"And I might add the confidence with which distracted persons do oftentimes, when they are awake, think, they see black fiends in places, where there is no black object in sight without them"
About this Quote
Boyle slips a dagger into the soft underbelly of certainty: the mind can hallucinate with the same swagger it uses to claim knowledge. The line is doing more than describing “distracted persons” seeing “black fiends.” It’s a tight little demonstration of his larger project as a philosopher-naturalist: separating what the world is from what the nervous system insists it is.
The phrase “when they are awake” is the tell. Boyle isn’t talking about dreams, the respectable dumpster where society throws irrational images. He’s targeting waking life, where testimony becomes evidence and conviction gets mistaken for truth. “The confidence with which” is almost a moral diagnosis; the danger isn’t merely error, it’s error plus certainty, the cocktail that makes superstition durable and contagious.
The “black fiends” aren’t random gothic decoration. In 17th-century England, demons were still part of the explanatory furniture, invoked in sermons, witch trials, and everyday accounts of misfortune. Boyle, a devout Christian but also a founding figure of experimental science, threads a careful needle: he can acknowledge spiritual language while relocating the immediate cause to perception gone rogue. Notice the precision: “where there is no black object in sight without them.” The external world is cleared of evidence; the spectacle is generated internally.
Subtextually, Boyle is coaching his readers toward an ethics of doubt. If the mind can project devils onto empty air, it can also project causes, motives, and “truths” onto nature. That’s why experiments matter: not to flatter reason, but to restrain it.
The phrase “when they are awake” is the tell. Boyle isn’t talking about dreams, the respectable dumpster where society throws irrational images. He’s targeting waking life, where testimony becomes evidence and conviction gets mistaken for truth. “The confidence with which” is almost a moral diagnosis; the danger isn’t merely error, it’s error plus certainty, the cocktail that makes superstition durable and contagious.
The “black fiends” aren’t random gothic decoration. In 17th-century England, demons were still part of the explanatory furniture, invoked in sermons, witch trials, and everyday accounts of misfortune. Boyle, a devout Christian but also a founding figure of experimental science, threads a careful needle: he can acknowledge spiritual language while relocating the immediate cause to perception gone rogue. Notice the precision: “where there is no black object in sight without them.” The external world is cleared of evidence; the spectacle is generated internally.
Subtextually, Boyle is coaching his readers toward an ethics of doubt. If the mind can project devils onto empty air, it can also project causes, motives, and “truths” onto nature. That’s why experiments matter: not to flatter reason, but to restrain it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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