Of Sticks and Stones

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.