Robert Boyle (1627-1691) once opined that,
'It is highly dishonourable for a Reasonable Soul to live in so Divinely built a Mansion as the Body she* resides in, altogether unacquainted with the exquisite Structure of it.'
Various dates for the quotation have been cited. It is not the dating but the sentiment that matters. Where found quoted, it is an encouragement to find out what we are made of. How is it, Boyle in effect asks, that people can go through life without finding out about their very substance and how it is organised? In a world where people are seemingly so 'health conscious,' one might have expected much more desire to find out.
Indeed, Boyle’s sentiments were independently echoed by the British physiologist A.V. Hill (1886-1977) in the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, ‘Biology in Education and Human Life,’ given at Newnham College, Cambridge, on Nov. 22, 1930.
(This lecture is available online at: Nature 127, 19-26 (3 January 1931) | doi:10.1038/127019a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/127019a0)
Following that lecture and its publication, Hill wrote to Nature the following brief letter:
Biology in Education and Human Life
In my Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (NATURE, Jan. 3, 1931) I protested that “those should be regarded as lacking education who are altogether ignorant of the nature of living things” (p. 21). Mr. A. D. Ritchie has directed my attention to a sentence of Robert Boyle’s, who about two and a half centuries ago, in much more beautiful words than mine, urged similarly that it is “highly dishonourable for a reasonable soul to live in so divinely built a mansion as the body she resides in altogether unacquainted with the exquisite structure of it”.
(This is also available online at: Nature 127, 237-237 (14 February 1931) | doi:10.1038/127237c0 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v127/n3198/abs/127237c0.html)
* NB Boyle refers to his soul as 'she.' This is because the Greek word for soul, ψυχή (pronounced 'psoo-kay'—and from which we get 'psyche'), is linguistically a first declension noun with feminine gender (not ‘female sex'—even though the terms 'gender' and 'sex' are nowadays often used interchangeably).
