for the history of sci-
ence would be dull if it did not contain villains as well as heroes,
stupid men as well as geniuses, and we soon hit on the idea of turn-
ing Priestley into a kind of Polonius. This allows us the pleasure of
patronizing him and saying, 'Of course the poor fellow was too
wedded to the old ideas to be open to the manifest correctness of
Lavoisier's theory: ' we may even quote against him, as his biographer
T. E. Thorpe does, the warning he uttered himself:
We may take a maxim so strongly for grantedthat the plainest evidence of
sense will not entirely change, and often hardly modify, our persuasions;
and the more ingeniousa man is, the more effectuallyhe is entangledin his
errors, his ingenuity only helping him to deceive himself by evading the
force of truth.5
Yet is it likely that such a man as Priestley, whose distinguished con-
tributions to chemistry nobody can deny, could ever have been blind
to the force of a crucial experiment in this field, if a genuinely crucial
experiment were possible?
In point of fact, Priestley was well aware of what Lavoisier had
been doing, and saw clearly what the implications of this work might
be. Writing in 1783 about the new oxygen theory, he says: " The
arguments in favour of this opinion, especially those which are drawn
from the experiment of Mr. Lavoisier made on mercury, are so speci-
ous, that I own I was myself much inclined to adopt them." 6 Why
5T. E. Thorpe, Joseph Priestley (London& New York, 1906), 216.
6Priestley, "Experiments relating to Phlogiston,"Phil. Trans. Vol. 73 (1783),
400.

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208 S. E. TOULMIN

then did he not adopt them?, we must surely ask. The answer to this
question usually implied is, baldly, that he was an old fogey, that one
cannot expect an old dog to learn new tricks. The fact of the matter
is quite otherwise. It is that he, Priestley, had hit upon another ex-
periment which, from the point of view of a Phlogistonian, supported
his theory even more strongly than did the mercury experiment sup-
port Lavoisier's. What this experiment was, he proceeds to tell us in
the paper of 1783, from which an extract is given below. The conclu-
sion he drew from the experiment he had already reported in a letter
to Franklin in Paris in the previous year: " In their usual state calces
of metals [i.e. earthy substances of the sort we should now classify as
'metallic oxides'] do not contain air [gas], but that may be expelled
by heat, and after this I reduce them to a perfect metallic state by
nothing but inflammable air [hydrogen] which they imbibe in toto
without any decomposition." 7 Priestley's experiment had convinced
him that under suitable circumstances one could 'see' phlogiston in
the form of hydrogen being imbibed by a calx to form a metal even
more vividly than Lavoisier's work had convinced him of the opposite.
Before we look at the experiment, one logical question requires to
be underlined. There is no denying that Lavoisier's experiments are
extremely suggestive, and Priestley allowed this, for in calling them
" specious " he really conceded more than in the twentieth century he
appears to-the word 'specious' having come down in the world in
the last 150 years. But if they had been not only convincing but
logically compelling, as a truly crucial experiment should be, there the
matter would have ended. However many more white swans the
Dutch explorers might have seen on their return from the trip to
Australia they could never reinstate the generalization about the
whiteness of swans once a single black one had crossed their path; and
if Lavoisier had really hit on a logically-crucial demonstration, it
should not have been possible to reinstate the phlogiston theory
either. Yet Priestley went off and did more experiments, and pro-
fessed to find them convincing enough to outweigh Lavoisier's dis-
coveries. Evidently these discoveries did not seem to be crucial from
the point of view which Priestley adopted: it is our business to ask,
how this can be.
Priestley's counter-demonstration is nicely contrived and, if re-
ported in his own terms, looks extremely striking. "I thought," he
says, " that throwing the focus of a burning lens upon a quantity of
minium [i.e. the calx of lead, or in modern terms lead oxide, Pb304],
surrounded with inflammable air, .. .might bring me near my object;
and on making the experiment it immediately answered far beyond
my expectation."
7 Priestley to Franklin,24th June, 1782: reprintedin
Thorpe,op. cit., 99-100.

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 209

For this purpose, [he goes on] I put upon a piece of a broken crucible
(which could yield no air) a quantity of minium, out of which all air had
been extracted; and placing it upon a convenient stand, introduced it into a
large receiver, filled with inflammable air, confined by water. As soon as
the minium was dry, by means of the heat thrown upon it, I observed that
it became black, and then ran in the form of perfect lead, at the same time
that the air diminished at a great rate, the water ascending within the re-
ceiver. I viewed this process with the most eager and pleasing expectation
of the result,8 having at that time no fixed opinion on the subject; and there-
fore I could not tell, except by actual trial, whether the air was decomposing
in the process, so that some other kind of air would be left, or whether it
would be absorbed in toto. The former I thought the more probable, as if
there was any such thing as phlogiston, inflammable air, I imagined, con-
sisted of it, and something else. However, I was then satisfied that it would
be in my power to determine, in a very satisfactory manner, whether the
phlogiston in inflammable air had any base or not [i.e. whether hydrogen
gas was composed of phlogiston in combination with something else, or of
phlogiston alone], and if it had, what that base was. For seeing the metal
to be actually revived and that in a considerable quantity, at the same time
that the air was diminished, I could not doubt but that the calx was actually
9
imbibing something from the air; and from its effects in making the calx
into metal, it could be no other than that to which chemists had unani-
mously given the name of phlogiston.
Before this first experiment was concluded, I perceived, that if the
phlogiston in inflammable air had any base, it must be very inconsiderable:
for the process went on till there was no more room to operate without en-
dangering the receiver; and examining, with much anxiety, the air that re-
mained, I found that it could not be distinguished from that in which I be-
gan the experiment, which was air extracted from iron by oil of vitriol [i.e.
the gas released by the action of sulphuric acid on iron]. I was therefore
pretty well satisfied that this inflammable air could not contain any thing
besides phlogiston; for at that time I reduced about 45 ounce measures of
the air to five.
In order to ascertain a fact of so much importance with the greatest care,
I afterwards carefully expelled from a quantity of minium all the phlogiston,
and every thing else that could have assumed the form of air,10 by giving it
a red heat when mixed with spirit of nitre; and immediately using it in the
manner mentioned above, I reduced 101 ounce measures of inflammable air
to two.11
8 Priestley, of course,means 'curiosity': the word 'expectation' has shifted in
meaningas much as the word 'specious.'
9 This is the crucialsentence.
10Dr. A. R. Hall argued in discussionthat in this sentence Priestley begs the
whole question whetherminium contains any 'air' in its composition. It is, how-
ever, hard to decide whetherhe is here trying to decomposethe miniumor only to
free it of adsorbedair, as we should now say. Would the distinctionbetween ad-
sorption and chemical combinationeven have been entirely clear to him? This
point will be returnedto at the end of the paper.
11Phil. Trans.,Vol. 73 (1783), 400-402.

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210 S. E. TOULMIN

Minium combines with inflammable air to form lead. In our ter-

minology, lead oxide combines with hydrogen to form lead: that is his
conclusion, though by stating it in modern terms we prejudice the
question of the proper interpretation to be put upon the observation.
The calx imbibes the air to form the metal, says Priestley, and I can
show you this happening: the experiment which he describes is to
serve as a plain demonstration of this process. And there is one thing
about the experiment which makes it, if anything, six times as con-
vincing as Lavoisier's. When oxidizing mercury in a closed container
of common air Lavoisier reduced the volume of air in the container by
no more than one-sixth, whereas in Priestley's demonstration, not
one-sixth only, but all the gas disappears in the reaction. So even if
we can account for Priestley's results in terms of our modern theories,
there is at any rate no denying their apparent force.
II
What is one to say, then, about Priestley's minium experiment?
It is important not to be in a hurry at this point, for there are two
different questions to which the experiment directs our attention, and
these we must distinguish. First, there is the chemical question, what
explanation we should nowadays wish to give of the phenomenon
Priestley observed; and, secondly, there is the further, philosophical
or logical question, what sort of criteria we employ when we decide to
back our modern interpretation of the result in preference to that put
forward by Priestley.
As to the first question, we are no doubt in a position to point out
one flaw in Priestley's account. The experiment was conducted in a
bell-jar of hydrogen enclosed over water. The effect of heating the
lead oxide was to release oxygen which combined with the hydrogen
in the jar to form further water. Owing to the trifling masses in-
volved this evolution of water escaped Priestley's attention so that,
where we should write as the equation of the reaction
Pb304 +4 H2-> 3 Pb + 4 H20,
he takes the equation to be
Min+H->Pb,
hydrogen being tentatively identified with phlogiston. If only (we
are tempted to conclude) he had spotted the fact that water was be-
ing evolved in the reaction and was mingling with the water in the
trough, he would have been forced to recognize the untenability of his
explanation.
This last remark, however, begs the answer to the second of our
questions; for it implies that, when all the ingredients in a chemical
reaction have been spotted, only one interpretation of the process is

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 211

open to us, and that one our own. So we must return to the history
of Priestley's enquiries, and observe his next steps. Looking up his
next paper in the Philosophical Transactions, published two years
later in 1785, we find him disowning his tentative identification of
hydrogen with phlogiston, but otherwise maintaining his theoretical
views.12 He does this, although he has in the meantime recognized
the fact that in his minium experiment water was produced which he
had at first failed to distinguish from the water in the trough. He re-
peats his experiment with iron, copper and mercury calx in inflam-
mable air, but this time encloses the gas in the jar over mercury
instead of water. On heating the calx, he finds the same result as
before: " [The metal] began to revive, the inflammable air rapidly
disappeared, and water was formed on the sides of the vessel in which
the experiment was made." This, Priestley concludes, "seemed to
afford a sufficient proof that [a metal] contains phlogiston, and that
it is not revived by the mere expulsion of dephlogisticated air [i.e.
oxygen], as M. Lavoisier supposes." 13
Once more we are obliged to exercise our historical imaginations.
At first we shall be tempted to complain at Priestley's continued fail-
ure to accept the modern view of this reaction; and, losing patience
with the man, we may begin to look for non-rational explanations of
his conservatism. It is important, therefore, to face directly the
logical issue here raised, and to consider whether Priestley should
really have been forced by his observations to reach the conclusions
which we accept as being so obvious.
Priestley, one must notice, regards the water evolved in the reac-
tion as a by-product: the principal phenomenon, he still declares, is
the union of the calx with phlogiston to form metal. He is, of course,
forced to sophisticate his explanation in order to make it still fit.
Whereas, before this experiment, he had hardly thought to question
the purity of the calces employed, he now introduces a further dis-
tinction. Common calces, such as the scales of iron he had used in
this new experiment, are liable to contain a certain amount of water,
which serves as-it-were as water of crystallization: only when this is
driven off do we obtain the " pure earth of iron," which is now to be
regarded as the true elementary substance. To quote the 1785 paper:
When iron is melted in dephlogisticatedair, we may suppose that, though
part of its phlogiston escapes, to enter into the compositionof the small
quantity of fixed air [i.e. carbondioxide] which is then procured,yet enough
remainsto form water with the addition of dephlogisticatedair which it has
imbibed,so that this calx of iron consists of the intimate union of the pure
earth of iron and of water; and thereforewhen the same calx, thus saturated
12Priestley, " Experimentsand ObservationsRelating to Air and
Water,"Phil.
Trans.,Vol. 75 (1785), 279-309. 13Ibid., 304.

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212 S. E. TOULMIN

with water, is exposedto heat in inflammableair, this air enters into it, de-
stroys the attraction betweenthe water and the earth, and revives the iron,
while the water is expelledin its properform.14
Furthermore, whereas in 1783 he had been inclined to identify
hydrogen with phlogiston, allowing at most that his 'inflammable air'
might contain caloric as well as phlogiston, now in 1785 he wishes to
correct himself, and regards hydrogen as a union of phlogiston and
water. The water evolved in the reaction, he declares, comes partly
from the scales and partly from the hydrogen. In symbols:
Scales + H- Pb + W
or Ei.W + Ph.W -Pb + W
One might at this point go off down a curious side-alley, and ask
how this new point of view ties up with our own views about the con-
stitution of water. If phlogiston is minus-oxygen, then the statement
that hydrogen is composed of water plus phlogiston comes remarkably
close to our own view that water consists of hydrogen plus oxygen.
The crucial question would now become what grounds we should re-
quire, and in fact have, for saying that hydrogen is a 'constituent' of
water, rather than saying vice versa that water is a 'constituent' of
hydrogen.
Leaving this aside, we must acknowledge that Priestley's inter-
pretation of his experiment is at least consistent. Whatever grounds
we have for preferring our own, Lavoisierian explanations (and I
would not dream of disputing the fact that they are vastly preferable
to Priestley's) the original mercury experiment is by no means the
crucial or the uniquely-vivid one it at first seemed. Priestley's
minium experiment was, if anything, more impressive, so that even
after he had spotted the tell-tale water drops, the original conviction
produced by the first discovery still remained. Where we nowadays
suppose that we can 'see' oxygen being evolved from heated mercury
calx, Priestley was equally convinced that he could 'see' hydrogen
being imbibed by heated lead or iron calx. The same compelling im-
pression of seeing a chemical formula verified before one's eyes, which
was so happily suggestive to Lavoisier, was equally misleading to
Priestley. And from this it follows, if nothing else does, that a telling
demonstration of a chemical formula is no guarantee of its correctness.
Thorpe describes Priestley's paper of 1783 in the words, "A series of
experiments faultless as to execution but utterly fallacious as to inter-
15 If the
pretation." popular doctrine of Crucial Experiments were
correct, this fallaciousness must appear in the form of positive incon-
sistencies, indeed of self-contradictions. But these are not in evi-
dence, for the issue is one of another kind.
14Phil. Trans. (1785), 299-300; and cf. 308n.
15 Thorpe, op. cit., 215.

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 213

III
In the secondhalf of this paper I shall discusssome generallessons
to be drawnfrom this particularhistoricalepisode. But before doing
this it may be worth asking why historians of chemistry so rarely
mention these particularexperimentsof Priestley's. Seeing the great
importancehe himself attached to them, this failure seems at least
odd; and when I myself first came across Priestley's papers about
them it seemed natural to put a worse interpretationon it. By neg-
lecting to set out the facts of the case and to enquire why Priestley
should have thought these experiments so important, had not his-
toriansbeen showinga wilful lack of sympathy and a deliberateblind-
ness to the real issues involved? Some of them, I still think, ignore
these papers simply because they find it convenient to do so: being
convincedof the superiorityof Lavoisier'sviews, they are preparedto
accept the evidenceof the mercuryexperimentas crucial,and have no
patience with any contrary-lookingdemonstrations. But on further
investigation two small bibliographicalpoints come to light which
may do somethingto excusethem, and since these points illustratethe
pitfalls to which we amateursof the subject are exposed, it may be
worth mentioning them here.
The 1783paperfirst came into my hands by chance,unboundfrom
the rest of the Philosophical Transactionsfor that year."6 Later on,
when trying to find it again, I was at first unable to track it down.
The 1785papercame to light quickly,but that was clearlynot the one
required,and the allusions in it to the earlier paper were not readily
intelligible without that other paper being before one. One would
have thought that such a paper would have been easy to find: all one
need do, surely, was to thumb through the contents at the beginning
of each bound volume of the Philosophical Transactions, or alterna-
tively to look up the referenceto the paper in the classifiedcontents
of the standard abstracts of the Philosophical Transactions by Hut-
ton, Shaw and Pearson,publishedby Baldwin in 1809. Yet no refer-
ence to the crucialpaper,it appeared,was to be found in either place.
And this is in fact the case. The 1783 paper is in the second half of
the Phil. Trans. volume for that year, and is listed only in the con-
tents pages bound half way through the volume; while by some mis-
chance all referenceto the paperwas omitted from the classifiedlist of
papers on chemical philosophy at the beginning of volume XV of
Baldwin's abstracts,although it is included in the chronologicalcon-
tents and referredto in the body of the abstractson page 453.
So it is possiblethat some of Priestley'smoderncriticshave simply
missed seeing the 1783paper,and have concludedthat he never really
16It had been bought by Mr. G. Buchdahl for the Melbourne
University De-
partmentof History and Methods of Science,where I was then working.

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214 S. E. TOULMIN

faced the implicationsof Lavoisier'swork on mercuryjust because of

this. All the same, it has probably more often happened that the
existence of the paper has been recognized,but its importanceand
force overlooked.
IV
To return to our main problem: Lavoisier'smercury experiment
not only was not in the event the crucialexperimentit has often been
taken for but, in point of logic, could not have been crucial. Priestley
acceptedLavoisier'sdemonstrationbut interpretedit in a way which,
though to moderneyes incorrect,could neverthelessseem satisfactory
to him; and he could do so without any inconsistency. For the ad-
vance which chemistry requiredwhen Lavoisierbegan his work was
essentially a theoretical one, which might be suggested by a suffi-
ciently striking experimentbut could not be imposed on one by it.
Lavoisier'snew system of chemistry was intended all along, not so
much to reportnew chemicalfacts, as to introducea clearerand more
consistent set of chemicalideas,17and the greatestmerit of the system
lay in its providingjust that.
One point is particularlyworth underlining. Before Lavoisierset
out his ideas, the criteria for marking off chemical substances from
other sortsof things wereextremelyvague, and differentscientistswere
inclined to include in the list of substancessome or all of a wide range
of things which we would now exclude. Heat, fire, light, spirits (ani-
mal spirits and the human spirit as well as methylated spirits), airs,
principlesand properties,electric, caloricand magnetic fluids were all
acceptedby some chemists and rejectedby others as possible partici-
pants in the natural transactionsand transformationswhich it is the
business of the chemist to study. Phlogiston, which people think of
nowadays as the chief villain in the drama of eighteenth-century
chemistry,was in fact only one characteron the scene, and not such
an importantone at that. Dr. Helene Metzger,in her profoundanal-
yses of the chemistry of this period, has brought out the extent to
which the issue was confusedby the classificationof (e.g.) light as a
chemicalsubstancecapableof enteringinto combinationwith another
substanceand of affectingthereby such propertiesof the substanceas
its refractive index.l8 It was easy enough to cite some phenomena
which seemedto supportthe view that each one or other of these dif-
17
See, for instance, the remarksby Lavoisierin his preface to G. de Morveau
et al., Methodede NomenclatureChimique(Paris, 1787), 6-14: and also the preface
to the Traite Elementaireof 1789. Cf: Helene Metzger,La Philosophiede la Ma-
tiere chez Lavoisier (Paris, 1935).
18See, for instance,Metzger,Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave,et la Doctrine Chimique
(Paris, 1930), 77-81.

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 215

ferent things could be thought of as being a sort of substance. What

was lacking, however, was any clear criterionfor deciding when, for
purposesof chemicaltheory, it was profitableto classify them in this
way.
Correspondingly,there was great obscurity about the distinction
between chemical processes and physical ones: the more often that
light, for instance, was thought of as a substance,the more tendency
was there to treat optical phenomena as effects of combinationand
decomposition. Even Lavoisier himself construed the change from
solid to liquid as one involving the combination of base-substance
with caloric,19and converselyBoerhaavethought of oxidationand re-
duction as being no more than a physical change of state 20-which is
understandablein a generation which was aware of the chemical
equivalenceof diamondand graphite.
Lavoisier'smain complaint against the phlogiston theory, there-
fore, is not that it misrepresentsthe facts-though no doubt he would
have thought that to give an adequaterepresentationof the facts in
terms of the theory was scarcelypracticable. Rather he objects that
the centralnotions of the theory weretoo vague to be explanatory. In
terms of phlogistonone could explainnot too little, but too much: the
term was a conceptualconcertina,and scientists had tended to stretch
it further and further in accounting for wider and wider ranges of
phenomenauntil its effective explanatorypower had become gravely
attenuated. "Chemists " he wrote in his memorandum of 1783,21
"have made a vague principleof phlogiston which is not strictly de-
fined, and which in consequenceaccommodatesitself to every expla-
nation into which it is pressed. Sometimesthis principleis heavy and
sometimesit is not; sometimesit is free fire, and sometimesit is fire
combinedwith the earthy element; sometimes it passes through the
poresof vessels and sometimesthey are impenetrableto it. It explains
at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity,
colours and the absence of colours. It is a veritable Proteus which
changesits form every minute."
It is worth asking how we ourselves would have been inclined to
proceedin this situation. E. M. Forsterhas written a pleasing essay
in which he describes Voltaire's chemical experiments.22We are
shownVoltaireand Madamedu Chateletliving in the same castle and
composingin their respective laboratoriesessays which are to be en-
19Metzger, La Philosophie de la Matiere chez Lavoisier, 77-84, and Lavoisier,
Traite Elementaire, Part I, Chapters I, V, and IX.
20
Metzger, Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave, 277-8.
21 Quoted
by Thorpe, Essays on Historical Chemistry (London, 1902), 169.
"
22 E. M.
Forster, " Voltaire's Laboratory reprinted in Abinger Harvest (Lon-
don, 1936).

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216 S. E. TOULMIN

tered for a competition set by the Academy of Sciences. The subject

of the competition is The Nature and Properties of Fire, and Voltaire,
as E. M. Forster depicts him, is greatly puzzled by the inconsistent
results he has got in his experiments to determine the weight of fire.
Looking back, we are not surprised at his failure to obtain any con-
sistent results, and we may even be a trifle impatient with him. I
once asked a scientific friend what he would have said to Voltaire to
persuade him of the uselessness of his enquiries and got the reply, " I
should have told him to use his common sense." This answer would
have been all right, if Voltaire's common sense could have been the
common sense of the twentieth century; but on investigation one
finds that our present common sense enshrines a good deal of the con-
ceptual clarification introduced by Lavoisier himself.
One thing Lavoisier did, I take it, was to use the principle of the
conservation of mass as an axiom of chemistry: by appeal to this idea
one was to determine for a start what things could be accepted as be-
ing 'substances' in a chemical sense at all. Plenty of people had
enunciated the principle before, or used it by implication in the course
of their arguments. But the conclusions they came to were as often
as not of the sort that Lavoisier himself now wanted to reject. Boyle,
for instance, used the principle to establish the corporeal nature of
light, which he did by citing the increase in weight of a metal when
calcined-the very phenomenon Lavoisier cites as proving the exist-
ence of oxygen.23 In such cases, however, the weight of the intangible
ingredient was never measured directly: it was, indeed, said that this
could not always be done, and that one was unreasonable in demand-
ing that it should be. This was the attitude taken up by Watson, for
instance, when he likened phlogiston to magnetism and gravity, and so
rejected as meaningless the demand that it should be produced in iso-
lation from other substances and exposed to direct measurement.24 It
had been possible, accordingly, to pay lip service to the principle of
the conservation of mass without clearing up the confusion between
chemical and physical change, whereas Lavoisier introduced a syste-
matic criterion for distinguishing them. Henceforth we are to measure
directly the quantities of all the ingredients entering into a reac-
tion, and to accept as genuine substances only those things which
there is good reason to believe can be so measured: only substances
passing this test are to be admitted into the equations governing
23 Robert Boyle, " New Experimentsto Make Fire and Flame Stable and Ponder-
able," in Collected Works (London, 1744), Volume III, discussedby Metzger in
Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave,69-71.
24Richard Watson, "Of Fire, Sulphur and Phlogiston," in Chemical Essays,
Volume I (London, 1782); quoted by White in his book on the phlogistontheory
and by Dr. Hall in The ScientificRevolution. Watson'sbook ran throughseven edi-
tions in less than twenty years.

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 217

chemical reactions or taken into account when workingout the bal-

ance of the masses involved.
The success of this procedureis a matter of common knowledge:
so much so that we are in danger of thinking of its adoption as an
obvious move, when it was not. It was, in fact, a brilliant piece of
analytical simplification,which served the purposesof science admir-
ably throughout the nineteenth century, but has more recently had
to be abandoned.25For the moment, at any rate, its effect was to cut
the cackle of theoretical disputation. Watson's excuse for not pro-
ducing phlogiston in a bottle had to be rejected, and, since no satis-
factory independent way of establishing the quantity of phlogiston
entering into a reaction was produced,one was to proceedon the as-
sumptionthat " the whole doctrineof phlogistonhad been foundedon
mistake."26 Only by makingprecisein this way our criterionfor tell-
ing authentic substances from other things was it possible for
Lavoisierto workout a new, clear, and comprehensiveset of chemical
concepts,and this in fact is what the chemists of the 1780'sturned to
Lavoisierto provide. Being a true discipleof Condillac,he set himself
to improve chemical theory by means of improvementsin chemical
nomenclature,and his successthoughincompletewas dazzling. It was
incomplete,seeing that in Lavoisier'ssystem 'caloric' retaineda foot-
hold among the elementarysubstanceswhich it did not lose till half
a century later.27 It was dazzling,because,as so often happens when
great clarificationsare introduced into our ideas, chemists looking
back at their old speculationsafterwardsfrom the new point of view
came to wonderhow they could ever have thought differently. With-
out being clear about the nature of the change in their outlook, they
decidedthat the phlogistontheory had been, not just hopelesslymud-
dled, but simply false. And this is the story we have so often been
told.
25 The " nineteenth
century approximation" was built up on the distinctionbe-
tween mass and energy,each of which was supposedto be independentlyconserved.
A sharp distinctionbetween chemicaland physical processeswas only maintainable
for so long as this approximationheld good. Now, however,we know that in many
processesit is necessaryto allow for the inter-conversionof matter and energy, and
so to set up only a single mass-energybalanceequation.
26Priestley'sphrase: Phil. Trans. (1783), 399.
27 Even then the
eclipse was in part only temporary: the recognitionthat mass
and energy are equivalentled to a return,if not to the idea of heat as a fluid, at any
rate to the use of combinedmass-and-energybalanceequations,of which Lavoisier's
equation "2(H.Cal2) + O.Cal2- Water.Call+ free caloric" is an anticipation. Of
course,Lavoisierhad no conversionfactor for relatinghis calorimetermeasurements
of 'quantity of heat' with his balancemeasurementsof ' quantity of matter', such
as is providedby the expression"E = mc2; " but he could certainly claim that the
amount of caloricreleasedin a reactionwas observableand measurable,even if not
'ponderable.'

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218 S. E. TOULMIN

A crucial experimentor observationcan, however, be made only

when certain very strict conditions are fulfilled. What these are
shouldbe evident from a glance at the stock logic-bookexamplewhich
I referredto earlier in passing. The hypothesis that all swans are
white, and the contraryhypothesis that not all swans are white can
be decided between by a single observation,when the first authenti-
cated report of black swans reaches the world of science. But, as a
matter of logic, this is possibleonly as a result of the fact that the two
hypotheses can be stated in such a way as formallyto excludeone an-
other. Once they have been stated in the same terms, it becomes
clear what sort of observations entitle us to prefer the one to the
other, and the making of such observationsis crucial.
At the level of high theory, however, this can no longer be done.
Rival theories present us with rival sets of terms of concepts,and the
hypotheses we formulate within each theory can never directly col-
lide. Lavoisiercould not compel Priestley to agree that his demon-
stration with mercury settled the issue between their theories any
more than Priestley's experiments could compel Lavoisier, because
they could not even agree to characterizethe systems they were
studying in sufficientlysimilar ways.28 It was always open to either
of them to give an interpretation in his own terms of any experi-
mental results that turned up, even though in some cases Priestley's
explanationsdo begin to look (to us at any rate) somewhat strained.
The superiormerit of Lavoisier'stheory lay in this: that it gave clear
and economicalexplanationsinstead of confusedones, not that it gave
true instead of false ones. One might say indeed that the supreme
merit of the theory was that, in the new terms which it introduced,
the issues involved in the long-disputedproblemsof combustion,cal-
cination and fire could at last be stated clearly enough to be laid to
rest.
V
The logical moral illustratedby the dispute between Priestley and
Lavoisieris this: that over questionsof scientifictheory no single ex-
28 This is not to say that Priestley could not have been convinced. The points
about which he himself felt most embarrassmentare clear enough: cf. the passage
from the 1783 paper wherehe explainsthat becauseof the sublimationof the speci-
mens of calx on heating," I couldnot pretendto ascertainthe weight of inflammable
air in the calx, so as to prove that it had acquiredan addition of weight by being
metallized,which I often attempted. But were it possibleto procurea perfect calx,
no part of which should be sublimedor dispersed,I should not doubt but that the
quantity of inflammableair imbibed by it would sufficientlyadd to its weight."
Phil. Trans.,73: 408-9. Yet when he later discoveredthat a loss of weight actually
occurred,it was still possible for him to put this down to water leaving the calx.
(cf. Phil. Trans.,75: 284ff.)

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 CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS: PRIESTLEY, LAVOISIER 219

periment can-in the logician's sense of the term-be completely

' crucial.' We are often tempted to speak of theory A predictingevent
a and theory B predictingevent b, and of an experimentto determine
whether a or b happens as settling the issue between the two theories
for good and all. Yet this is in fact an abbreviatedmannerof speak-
ing and one which may gravely mislead us. For it is not theories
which make predictionsbut theorists. If ProfessorAlpha appeals to
theory A in supportof his predictionof a, he has to begin by charac-
terizing the situation with which he is concernedin such terms that
the theory A can be applied to it at all; and ProfessorBeta who sup-
ports theory B will normallydispute not so much the predictionas the
characterization. Priestley does not dispute the facts of Lavoisier's
experimentalfindings: what he disputes is their relevance, and his
faith that calces, being elementary,contain no oxygen in turn affects
his own choice of experiment. By baking the minium before begin-
ning his experimentso as to drive off "all the phlogiston and every
thing else that could have assumedthe form of air " he alreadyhelps
to determinein his own mind the elementarycharacterof the calx in
question, and so in part prejudgesthe relevance of the result he ob-
tains to the theoretical issue he is trying to settle.9 Just what any
experimentproves at the level of theory depends,accordingly,on the
interpretationwe agree to give it.
This is not to deny that in two other senses an experimentmay be
'crucial.' It may be historically crucial, if it sets off irreversible
changesin theory. In this sense, the mercuryexperimentwas indeed
crucial: once Lavoisier had heard from Priestley what happened if
one heated mercuryin a confinedspace, he hastened to repeat the ex-
periment and, under the stimulus of the result, the revolution in his
ideas went aheadrapidly. Again, an experimentcan be ' crucial' rela-
tive to a given set of theoreticalassumptions. Foucault'sexperiment
to measure the velocity of light in a transparent substance much
denser than air (1850) was regardedat the time as a crucial experi-
ment to decide between the corpuscularand wave theories of light;
but it could serve this purposeonly so long as physicists shareda cer-
tain commonbody of theoreticalideas. Once these ideas were called
in question the corpusculartheory could be revived, without Fou-
cault's experimentalresults ever being disputed.
Looking back from the twentieth century as we do, it is natural
for us to think of Lavoisier'smercury experiment as crucial, for we
have learned to regard the phenomenon he studied as a paradigm
example, and as the simplest sort of chemical reaction. To have
Lavoisier'sinterpretationof this phenomenonquestionedis, we feel,
to have all chemistryquestioned,and at this we rebel. But the task
29 On this point cf. note 10 above.

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220 S. E. TOULMIN

of the philosophicalhistorianof science is to probe the foundationof

just these things and, if I have done so in this paper,it is not with any
desire to re-instate Priestley's theories,but in orderto make it rather
clearerwhy we rightly preferLavoisier's. In fact, Lavoisier'sachieve-
ment appearsthe greaterwhen we see it for what it was. If we think
of him now as 'the father of modernchemistry,'it is not because by
good fortune he was the first to hit on an experimentwhich obliged
one to accept the new point of view: it is ratherbecauseof the vision
with which he followed out the possibilitiesonly suggestedto him by
this experiment,and the clear-headednesswith which he devised the
first really comprehensiveand fruitful set of chemical concepts and
categories.
To return,in conclusion,to the questionof simplicity: the dispute
between Priestley and Lavoisier has important resemblancesto the
dispute between the Aristotelian and Galilean systems of dynamics.
There, too, one can point to phenomena (such as the flight of projec-
tiles and the motion of the planets) which seem to us, lookingback,to
be standing proofs of the correctnessof the new outlook. The ex-
planationsgiven by the older thinkersseem to us particularlyunsatis-
factory just because they set about explainingthe simplest, most na-
tural happeningsin terms of more complicatedones. What good does
it do, we ask, to comparethe motion of the planets through the sky
with the motion of a horse and cart? A man will certainly end up
with odd ideas about the heavenly bodies if that is how he proceeds.
Yet to determinewhich phenomenain any scienceare to be treated as
'complex' and which as 'simple' is in fact one of the hardest prob-
lems of all, and one of the last to be resolved in any really teasing
theoretical dispute. We may find it puzzling that Priestley should
have wanted to explain away the results of Lavoisier'sinvestigation.
But Priestley in his turn found it strange that his contemporaries
were unwilling to see the truth when it was presented before them.
For him not the mercurybut the minium phenomenonwas the simple
paradigm:any contrary-pointingphenomenonmust be thought of as
a more complex affair. And it is only in the frameworkof one or
other of the rival theoriesthat one can really ask the questionwhether
Lavoisier'smercuryphenomenonor Priestley's minium phenomenon
was the simplerchemicalreaction. We must not answerthis question
for ourselves first, and then go on afterwardsto blame Priestley for
accepting the consequencesof answeringit differently. He could be
obliged to accept our answerto this question only if he had accepted
already the vital parts of Lavoisier'stheory, and this was just what
he never broughthimself to do.
University of Leeds.

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