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Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the leading figures in natural philosophy and in the field of scientific methodology in the period of transition from the Renaissance to the early modern era. As a lawyer, member of Parliament, and Queen's Counsel, Bacon wrote on questions of law, state and religion, as well as on contemporary politics; but he also published texts in which he speculated on possible conceptions of society, and he pondered questions of ethics ( Essays ) even in his works on natural philosophy ( The Advancement of Learning ).

After his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge and Gray's Inn, London, Bacon did not take up a post at a university, but instead tried to start a political career. Although his efforts were not crowned with success during the era of Queen Elizabeth, under James I he rose to the highest political office, Lord Chancellor. Bacon's international fame and influence spread during his last years, when he was able to focus his energies exclusively on his philosophical work, and even more so after his death, when English scientists of the Boyle circle ( Invisible College ) took up his idea of a cooperative research institution in their plans and preparations for establishing the Royal Society.

To the present day Bacon is well known for his treatises on empiricist natural philosophy ( The Advancement of Learning , Novum Organum Scientiarum ) and for his doctrine of the idols, which he put forward in his early writings, as well as for the idea of a modern research institute, which he described in Nova Atlantis .

1. Biography

2. natural philosophy: struggle with tradition, 3.1 the idols, 3.2 system of sciences, 3.3 matter theory and cosmology, 4. scientific method: the project of the instauratio magna, 5. scientific method: novum organum and the theory of induction, 6. science and social philosophy, 7. the ethical dimension in bacon's thought, major philosophical works by bacon, selected works on bacon, other secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Francis Bacon was born January, 22, 1561, the second child of Sir Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper of the Seal) and his second wife Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI and one of the leading humanists of the age. Lady Anne was highly erudite: she not only had a perfect command of Greek and Latin, but was also competent in Italian and French. Together with his older brother Anthony, Francis grew up in a context determined by political power, humanist learning, and Calvinist zeal. His father had built a new house in Gorhambury in the 1560s, and Bacon was educated there for some seven years; later, along with Anthony, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge (1573–5), where he sharply criticized the scholastic methods of academic training. Their tutor was John Whitgift, in later life Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift provided the brothers with classical texts for their studies: Cicero, Demosthenes, Hermogenes, Livy, Sallust, and Xenophon (Peltonen 2007). Bacon began his studies at Gray's Inn in London in 1576; but from 1577 to 1578 he accompanied Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador, on his mission in Paris. According to Peltonen (2007):

During his stay in France, perhaps in autumn 1577, Bacon once visited England as the bearer of diplomatic post, delivering letters to Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester, and to the Queen herself.

When his father died in 1579, he returned to England. Bacon's small inheritance brought him into financial difficulties and since his maternal uncle, Lord Burghley, did not help him to get a lucrative post as a government official, he embarked on a political career in the House of Commons, after resuming his studies in Gray's Inn. In 1581 he entered the Commons as a member for Cornwall, and he remained a Member of Parliament for thirty-seven years. He was admitted to the bar in 1582 and in 1587 was elected as a reader at Gray's Inn. His involvement in high politics started in 1584, when he wrote his first political memorandum, A Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth . Right from the beginning of his adult life, Bacon aimed at a revision of natural philosophy and—following his father's example—also tried to secure high political office. Very early on he tried to formulate outlines for a new system of the sciences, emphasizing empirical methods and laying the foundation for an applied science ( scientia operativa ). This twofold task, however, proved to be too ambitious to be realized in practice. Bacon's ideas concerning a reform of the sciences did not meet with much sympathy from Queen Elizabeth or from Lord Burghley. Small expectations on this front led him to become a successful lawyer and Parliamentarian. From 1584 to 1617 (the year he entered the House of Lords) he was an active member in the Commons. Supported by Walsingham's patronage, Bacon played a role in the investigation of English Catholics and argued for stern action against Mary Queen of Scots. He served on many committees, including one in 1588 which examined recusants; later he was a member of a committee to revise the laws of England. He was involved in the political aspects of religious questions, especially concerning the conflict between the Church of England and nonconformists. In a tract of 1591, he tried to steer a middle course in religious politics; but one year later he was commissioned to write against the Jesuit Robert Parson (Jardine and Stewart 1999, p. 125), who had attacked English sovereignty.

From the late 1580s onwards, Bacon turned to the Earl of Essex as his patron. During this phase of his life, he particularly devoted himself to natural philosophy. He clearly expressed his position in a famous letter of 1592 to his uncle, Lord Burghley:

I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own; which is the thing I greatly affect. (Bacon 1857–74, VIII, 109)

In 1593 Bacon fell out favor with the queen on account of his refusal to comply with her request for funds from Parliament. Although he did not vote against granting three subsidies to the government, he demanded that these should be paid over a period six, rather than three, years. This led Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Walter Raleigh to argue against him in Parliament. Bacon's patron, the Earl of Essex, for whom he had already served as a close political advisor and informer, was not able to mollify the queen's anger over the subsidies; and all Essex's attempts to secure a high post for Bacon (attorney-general or solicitor-general) came to nothing. Nevertheless, the queen valued Bacon's competence as a man of law. He was involved in the treason trial of Roderigo Lopez and later on in the proceedings against the Earl of Essex. In his contribution to the Gesta Grayorum (the traditional Christmas revels held in Gray's Inn) of 1594–5, Bacon had emphasized the necessity of scientific improvement and progress. Since he failed to secure for himself a position in the government, he considered the possibility of giving up politics and concentrating on natural philosophy. It is no wonder, then, that Bacon engaged in many scholarly and literary pursuits in the 1590s. His letters of advice to the Earl of Rutland and to the Earl of Essex should be mentioned in this context. The advice given to Essex is of particular importance because Bacon recommended that he should behave in a careful and intelligent manner in public, above all abstaining from aspiring to military commands. Bacon also worked in this phase of his career for the reform of English law. In 1597 his first book was published, the seminal version of his Essays , which contained only ten pieces (Klein 2004b). His financial situation was still insecure; but his plan to marry the rich widow Lady Hatton failed because she was successfully courted by Sir Edward Coke. In 1598 Bacon was unable to sell his reversion of the Star Chamber clerkship, so that he was imprisoned for a short time on account of his debts. His parliamentary activities in 1597–98, mainly involving committee work, were impressive; but when the Earl of Essex in 1599 took command of the attempt to pacify the Irish rebels, Bacon's hopes sank. Essex did not solve the Irish question, returned to court and fell from grace, as Bacon had anticipated he would. He therefore lost a valuable patron and spokesman for his projects. Bacon tried to reconcile the queen and Essex; but when the earl rebelled against the crown in 1601, he could do nothing to help him. The queen ordered Bacon to participate in the treason trial against Essex. In 1601 Bacon sat in Elizabeth's last parliament, playing an extremely active role.

Bacon looked forward to the next reign and tried to get in contact with James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth's successor. During James' reign Bacon rose to power. He was knighted in 1603 and was created a learned counsel a year later. He took up the political issues of the union of England and Scotland, and he worked on a conception of religious toleration, endorsing a middle course in dealing with Catholics and nonconformists. Bacon married Alice Barnhem, the young daughter of a rich London alderman in 1606. One year later he was appointed Solicitor General. He was also dealing with theories of the state and developed the idea, in accordance with Machiavelli, of a politically active and armed citizenry. In 1608 Bacon became clerk of the Star Chamber; and at this time, he made a review of his life, jotting down his achievements and failures. Though he still was not free from money problems, his career progressed step by step. In the period from 1603 to 1613 Bacon was not only busy within English politics. He also created the foundations of his philosophical work by writing seminal treatises which prepared the path for the Novum Organum and for the Instauratio Magna . In 1613 he became Attorney General and began the rise to the peak of his political career: he became a member of the Privy Council in 1616, was appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal the following year—thus achieving the same position as his father—and was granted the title of Lord Chancellor and created Baron of Verulam in 1618. In 1621, however, Bacon, after being created Viscount of St Alban, was impeached by Parliament for corruption. He fell victim to an intrigue in Parliament because he had argued against the abuse of monopolies, indirectly attacking his friend, the Duke of Buckingham, who was the king's favorite. In order to protect Buckingham, the king sacrificed Bacon, whose enemies had accused him of taking bribes in connection with his position as a judge. Bacon saw no way out for himself and declared himself guilty. His fall was contrived by his adversaries in Parliament and by the court faction, for which he was a scapegoat to save the Duke of Buckingham not only from public anger but also from open aggression (Mathews 1996). He lost all his offices and his seat in Parliament, but retained his titles and his personal property. Bacon devoted the last five years of his life—the famous quinquennium—entirely to his philosophical work. He tried to go ahead with his huge project, the Instauratio Magna Scientiarum ; but the task was too big for him to accomplish in only a few years. Though he was able to finish important parts of the Instauratio , the proverb, often quoted in his works, proved true for himself: Vita brevis, ars longa . He died in April 1626 of pneumonia after experiments with ice.

Bacon's struggle to overcome intellectual blockades and the dogmatic slumber of his age and of earlier periods had to be fought on many fronts. Very early on he criticized not only Plato, Aristotle and the Aristotelians, but also humanists and Renaissance scholars such as Paracelsus and Bernardino Telesio.

Although Aristotle provided specific axioms for every scientific discipline, what Bacon found lacking in the Greek philosopher's work was a master principle or general theory of science, which could be applied to all branches of natural history and philosophy (Klein 2003a). For Bacon, Aristotle's cosmology, as well as his theory of science, had become obsolete and consequently so too had many of the medieval thinkers who followed his lead. He does not repudiate Aristotle completely, but he opposes the humanistic interpretation of him, with its emphasis on syllogism and dialectics ( scientia operativa versus textual hermeneutics) and the metaphysical treatment of natural philosophy in favor of natural forms (or nature's effects as structured modes of action, not artifacts), the stages of which correspond—in the shape of a pyramid of knowledge—to the structural order of nature itself.

If any ‘modern’ Aristotelians came near to Bacon, it was the Venetian or Paduan branch, represented by Jacopo Zabarella. On the other hand, Bacon criticized Telesio, who—in his view—had only halfway succeeded in overcoming Aristotle's deficiencies. Although we find the debate with Telesio in an unpublished text of his middle period ( De Principiis atque Originibus, secundum fabulas Cupidinis et Coelum or On Principles and Origins According to the Fables of Cupid and Coelum , written in 1612; Bacon V [1889], 461–500), Bacon began to struggle with tradition as early as 1603. In Valerius Terminus (1603?) he already repudiates any mixture of natural philosophy and divinity; he provides an outline of his new method and determines that the end of knowledge was “a discovery of all operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice” (Bacon III [1887], 222). He opposes Aristotelian anticipatio naturae , which favored the inquiry of causes to satisfy the mind instead of those “as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions” (Bacon III [1887], 232).

When Bacon introduces his new systematic structure of the disciplines in The Advancement of Learning (1605), he continues his struggle with tradition, primarily with classical antiquity, rejecting the book learning of the humanists, on the grounds that they “hunt more after words than matter” (Bacon III [1887], 283). Accordingly, he criticizes the Cambridge University curriculum for placing too much emphasis on dialectical and sophistical training asked of “minds empty and unfraught with matter” (Bacon III [1887], 326). He reformulates and functionally transforms Aristotle's conception of science as knowledge of necessary causes. He rejects Aristotle's logic, which is based on his metaphysical theory, whereby the false doctrine is implied that the experience which comes to us by means of our senses (things as they appear ) automatically presents to our understanding things as they are . Simultaneously Aristotle favors the application of general and abstract conceptual distinctions, which do not conform to things as they exist. Bacon, however, introduces his new conception of philosophia prima as a meta-level for all scientific disciplines.

From 1606 to 1612 Bacon pursued his work on natural philosophy, still under the auspices of a struggle with tradition. This tendency is exemplified in the unpublished tracts Temporis partus masculus , 1603/1608 (Bacon III [1887], 521–31), Cogitata et Visa , 1607 (Bacon III, 591–620), Redargutio Philosophiarum , 1608 (III, 557–85), and De Principiis atque Originibus …, 1612 (Bacon V [1889], 461–500). Bacon rediscovers the Pre-Socratic philosophers for himself, especially the atomists and among them Democritus as the leading figure. He gives preference to Democritus' natural philosophy in contrast to the scholastic—and thus Aristotelian—focus on deductive logic and belief in authorities. Bacon does not expect any approach based on tradition to start with a direct investigation of nature and then to ascend to empirical and general knowledge. This criticism is extended to Renaissance alchemy, magic, and astrology ( Temporis partus masculus ), because the ‘methods’ of these ‘disciplines’ are based on occasional insights, but do not command strategies to reproduce the natural effects under investigation. His criticism also concerns contemporary technical literature, in so far as it lacks a new view of nature and an innovative methodological program. Bacon takes to task the ancients, the scholastics and also the moderns. He not only criticizes Plato, Aristotle, and Galen for these failings, but also Jean Fernel, Paracelsus, and Telesio, while praising the Greek atomists and Roger Bacon.

Bacon's manuscripts already mention the doctrine of the idols as a necessary condition for constituting scientia operativa . In Cogitata et Visa he compares deductive logic as used by the scholastics to a spider's web, which is drawn out of its own entrails, whereas the bee is introduced as an image of scientia operativa . Like a bee, the empiricist, by means of his inductive method, collects the natural matter or products and then works them up into knowledge in order to produce honey, which is useful for healthy nutrition.

In Bacon's follow-up paper, Redargutio Philosophiarum , he carries on his empiricist project by referring to the doctrine of twofold truth, while in De Principiis atque Originibus he rejects alchemical theories concerning the transformation of substances in favor of Greek atomism. But in the same text he sharply criticizes his contemporary Telesio for propagating a non-experimental halfway house empiricism. Though Telesio proves to be a moderate ‘modern’, he clings to the Aristotelian framework by continuing to believe in the quinta essentia and in the doctrine of the two worlds, which presupposes two modes of natural law (one mode for the sublunary and another for the superlunary sphere).

3. Natural Philosophy: Theory of the Idols and the System of Sciences

Bacon's doctrine of the idols not only represents a stage in the history of theories of error (Brandt 1979) but also functions as an important theoretical element within the rise of modern empiricism. According to Bacon, the human mind is not a tabula rasa . Instead of an ideal plane for receiving an image of the world in toto, it is a crooked mirror, on account of implicit distortions (Bacon IV [1901], 428–34). He does not sketch a basic epistemology but underlines that the images in our mind right from the beginning do not render an objective picture of the true objects. Consequently, we have to improve our mind, i.e., free it from the idols, before we start any knowledge acquisition.

As early as Temporis partus masculus , Bacon warns the student of empirical science not to tackle the complexities of his subject without purging the mind of its idols:

On waxen tablets you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old. With the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new. (Farrington 1964, 72)

In Redargutio Philosophiarum Bacon reflects on his method, but he also criticizes prejudices and false opinions, especially the system of speculation established by theologians, as an obstacle to the progress of science (Farrington 1964, 107), together with any authoritarian stance in scholarly matters.

Bacon deals with the idols in the Second Book of The Advancement of Learning , where he discusses Arts intellectual (Invention, Judgment, Memory, Tradition). In his paragraph on judgment he refers to proofs and demonstrations, especially to induction and invention. When he comes to Aristotle's treatment of the syllogism, he reflects on the relation between sophistical fallacies (Aristotle, De Sophisticis Elenchis ) and the idols (Bacon III [1887], 392–6). Whereas induction, invention, and judgment presuppose “the same action of the mind”, this is not true for proof in the syllogism. Bacon, therefore, prefers his own interpretatio naturae , repudiating elenches as modes of sophistical ‘juggling’ in order to persuade others in redargutions (“degenerate and corrupt use … for caption and contradiction”). There is no finding without proof and no proof without finding. But this is not true for the syllogism, in which proof (syllogism: judgment of the consequent) and invention (of the ‘mean’ or middle term) are distinct. The caution he suggests in relation to the ambiguities in elenches is also recommended in face of the idols :

there is yet a much more important and profound kind of fallacies in the mind of man, which I find not observed or enquired at all, and think good to place here, as that which of all others appertaineth most to rectify judgment: the force whereof is such, as it doth not dazzle or snare the understanding in some particulars, but doth more generally and inwardly infect and corrupt the state thereof. For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence, nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. For this purpose, let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind …. (Bacon III [1887], 394–5)

Bacon still presents a similar line of argument to his reader in 1623, namely in De Augmentis (Book V, Chap. 4; see Bacon IV [1901], 428–34). Judgment by syllogism presupposes—in a mode agreeable to the human mind—mediated proof, which, unlike in induction, does not start from sense in primary objects. In order to control the workings of the mind, syllogistic judgment refers to a fixed frame of reference or principle of knowledge as the basis for “all the variety of disputations” (Bacon IV [1901], 491). The reduction of propositions to principles leads to the middle term. Bacon deals here with the art of judgment in order to assign a systematic position to the idols. Within this art he distinguishes the ‘Analytic’ from the detection of fallacies (sophistical syllogisms). Analytic works with “true forms of consequences in argument” (Bacon IV [1901], 429), which become faulty by variation and deflection. The complete doctrine of detection of fallacies, according to Bacon, contains three segments:

• Sophistical fallacies,
• Fallacies of interpretation, and
• False appearances or Idols.

Concerning (1) Bacon praises Aristotle for his excellent handling of the matter, but he also mentions Plato honorably. Fallacies of interpretation (2) refer to “Adventitious Conditions or Adjuncts of Essences”, similar to the predicaments, open to physical or logical inquiry. He focuses his attention on the logical handling when he relates the detection of fallacies of interpretation to the wrong use of common and general notions, which leads to sophisms. In the last section (3) Bacon finds a place for his idols, when he refers to the detection of false appearances as

the deepest fallacies of the human mind: For they do not deceive in particulars, as the others do, by clouding and snaring the judgment; but by a corrupt and ill-ordered predisposition of mind, which as it were perverts and infects all the anticipations of the intellect. (IV, 431)

Idols are productions of the human imagination (caused by the crooked mirror of the human mind) and thus are nothing more than “untested generalities” (Malherbe 1996, 80).

In his Preface to the Novum Organum Bacon promises the introduction of a new method, which will restore the senses to their former rank (Bacon IV [1901], 17f.), begin the whole labor of the mind again, and open two sources and two distributions of learning, consisting of a method of cultivating the sciences and another of discovering them. This new beginning presupposes the discovery of the natural obstacles to efficient scientific analysis, namely seeing through the idols, so that the mind's function as the subject of knowledge acquisition comes into focus (Brandt 1979, 19).

According to Aphorism XXIII of the First Book, Bacon makes a distinction between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine mind: whereas the former are for him nothing more than “certain empty dogmas”, the latter show “the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature” (Bacon IV [1901], 51).

3.1.1 Idols of the Tribe

The Idols of the Tribe have their origin in the production of false concepts due to human nature, because the structure of human understanding is like a crooked mirror, which causes distorted reflections (of things in the external world).

3.1.2 Idols of the Cave

The Idols of the Cave consist of conceptions or doctrines which are dear to the individual who cherishes them, without possessing any evidence of their truth. These idols are due to the preconditioned system of every individual, comprising education, custom, or accidental or contingent experiences.

3.1.3 Idols of the Market Place

These idols are based on false conceptions which are derived from public human communication. They enter our minds quietly by a combination of words and names, so that it comes to pass that not only does reason govern words, but words react on our understanding.

3.1.4 Idols of the Theatre

According to the insight that the world is a stage, the Idols of the Theatre are prejudices stemming from received or traditional philosophical systems. These systems resemble plays in so far as they render fictional worlds, which were never exposed to an experimental check or to a test by experience. The idols of the theatre thus have their origin in dogmatic philosophy or in wrong laws of demonstration.

Bacon ends his presentation of the idols in Novum Organum , Book I, Aphorism LXVIII, with the remark that men should abjure and renounce the qualities of idols, “and the understanding [must be] thoroughly freed and cleansed” (Bacon IV [1901], 69). He discusses the idols together with the problem of information gained through the senses, which must be corrected by the use of experiments (Bacon IV [1901], 27).

Within the history of occidental philosophy and science, Bacon identifies only three revolutions or periods of learning: the heyday of the Greeks and that of the Romans and Western Europe in his own time (Bacon IV [1901], 70ff.). This meager result stimulated his ambition to establish a new system of the sciences. This tendency can already be seen in his early manuscripts, but is also apparent in his first major book, The Advancement of Learning . In this work Bacon presents a systematic survey of the extant realms of knowledge, combined with meticulous descriptions of deficiencies, leading to his new classification of knowledge. In The Advancement (Bacon III [1887], 282f.) a new function is given to philosophia prima , the necessity of which he had indicated in the Novum Organum , I, Aphorisms LXXIX–LXXX (Bacon IV [1901], 78–9). In both texts this function is attributed to philosophia naturalis , the basis for his concept of the unity of the sciences and thus of materialism.

Natural science is divided by Bacon into physics and metaphysics. The former investigates variable and particular causes, the latter reflects on general and constant ones, for which the term form is used. Forms are more general than the four Aristotelian causes and that is why Bacon's discussion of the forms of substances as the most general properties of matter is the last step for the human mind when investigating nature. Metaphysics is distinct from philosophia prima . The latter marks the position in the system where general categories of a general theory of science are treated as (1) universal categories of thought, (2) relevant for all disciplines. Final causes are discredited, since they lead to difficulties in science and tempt us to amalgamate theological and teleological points of doctrine. At the summit of Bacon's pyramid of knowledge are the laws of nature (the most general principles). At its base the pyramid starts with observations, moves on to invariant relations and then to more inclusive correlations until it reaches the stage of forms. The process of generalization ascends from natural history via physics towards metaphysics, whereas accidental correlations and relations are eliminated by the method of exclusion. It must be emphasized that metaphysics has a special meaning for Bacon. This concept (1) excludes the infinity of individual experience by generalization with a teleological focus and (2) opens our mind to generate more possibilities for the efficient application of general laws.

According to Bacon, man would be able to explain all the processes in nature if he could acquire full insight into the hidden structure and the secret workings of matter (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 101). Bacon's conception of structures in nature, functioning according to its own working method, concentrates on the question of how natural order is produced, namely by the interplay of matter and motion. In De Principiis atque Originibus , his materialistic stance with regard to his conception of natural law becomes evident. The Summary Law of Nature is a virtus (matter-cum-motion) or power in accordance with matter theory, or

the force implanted by God in these first particles, form the multiplication thereof of all the variety of things proceeds and is made up. (Bacon V [1889], 463)

Similarly, in De Sapientia Veterum he attributes to this force an

appetite or instinct of primal matter; or to speak more plainly, the natural motion of the atom; which is indeed the original and unique force that constitutes and fashions all things out of matter. (Bacon VI [1890], 729)

Suffice it to say here that Bacon, who did not reject mathematics in science, was influenced by the early mathematical version of chemistry developed in the 16 th century, so that the term ‘instinct’ must be seen as a keyword for his theory of nature. The natural philosopher is urged to inquire into the

appetites and inclination of things by which all that variety of effects and changes which we see in the works of nature and art is brought about. (Bacon III [1887], 17–22; V [1889], 422–6 and 510ff.: Descriptio Globi Intellectualis ; cf. IV [1901], 349)

Bacon's theory of active or even vivid force in matter accounts for what he calls Cupid in De Principiis atque Originibus (Bacon V [1889], 463–5). Since his theory of matter aims at an explanation of the reality which is the substratum of appearances, he digs deeper than did the mechanistic physics of the 17 th century (Gaukroger 2001, 132–7). Bacon's ideas concerning the quid facti of reality presuppose the distinction

between understanding how things are made up and of what they consist, … and by what force and in what manner they come together, and how they are transformed. (Gaukroger 2001, 137)

This is the point in his work where it becomes obvious that he tries to develop an explanatory pattern in which his theory of matter, and thus his atomism, are related to his cosmology, magic, and alchemy.

In De Augmentis , Bacon not only refers to Pan and his nymphs in order to illustrate the permanent atomic movement in matter but in addition revives the idea of magic in a ‘honourable meaning’ as

the knowledge of the universal consents of things …. I … understand [magic] as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives, displays the wonderful works of nature. (Bacon IV [1901], 366–7: De Augmentis III.5)

Bacon's notion of form is made possible by integration into his matter theory, which (ideally) reduces the world of appearances to some minimal parts accessible and open to manipulation by the knower/maker. In contrast to Aristotle, Bacon's knowing-why type of definition points towards the formulation of an efficient knowing-how type (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 119). In this sense a convergence between the scope of definition and that of causation takes place according to a ‘constructivist epistemology’. The fundamental research of Graham Rees has shown that Bacon's special mode of cosmology is deeply influenced by magic and semi-Paracelsian doctrine. For Bacon, matter theory is the basic doctrine, not classical mechanics as it is with Galileo. Consequently, Bacon's purified and modified versions of chemistry, alchemy, and physiology remain primary disciplines for his explanation of the world.

According to Rees, the Instauratio Magna comprises two branches: (1) Bacon's famous scientific method, and (2) his semi-Paracelsian world system as “a vast, comprehensive system of speculative physics” (Rees 1986, 418). For (2) Bacon conjoins his specific version of Paracelsian cosmic chemistry to Islamic celestial kinematics (especially in Alpetragius [al-Bitruji]; see Zinner 1988, 71). The chemical world system is used to support Bacon's explanation of celestial motion in the face of contemporary astronomical problems (Rees 1975b, 161f.). There are thus two sections in Bacon's Instauratio , which imply the modes of their own explanation.

Bacon's speculative cosmology and matter theory had been planned to constitute Part 5 of Instauratio Magna . The theory put forward refers in an eclectic vein to atomism, criticizes Aristotelians and Copernicans, but also touches on Galileo, Paracelsus, William Gilbert, Telesio, and Arabic astronomy.

For Bacon, ‘magic’ is classified as applied science, while he generally subsumes under ‘science’ pure science and technology. It is never identified with black magic, since it represents the “ultimate legitimate power over nature” (Rees 2000, 66). Whereas magia was connected to crafts in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, Bacon's science remains the knowledge of forms in order to transform them into operations. Knowledge in this context, however, is no longer exclusively based on formal proof.

Bacon's cosmological system—a result of thought experiments and speculation, but not proven in accordance with the inductive method—presupposes a finite universe, a geocentric plenum, which means that the earth is passive and consists of tangible matter. The remaining universe is composed of active or pneumatic matter. Whereas the interior and tangible matter of the earth is covered by a crust which separates it from the pneumatic heaven, the zone between earth and the “middle region of the air” allows a mixture of pneumatic and tangible matter, which is the origin of organic and non-organic phenomena. Bacon speaks here of “attached spirit” (Rees 1986, 418–20), while otherwise he assumes four kinds of free spirit: air and terrestrial fire, which refer to the sublunary realm; ether and sidereal fire, which are relevant to the celestial realm. Ether is explained as the medium in which planets move around the central earth. Air and ether, as well as watery non-inflammable bodies, belong to Bacon's first group of substances or to the Mercury Quaternion .

Terrestrial fire is presented as the weak variant of sidereal fire; it joins with oily substances and sulphur, for all of which Bacon introduces the Sulphur Quaternion. These quaternions comprise antithetical qualities: air and ether versus fire and sidereal fire. The struggle between these qualities is determined by the distance from the earth as the absolute center of the world system. Air and ether become progressively weaker as the terrestrial and sidereal fire grow stronger. The quaternion theory functions in Bacon's thought as a constructive element for constituting his own theory of planetary movement and a general theory of physics. This theory differs from all other contemporary approaches, even though Bacon states that “many theories of the heavens may be supposed which agree well enough with the phenomena and yet differ with each other” (Bacon IV [1901], 104). The diurnal motion of the world system (9 th sphere) is driven by sympathy; it carries the heavens westward around the earth. The sidereal fire is powerful and, accordingly, sidereal motion is swift (the stars complete their revolution in 24 hours). Since the sidereal fire becomes weaker if it burns nearer to the earth, the lower planets move more slowly and unevenly than the higher ones (in this way Bacon, like Alpetragius, accounts for irregular planetary movement without reference to Ptolemy's epicycle theory). He applies his theory of consensual motion to physics generally (e.g., wind and tides) and thus comes into conflict with Gilbert's doctrine of the interstellar vacuum and Galileo's theory of the tides (for Bacon, the cycle of tides depends on the diurnal motion of the heavens but, for Galileo, on the earth's motion).

With quaternion theory we see that, in the final analysis, Bacon was not a mechanist philosopher. His theory of matter underwent an important transformation, moving in the direction of ‘forms’, which we would nowadays subsume under biology or the life sciences rather than under physics. Bacon distinguishes between non-spiritual matter and spiritual matter. The latter, also called ‘subtle matter’ or ‘spirit’, is more reminiscent of Leibniz' ‘monads’ than of mechanically defined and materially, as well as spatially, determined atoms. The spirits are seen as active agents of phenomena; they are endowed with ‘appetition’ and ‘perception’ (Bacon I [1889], 320–21: Historia Vitae et Mortis ; see also V, 63: Sylva Sylvarum , Century IX: “It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception: for when one body is applied to another, there is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate”).

These spirits are never at rest. In the Novum Organum , then, Bacon rejected the “existence of eternal and immutable atoms and the reality of the void” (Kargon 1966, 47). His new conception of matter was therefore “close to that of the chemists” in the sense of Bacon's semi-Paracelsian cosmology (Rees 2000, 65–69). The careful natural philosopher tries to disclose the secrets of nature step by step; and therefore he says of his method: “I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty” (Bacon IV [1901], 40: Novum Organum , Preface). This points towards his inductive procedure and his method of tables, which is a complicated mode of induction by exclusion. It is necessary because nature hides her secrets. In Aphorism XIX of Book I in his Novum Organum Bacon writes:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immoveable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. (Bacon IV [1901], 50)

The laws of nature, which Bacon intended to discover by means of his new method, were expressed in the ‘forms’, in which the ‘unbroken ascent’ culminates. Through these forms the natural philosopher understands the general causes of phenomena (Kargon 1966, 48). In his endeavor to learn more about the secret workings of nature, Bacon came to the conclusion that the atomist theory could not provide sufficient explanations for the “real particles, such as really exist” (Bacon IV [1901], 126: Novum Organum , II.viii), because he thought that the immutability of matter and the void (both necessary assumptions for atomism) were untenable. His language turned from that of Greek physics to the usage of contemporary chemists. This is due to his insight that “subtlety of investigation” is needed, since our senses are too gross for the complexity and fineness of nature, so that method has to compensate for the shortcomings of our direct comprehension. Only method leads to the knowledge of nature: in Sylva Sylvarum , Century I.98 Bacon deals explicitly with the question of the asymmetrical relationship between man's natural instrument (i.e., the senses) and the intricacy of nature's structures and workings.

Bacon distinguishes ‘animate’ or vital spirits, which are continuous and composed of a substance similar to fire, from lifeless or inanimate spirits, which are cut off and resemble air: the spirits interact with gross matter through chemical processes (Bacon IV, 195–6 ( Novum Organum , II.xl)). These spirits have two different desires: self-multiplication and attraction of like spirits. According to Kargon (1966, 51):

Bacon's later theory of matter is one of the interaction of gross, visible parts of matter and invisible material spirits, both of which are physically mixed.

Spirits interact with matter by means of concoction, colliquation and other non-mechanical chemical processes, so that Bacon's scientific paradigm differs from Descartes' mechanist theory of matter in his Principia Philosophiae (1644), which presupposes res extensa moving in space. Bacon's theory of matter is thus closely related to his speculative philosophy:

The distinction between tangible and pneumatic matter is the hinge on which the entire speculative system turns. (Rees 1996, 125; Paracelsus had already stated that knowledge inheres in the object: see Shell 2004, 32)

Bacon's theory of matter in its final version was more corpuscular than atomist (Clericuzio 2000, 78). Bacon's particles are semina rerum : they are endowed with powers, which make a variety of motions possible and allow the production of all possible forms. These spirits are constitutive for Bacon's theory of matter. As material, fine substances, composed of particles, combined from air and fire, they can, as we have seen, be either inanimate or animate. Bacon thus suggests a corpuscular and chemical chain of being:

Small wonder, then, that Bacon's spirits are indispensable for his conception of physiology:

the vital spirits regulate all vegetative functions of plants and animals. Organs responsible for these functions, for digestion, assimilation, etc., seem to act by perception, mere reaction to local stimuli, but these reactions are coordinated by the vital spirit. These functions flow from the spirit's airy-flamy constitution. The spirit has the softness of air to receive impressions and the vigour of fire to propagate its actions. (Rees in OFB VI, 202–3)

This physiological stratum of Bacon's natural philosophy was influenced by his semi-Paracelsian cosmology (on Paracelsus see Müller-Jahncke 1985, 67–88), which Graham Rees (Rees and Upton 1984, 20–1) has reconstructed from the extant parts of the Instauratio Magna . Detailed consideration therefore has to be given to Bacon's theory of the ‘quaternions’.

Bacon's speculative system is a hybrid based on different sources which provided him with seminal ideas: e.g., atomism, Aristotelianism, Arabic astronomy, Copernican theory, Galileo's discoveries, the works of Paracelsus, and Gilbert. In his theory he combines astronomy, referring to Alpetragius (see Dijksterhuis 1956, 237–43; Rees and Upton 1984, 26; Gaukroger, 2001, 172–5; and see Grant 1994, 533–66, for discussion of the cosmology of Alpetragius), and chemistry (Rees 1975a, 84–5):

[i]t was partly designed to fit a kinematic skeleton and explain, in general terms, the irregularities of planetary motion as consequences of the chemical constitution of the universe. (Rees 1975b, 94)

Bacon had no explanation for the planetary retrogressions and saw the universe as a finite and geocentric plenum, in which the earth consists of the two forms of matter (tangible and pneumatic). The earth has a tangible inside and is in touch with the surrounding universe, but through an intermediate zone. This zone exists between the earth's crust and the pure pneumatic heavens; it reaches some miles into the crust and some miles into air. In this zone, pneumatic matter mixes with tangible matter, thus producing ‘attached spirits’, which must be distinguished from ‘free spirits’ outside tangible bodies. Bacon's four kinds of free spirits are relevant for his ‘quaternion theory’:

The planets move around the earth in the ether (a tenuous kind of air), which belongs to the ‘mercury quaternion’: it includes watery bodies and mercury. Terrestrial fire is a weakened form of sidereal fire. It is related to oily substances and sulphur, and constitutes the ‘sulphur quaternion’. The two quaternions oppose each other: air/ether vs. fire/sidereal fire. Air and ether loose power when terrestrial and sidereal fires grow more energetic—Bacon's sulphur and mercury are not principles in the sense of Paracelsus, but simply natural substances. The Paracelsian principle of salt is excluded by Bacon and the substance, which plays a role only in the sublunary realm, is for him a compound of natural sulphur and mercury (Rees and Upton 1984, 25).

Bacon used his quaternion theory for his cosmology, which differs greatly from other contemporary systems (Rees 2000, 68):

• the diurnal motion turns the heavens about the earth towards the west;
• under powerful sidereal fire (i.e., principle of celestial motion) the motion is swift: the revolution of the stars takes place in twenty-four hours;
• under weaker sidereal fire—nearer to the earth—planets move more slowly and more erratic.

Bacon, who tried to conceive of a unified physics, rejected different modes of motion in the superlunary and in the sublunary world (Bacon I [1889], 329). He did not believe in the existence of the (crystalline) spheres nor in the macrocosm-microcosm analogy. He revised Paracelsian ideas thoroughly. He rejected the grounding of his theories in Scripture and paid no attention at all to Cabbalistic and Hermetic tendencies (Rees 1975b, 90–1). But he extended the explanatory powers of the quaternions to earthly phenomena such as wind and tides.

Bacon's two systems were closely connected:

System 2 depends on System 1, since explanations for terrestrial things were subordinated to explanations of the cosmological level. The table of System 2 shows Bacon's matter theory. His quaternion theory is relevant for System 1. System 2 is explained in terms of ‘intermediates’, which combine the qualities of the items in one quaternion with their opposites in the other.

Bacon's system is built in a clear symmetrical way: each quaternion has four segments, together eight and there are four types of intermediates. Thus, the system distinguishes twelve segments in all. He wanted to explain all natural phenomena by means of this apparatus:

There are two principal intermediates:

Bacon's bi-quaternion theory necessarily refers to the sublunary as well as to the superlunary world. Although the quaternion theory is first mentioned in Thema Coeli (1612; see Bacon V [1889], 547–59), he provides a summary in his Novum Organum (Bacon II [1887], 50):

it has not been ill observed by the chemists in their triad of first principles, that sulphur and mercury run through the whole universe … in these two one of the most general consents in nature does seem to be observable. For there is consent between sulphur, oil and greasy exhalation, flame, and perhaps the body of a star. So is there between mercury, water and watery vapors, air, and perhaps the pure and intersiderial ether. Yet these two quaternions or great tribes of things (each within its own limits) differ immensely in quantity of matter and density, but agree very well in configuration. (Bacon IV [1901], 242–3; see also V [1889], 205–6; for tables of the two quaternions and Bacon's theory of matter see Rees 1996, 126, 137; Rees 2000, 68–9)

Bacon regarded his cosmological worldview as a system of anticipations, which was open to revision in light of further scientific results based on the inductive method (Rees 1975b, 171). It was primarily a qualitative system, standing aside from both mathematical astronomers and Paracelsian chemists. It thus emphasized the priority which he gave to physics over mathematics in his general system of the sciences.

Bacon's two quaternions and his matter theory provide a speculative framework for his thought, which was open to the future acquisition of knowledge and its technical application. His Nova Atlantis can be understood as a text which occupies an intermediate position between his theory of induction and his speculative philosophy (Klein 2003c; Price 2002).

It is important to bear in mind that Bacon's speculative system was his way out of a dilemma which had made it impossible for him to finish his Instauratio Magna . His turn towards speculation can only be interpreted as an intellectual anticipation during an intermediate phase of the history of science, when a gigantic amount of research work was still to be accomplished, so that empirical theories could neither be established nor sufficiently guaranteed. Speculation in Bacon's sense can therefore be seen as a preliminary means of explaining the secrets of nature until methodical research has caught up with our speculations. The speculative stance remains a relative and intermediate procedure for the ‘man of science’.

The Great Instauration , Bacon's main work, was published in 1620 under the title: Franciscus de Verulamio Summi Angliae Cancellaris Instauratio magna . This great work remained a fragment, since Bacon was only able to finish parts of the planned outline. The volume was introduced by a Prooemium , which gives a general statement of the purpose, followed by a Dedication to the King (James I) and a Preface , which is a summary of all “directions, motifs, and significance of his life-work” (Sessions 1996, 71). After that, Bacon printed the plan of the Instauratio , before he turned to the strategy of his research program, which is known as Novum Organum Scientiarum . Altogether the 1620 book constitutes the second part of Part II of the Instauratio , the first part of which is represented by De Augmentis and Book I of The Advancement of Learning . When Bacon organized his Instauratio , he divided it into six parts, which reminded contemporary readers of God's work of the six days (the creation), already used by writers like Guillaume Du Bartas ( La Sepmaine, ou Création du Monde , 1579, transl. by Joshua Sylvester, Bartas His Devine Weekes & Workes , 1605) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ( Heptaplus , 1489).

Bacon sees nature as a labyrinth, whose workings cannot be exclusively explained by reference to “excellence of wit” and “repetition of chance experiments”:

Our steps must be guided by a clue, and see what way from the first perception of the sense must be laid out upon a sure plan. (Bacon IV [1901], 18)

Bacon's Plan of the Work runs as follows (Bacon IV [1901], 22):

• The Divisions of the Sciences.
• The New Organon; or Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature.
• The Phenomena of the Universe; or a Natural and Experimental History for the foundation of Philosophy.
• The Ladder of Intellect.
• The Forerunners; or Anticipations of the New Philosophy.
• The New Philosophy; or Active Science .

Part 1 contains the general description of the sciences including their divisions as they presented themselves in Bacon's time. Here he aimed at a distinction between what was already invented and known in contrast to “things omitted which ought be there” (Bacon IV [1901], 23). This part could be taken from The Advancement of Learning (1605) and from the revised and enlarged version De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623).

Part 2 develops Bacon's new method for scientific investigation, the Novum Organum , equipping the intellect to pass beyond ancient arts and thus producing a radical revision of the methods of knowledge; but it also introduces a new epistemology and a new ontology. Bacon calls his new art Interpretatio Naturae , which is a logic of research going beyond ordinary logic, since his science aims at three inventions: of arts (not arguments), of principles (not of things in accordance to principles), and of designations and directions for works (not of probable reasons). The effect Bacon looks for is to command nature in action, not to overcome an opponent in argument. The Novum Organum is the only part of the Instauratio Magna which was brought near to completion.

Part 3 was going to contain natural and experimental history or the record of the phenomena of the universe. According to De Augmentis Scientarum (Bacon IV [1901], 275), natural history is split up into narrative and inductive, the latter of which is supposed “to minister and be in order to the building up of Philosophy ”. These functional histories support human memory and provide the material for research , or the factual knowledge of nature, which must be certain and reliable. Natural history starts from and emphasizes the subtlety of nature or her structural intricacy, but not the complexity of philosophical systems, since they have been produced by the human mind. Bacon sees this part of Instauratio Magna as a foundation for the reconstruction of the sciences in order to produce physical and metaphysical knowledge. Nature in this context is studied under experimental conditions, not only in the sense of the history of bodies, but also as a history of virtues or original passions, which refer to the desires of matter (Rees 1975a). This knowledge was regarded by Bacon as a preparation for Part 6, the Second Philosophy or Active Science , for which he gave only the one example of Historia Ventorum (1622); but—following his plan to compose six prototypical natural histories—he also wrote Historia vitae et mortis (1623) and the Historia densi , which was left in manuscript. The text, which develops the idea of Part 3, is called Parasceve ad Historiam Naturalem et Experimentalem.

Part 4, which Bacon called The Ladder of Intellect or Scala Intellectus , was intended to function as a link between the method of natural history and that of Second Philosophy/Active Science. It consists not only of the fragment Filum labyrinthi (Bacon III [1887], 493–504), but also includes the Abecedarium nouum naturae (OFB XIII, xxi), which was planned as a preface to all of section 4 “[to] demonstrate the whole process of the mind” (OFB XIII, xxii). Filum labyrinthi is similar to, but not identical with, Cogitata et Visa . Speaking of himself in an authorial voice, Bacon reflects on the state of science and derives his construction of a research program from the gaps and deficiencies within the system of disciplines: sciences of the future should be examined and further ones should be discovered. Emphasis must be laid on new matter (not on controversies). It is necessary to repudiate superstition, zealous religion, and false authorities. Just as the Fall was not caused by knowledge of nature, but rather by moral knowledge of good and evil, so knowledge of natural philosophy is for Bacon a contribution to the magnifying of God's glory, and, in this way, his plea for the growth of scientific knowledge becomes evident.

Part 5 deals with the forerunners or anticipations of the new philosophy, and Bacon emphasizes that the ‘big machinery’ of the Instauratio Magna needs a good deal of time to be completed. Anticipations are ways to come to scientific inferences without recourse to the method presented in the Novum Organum . Meanwhile, he has worked on his speculative system, so that portions of his Second Philosophy are treated and finished: De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris and Thema Coeli . For this part of the Great Instauration , texts are planned that draw philosophical conclusions from collections of facts which are not yet sufficient for the use or application of Bacon's inductive method.

Part 6 was scheduled to contain Bacon's description of the new philosophy, as the last part of his Great Instauration ; but nothing came of this plan, so that there is no extant text at all from this part of the project.

Already in his early text Cogitata et Visa (1607) Bacon dealt with his scientific method, which became famous under the name of induction . He repudiates the syllogistic method and defines his alternative procedure as one “which by slow and faithful toil gathers information from things and brings it into understanding” (Farrington 1964, 89). When later on he developed his method in detail, namely in his Novum Organum (1620), he still noted that

[of] induction the logicians seem hardly to have taken any serious thought, but they pass it by with a slight notice, and hasten to the formulae of disputation. I on the contrary reject demonstration by syllogism …. (Bacon IV [1901], 24)

Bacon's method appears as his conceptual plot,

applied to all stages of knowledge, and at every phase the whole process has to be kept in mind. (Malherbe 1996, 76)

Induction implies ascending to axioms, as well as a descending to works, so that from axioms new particulars are gained and from these new axioms. The inductive method starts from sensible experience and moves via natural history (providing sense-data as guarantees) to lower axioms or propositions, which are derived from the tables of presentation or from the abstraction of notions. Bacon does not identify experience with everyday experience, but presupposes that method corrects and extends sense-data into facts, which go together with his setting up of tables (tables of presence and of absence and tables of comparison or of degrees, i.e., degrees of absence or presence). “Bacon's antipathy to simple enumeration as the universal method of science derived, first of all, from his preference for theories that deal with interior physical causes, which are not immediately observable” (Urbach 1987, 30; see: sect. 2). The last type can be supplemented by tables of counter-instances, which may suggest experiments:

To move from the sensible to the real requires the correction of the senses, the tables of natural history, the abstraction of propositions and the induction of notions. In other words, the full carrying out of the inductive method is needed. (Malherbe 1996, 85)

The sequence of methodical steps does not, however, end here, because Bacon assumes that from lower axioms more general ones can be derived (by induction). The complete process must be understood as the joining of the parts into a systematic chain. From the more general axioms Bacon strives to reach more fundamental laws of nature (knowledge of forms), which lead to practical deductions as new experiments or works (IV, 24–5). The decisive instruments in this process are the middle or ‘living axioms,’ which mediate between particulars and general axioms. For Bacon, induction can only be efficient if it is eliminative by exclusion, which goes beyond the remit of induction by simple enumeration. The inductive method helps the human mind to find a way to ascertain truthful knowledge.

Novum Organum , I, Aphorism CXV (Bacon IV [1901], 103) ends the “pulling down” of “the signs and causes of the errors” within the sciences, achieved by means of three refutations, which constituted the condition for a rational introduction of method: refutation of ‘natural human reason’ (idols); refutation of ‘demonstrations’ (syllogisms) and refutation of ‘theories’ (traditional philosophical systems).

The Second Part of the Novum Organum deals with Bacon's rule for interpreting nature, even if he provides no complete or universal theory. He contributes to the new philosophy by introducing his tables of discovery ( Inst. Magna , IV), by presenting an example of particulars ( Inst. Magna , II), and by observations on history ( Inst. Magna , III). It is well known that he worked hard in the last five years of his life to make progress on his natural history, knowing that he could not always come up to the standards of legitimate interpretation.

Bacon's method presupposes a double starting-point: empirical and rational. True knowledge is acquired if we want to proceed from a lower certainty to a higher liberty and from a lower liberty to a higher certainty. The rule of certainty and liberty in Bacon converges with his repudiation of the old logic of Aristotle, which determined true propositions by the criteria of generality, essentiality, and universality. Bacon rejects anticipatio naturae (“anticipation of nature”) in favor of interpretatio naturae (“interpretation of nature”), which starts with the collecting of facts and their methodical (inductive) investigation, shunning entanglement in pure taxonomy (as in Ramism), which establishes the order of things (Urbach 1987, 26; see also Foucault 1966 [1970]), but does not produce knowledge. For Bacon, making is knowing and knowing is making (Bacon IV [1901], 109–10). In accordance with the maxim “command nature … by obeying her” (Sessions 1996, 136; Gaukroger 2001, 139ff.), the exclusion of superstition, imposture, error, and confusion are obligatory. Bacon introduces variations into “the maker's knowledge tradition” as the discovery of the forms of a given nature lead him to develop his method for acquiring factual and proven knowledge.

Bacon argues against “anticipation of nature”, which he regards as a conservative method, leading to theories that recapitulate the data without producing new ones conducive to the growth of knowledge. Moreover, such theories are considered to be final, so that they are never replaced.

“Anticipation of nature” resembles “conventionalism” (Urbach 1987, 30–41), according to which theories refer to unobservable entities (e.g., atoms, epicycles). The theories are “computation rules” or “inference licences” within this given framework, which give explanations and predictions of particular kinds of observable events. The conventionalist acceptance of making predictions concerning future events cannot be separated from the question of probability. Bacon's procedure of knowledge acquisition goes against “conventionalism”, because “anticipation of nature” does not reject authoritative and final speculations concerning “unobservables” and because it permits “ad hoc adjustments”. Nowadays, however,

philosophers would not accept the idea that just because we can't observe something directly … it follows that there is no such thing. (Huggett 2010, 82. See also Von Weizsäcker and Juilfs 1958, pp.67–70; Rae 1986 [2000], 1–27 and passim)

Conventionalist deep-level theories of the world are chosen from among alternative ways of observing phenomena. Although theories revealing the world structure are not directly provable or disprovable by means of observation or experiment, conventionalists might maintain their chosen theory even in the face of counter-evidence. They therefore avoid changes of theory. Any move to a new theory is not taken on the basis of new evidence, but because a new theory seems to be simpler, more applicable or more beautiful. Laws of nature are generally understood as being unrevisable (O'Hear 1995, 165). The famous debate, sparked by Thomas Kuhn, on paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic science and theory is relevant here. Bacon's position—open to scientific progress—is nearer to Kuhn than to Duhem or Poincaré. For Bacon, “anticipation of nature” (as a mode of “conventionalism”) produces obstacles to the progress of knowledge. Traditional methods shun speculation concerning things which are not immediately visible; Bacon's speculation, however, is an element of “interpretation of nature”. He presupposes hypothetical theories, but these do not go beyond the collected data. His acceptance of hypotheses is connected with his rejection of “ anticipation of nature”. Thus, hypotheses are related to the axioms of “interpretation of nature”, which go beyond the original data. The amount of established facts is not identical with that of possible data (Gillies 1998, 307). Anticipation is rejected, only if it “flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms” (OFB XI, xxv). Because of the dangers of premature generalization, Bacon is careful about speculations and rigorously rejects any dogmatic defense of them and the tendency to declare them infallible.

…the philosophy that we now possess clutches to its breast certain tenets with which (if we look into it carefully) they want wholly to conceive men that nothing difficult, nothing with real power and influence over nature, should be expected from art or human effort; […] These things, if we examine them minutely, tend wholly towards a wicked circumscription of human power and an intentional and unnatural despair which not only confounds the presages of hope but breaks every nerve and spur of industry, and throws away the chances afforded by experience itself—while all they care about is that their art be considered perfect, expending their effort to achieve the most foolish and bankrupt glory of having it believed that whatever has not been found out or understood so far cannot be found out or understood in the future. (OFB XI, 141)

Bacon sees nature as an extremely subtle complexity, which affords all the energy of the natural philosopher to disclose her secrets.

For him, new axioms must be larger and wider than the material from which they are taken. At the same time, “interpretation of nature” must not leap to remote axioms. In terms of his method, he rejects general ideas as simple abstractions from very few sense perceptions. Such abstract words may function as conventions for organizing “new observations”, but only in the sense of means for taxonomical order. Such a sterile procedure is irrelevant for “interpretation of nature”, which is not final or infallible and is based on the insight that confirming hypotheses do not provide strict proofs. Bacon's method is therefore characterized by openness:

Nevertheless, I do not affirm that nothing can be added to what I prescribe; on the contrary, as one who observes the mind not only in its innate capacity but also insofar as it gets to grips with things, it is my conviction that the art of discovering will grow as the number of things discovered will grow. (OFB, XI, 197)

Peter Urbach's commentary exactly underlines Bacon's openness:

He believed that theories should be advanced to explain whatever data were available in a particular domain. These theories should preferably concern the underlying physical, causal mechanisms and ought, in any case, to go beyond the data which generated them. They are then tested by drawing out new predictions, which, if verified in experience, may confirm the theory and may eventually render it certain, at least in the sense that it becomes very difficult to deny. (Urbach 1987, 49)

Bacon was no seventeenth-century Popperian. Rather, on account of his theory of induction, he was:

the first great theorist of experimentalism”: “the function of experiment was both to test theories and to establish facts” (Rees, in OFB XI, xli). Encyclopaedic repetition with an Aristotelian slant is being displaced by original compilation in which deference to authority plays no part whatever. Individual erudition is being dumped in favour of collective research. Conservation of traditional knowledge is being discarded in the interest of a new, functional realization of natural history, which demands that legenda —things worth reading—be supplanted by materials which will form the basis of a thoroughgoing attempt to improve the material conditions of the human race. (Rees, in OFB XI, xlii)

Form is for Bacon a structural constituent of a natural entity or a key to its truth and operation, so that it comes near to natural law, without being reducible to causality. This appears all the more important, since Bacon—who seeks out exclusively causes which are necessary and sufficient for their effects—rejects Aristotle's four causes (his four types of explanation for a complete understanding of a phenomenon) on the grounds that the distribution into material, formal, efficient, and final causes does not work well and that they fail to advance the sciences (especially the final, efficient, and material causes). Consider again the passage quoted in Section 3.3:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms at last. This is the true way, but as yet untried. (Bacon IV [1901], 50: Novum Organum , I, Aphorism XIX).

Since for Bacon the formal necessity of the syllogism does not suffice to set up first principles, his method comprises two basic tasks: (1) the discovery of forms, and (2) the transformation of concrete bodies. The discovery from every case of generation and motion refers to a latent process according to which efficient and material causes lead to forms; but there is also the discovery of latent configurations of bodies at rest and not in motion (Bacon IV [1901], 119–20).

Bacon's new mode of using human understanding implies a parallelism between striving towards human power and constituting human knowledge. Technical know-how leads to successful operations, which converge with the discovery of forms (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 108; Bacon IV [1901], 121). To understand the workings of nature presupposes an arrangement of facts which makes the investigative analysis of cause and effect possible, especially by means of new experiments. At this point the idea of scientia operativa comes in again, since the direction for a true and perfect rule of operation is parallel to the discovery of a true form. Bacon's specific non-Aristotelian Aristotelianism (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 113, 115) is one of the main features of his theory. Other indispensable influences on Bacon, apart from a modified version of Aristotle, are critically assessed Hermeticism, rhetoric (Vickers) and alchemy (Rees).

Two kinds of axioms correspond to the following division of philosophy and the sciences: the investigation of forms or metaphysics ; and the investigation of efficient cause and matter, which leads to the latent process and configuration in physics . Physics itself is split up by Bacon into Mechanics , i.e., the practical, and Magic , i.e., the metaphysical.

Nowadays the view that Bacon “made little first-hand contribution to science” (Hesse 1964, 152) no longer coincides with the opinion that we have to assume an underestimation of the “place of hypothesis and mathematics” in his work (Urban 1987; Sessions 1999, 139; Rees 1986). But there were few doubts in the past that Bacon “encouraged detailed and methodical experimentation” (Hesse 1964, 152); and he did this on account of his new inductive method, which implied the need for negative instances and refuting experiments. Bacon saw that confirming instances could not suffice to analyze the structure of scientific laws, since this task presupposed a hypothetical-deductive system, which, according to Lisa Jardine, is closely connected to “the logical and linguistic backgrounds from which Bacon's New Logic proceeds …” (Sessions 1999, 140; Jardine 1974, 69ff.).

Bacon's interpretation of nature uses “Tables and Arrangements of Instances” concerning the natural phenomena under investigation, which function as a necessary condition for cracking the code of efficient causation. His prerogative instances are not examples or phenomena simply taken from nature but rather imply information with inductive potential which show priority conducive to knowledge or to methodological relevance when inserted into tables. The instances do not represent the order of sensible things, but instead express the order of qualities (natures). These qualities provide the working basis for the order of abstract natures. Bacon's tables have a double function: they are important for natural history , collecting the data on bodies and virtues in nature; and they are also indispensable for induction , which makes use of these data.

Already in Temporis Partus Masculus (1603) Bacon had displayed a “facility of shrewd observation” (Sessions 1999, 60) concerning his ideas on induction. In his Novum Organum the nature of all human science and knowledge was seen by him as proceeding most safely by negation and exclusion, as opposed to affirmation and inclusion. Even in his early tracts it was clear to Bacon that he had to seek a method of discovering the right forms, the most well known of which was heat ( Novum Organum II, Aph. XI–XII) or “the famous trial investigation of the form of heat” (Rees 2000, 66; see Bacon IV [1901], 154–5).

In his “[m]ethod of analysis by exclusion” (Sessions 1999, 141), negation proved to be “one of Bacon's strongest contributions to modern scientific method” (Wright 1951, 152). Most important were his tables of degrees and of exclusion. They were needed for the discovery of causes, especially for supreme causes, which were called forms. The method of induction works in two stages:

• Learned experience from the known to the unknown has to be acquired, and the tables (of presence, absence, degrees) have to be set up before their interpretation can take place according to the principle of exclusion. After the three tables of the first presentation have been judged and analyzed, Bacon declares the First Vintage or the first version of the interpretation of nature to be concluded.
• The second phase of the method concentrates on the process of exclusion. The aim of this procedure is the reduction of the empirical character of experience, so that the analysis converges with an anatomy of things. Here, too, tables of presence and of absence are set up. The research work proper consists of finding the relationship of the two natures of qualities. Here exclusion functions as the process of determination. Bacon's method starts from material determination in order to establish the formal determination of real causes, but does not stop there, because it aims at the progressive generalization of causes. Here, again, the central element of the inductive method is the procedure of exclusion.

Forms, as the final result of the methodical procedure, are:

nothing more than those laws and determinations of absolute actuality which govern and constitute any simple nature, as heat, light, weight, in every kind of matter and subject that is susceptible of them (Bacon IV [1901], 145–6);

They are not identical with natural law, but with definitions of simple natures (elements) or ultimate ingredients of things from which the basic material structure has been built (Gaukroger 2001, 140). Forms are the structures constituted by the elements in nature (microphysics). This evokes a cross-reference to Bacon's atomism, which has been called the “constructivist component” (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 116) of his system, including an alchemical theory about basic kinds of matter. He aims at “understanding the basic structures of things … as a means to transforming nature for human purposes” (Gaukroger 2001, 140; Clericuzio 2000, 78ff.); and thus he “ends” the unfinished Novum Organum with a list of things which still have to be achieved or with a catalogue of phenomena which are important and indispensable for a future natural history.

Historians of science, with their predilection for mathematical physics, used to criticize Bacon's approach, stating that “the Baconian concept of science, as an inductive science, has nothing to do with and even contradicts today's form of science” (Malherbe 1996, 75). In reaching this verdict, however, they overlooked the fact that a natural philosophy based on a theory of matter cannot be assessed on the grounds of a natural philosophy or science based on mechanics as the fundamental discipline. One can account for this chronic mode of misunderstanding as a specimen of the paradigmatic fallacy (Gaukroger 2001, 134ff.; see Rees 1986).

Bacon came to the fundamental insight that facts cannot be collected from nature, but must be constituted by methodical procedures, which have to be put into practice by scientists in order to ascertain the empirical basis for inductive generalizations. His induction, founded on collection, comparison, and exclusion of factual qualities in things and their interior structure, proved to be a revolutionary achievement within natural philosophy, for which no example in classical antiquity existed. His scala intellectus has two contrary movements “upwards and downwards: from axiomata to experimenta and opera and back again” (Pérez-Ramos 1988, 236). Bacon's induction was construed and conceived as an instrument or method of discovery. Above all, his emphasis on negative instances for the procedure of induction itself can claim a high importance with regard to knowledge acquisition and has been acclaimed as an innovation by scholars of our time. Some have detected in Bacon a forerunner of Karl Popper in respect of the method of falsification. Finally, it cannot be denied that Bacon's methodological program of induction includes aspects of deduction and abstraction on the basis of negation and exclusion. Contemporary scholars have praised his inauguration of the theory of induction. This theory has been held in higher esteem since the 1970s than it was for a long period before (see the work of Rees, Gaukroger and Pérez-Ramos 1988, 201–85). Nevertheless, it is doubtful that Bacon's critics, who were associated with the traditions of positivism and analytical philosophy, acquired sufficient knowledge of his writings to produce solid warrants for their criticisms (Cohen 1970, 124–34; Cohen 1985, 58ff.; on the general problem of induction see, e.g., Hempel 1966; Swinburne (ed.) 1974; Lambert and Brittan 1979 [1987]). In comparison to the neglect of Bacon in the twentieth century, a more recent and deeper assessment of his work has arisen in connection with the “Oxford Francis Bacon” project, which was launched in the late 1990s by Graham Rees, who directed it until his death in 2009; it is now under the general editorship of Brian Vickers.

In Bacon's thought we encounter a relation between science and social philosophy, since his ideas concerning a utopian transformation of society presuppose an integration into the social framework of his program concerning natural philosophy and technology as the two forms of the maker's knowledge. From his point of view, which was influenced by Puritan conceptions, early modern society has to make sure that losses caused by the Fall are compensated for, primarily by man's enlargement of knowledge, providing the preconditions for a new form of society which combines scientia nova and the millennium, according to the prophecy of Daniel 12:4 (Hill 1971, 85–130). Science as a social endeavor is seen as a collective project for the improvement of social structures. On the other hand, a strong collective spirit in society may function as a conditio sine qua non for reforming natural philosophy. Bacon's famous argument that it is wise not to confound the Book of Nature with the Book of God comes into focus, since the latter deals with God's will (inscrutable for man) and the former with God's work, the scientific explanation or appreciation of which is a form of Christian divine service. Successful operations in natural philosophy and technology help to improve the human lot in a way which makes the hardships of life after the Fall obsolete. It is important to note that Bacon's idea of a—to a certain extent—Christian society by no means conveys Christian pessimism in the vein of patristic thinkers but rather displays a clear optimism as the result of compounding the problem of truth with the scope of human freedom and sovereignty (Brandt 1979, 21).

With regard to Bacon's Two Books—the Book of God and the Book of Nature—one has to keep in mind that man, when given free access to the Book of Nature, should not content himself with merely reading it. He also has to find out the names by which things are called. If man does so, not only will he be restored to his status a noble and powerful being, but the Book of God will also lose importance, from a traditional point of view, in comparison to the Book of Nature. This is what Blumenberg referred to as the “asymmetry of readability” (Blumenberg 1981, 86–107). But the process of reading is an open-ended activity, so that new knowledge and the expansion of the system of disciplines can no longer be restricted by concepts such as the completeness and eternity of knowledge (Klein 2004a, 73).

According to Bacon, the Book of God refers to his will, the Book of Nature to his works. He never gives a hint in his works that he has concealed any message of unbelief for the sophisticated reader; but he emphasized: (1) that religion and science should be kept separate and, (2) that they were nevertheless complementary to each other. For Bacon, the attack of theologians on human curiosity cannot be founded on a rational basis. His statement that “all knowledge is to be limited by religion, and to be referred to use and action” (Bacon III [1887], 218) does not express a general verdict on theoretical curiosity, but instead provides a normative framework for the tasks of science in a universal sense. Already in the dedicatory letter to James I in his Advancement of Learning , Bacon attacks “the zeal and jealousy of divines” (Bacon III, 264) and in his manuscript Filum Labyrinthi of 1607, he “thought … how great opposition and prejudice natural philosophy had received by superstition, and the immoderate and blind zeal of religion” (Bacon VI [1863], 421). As Calvin had done long before him in the Institutes , Bacon stated that since God created the physical world, it was a legitimate object of man's knowledge, a conviction which he illustrated with the famous example of King Solomon in The Advancement of Learning (Zagorin 1999, 49–50; see also Kocher 1953, 27–8). Bacon praises Solomon's wisdom, which seems to be more like a game than an example of man's God-given thirst for knowledge:

The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God's playfellows in that game, considering the great commandment of wits and means, whereby nothing needeth to be hidden from them. (Bacon III [1887], 299; Blumenberg, 1973, 196–200)

From this perspective, the punishment of mankind on account of the very first disobedience by Adam and Eve can be seen in a different light from that of theological interpretations. In Bacon's view, this disobedience and its consequences can be remedied in two ways: (1) by religion and moral imperatives, and (2) by advancement in the arts and sciences: “the purpose in advancing arts and sciences is the glory of God and the relief of man's estate” (Wormald 1993, 82).

The two remedies, which are interconnected with the moral dimension, refer to the advancement of learning and religion. All three together (the advancement of learning, religion, and morality) are combined in such a way that they promote each other mutually; consequently, limited outlooks on coping with life and knowledge are ruled out completely in these three fields.

The ethical dimension of Bacon's thought has been underrated by generations of scholars. Time and again a crude utilitarianism has been derived from Book I, Aphorism 1 of the Novum Organum ; this cannot, however, withstand a closer analysis of his thought. Since Bacon's philosophy of science tries to answer the question of how man can overcome the deficiencies of earthly life resulting from the Fall, he enters the realm of ethical reflection. The improvement of mankind's lot by means of philosophy and science does not start from a narrow utilitarian point of view, involving sheer striving for profit and supporting the power or influence of select groups of men, but instead emphasizes the construction of a better world for mankind, which might come into existence through the ascertaining of truths about nature's workings (Bacon III [1887], 242). Thus, the perspective of the universal in Bacon's ethical thought is given predominance. The range of science and technology in their ethical meaning transcends the realm of the application of tools and/or instruments, in so far as the aim is the transformation of whole systems. Since causality and finality can interact on the basis of human will and knowledge, a plurality of worlds becomes feasible (Bacon V [1889], 506–7). Moral philosophy is closely connected to ethical reflections on the relationship between the nature of virtues—habitual or innate?—and their use in life, privately and collectively. Any application of the principles of virtue presupposes for Bacon the education of the mind, so that we learn what is good and what should be attained (Gaukroger 2006, 204–5 and passim):

The main and primitive division of moral knowledge seemeth to be into the Exemplar or Platform of Good, and the Regimen of Culture of the Mind; the one describing the nature of good, the other prescribing rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto (Bacon III [1887], 419).

So, already in his Advancement of Learning Bacon studied the nature of good and distinguished various kinds of good. He insisted on the individual's duty to the public. Private moral self-control and the concomitant obligations are relevant for behavior and action in society. One's ethical persona is connected to morality by reference to acceptable behaviour. Though what we can do may be limited, we have to muster our psychological powers and control our passions when dealing with ourselves and with others. We need to apply self-discipline and rational assessment, as well as restraining our passions, in order to lead an active moral life in society.

Thus, for Bacon, the acquisition of knowledge does not simply coincide with the possibility of exerting power. Scientific knowledge is a condition for the expansion and development of civilization. Therefore, knowledge and charity cannot be kept separate:

I humbly pray … that knowledge being now discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it, and which makes the mind of man to swell, we may not be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity…. Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all; that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from the lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it (Bacon IV [1901], 20f.: Instauratio Magna , Preface).

Finally, the view that Bacon's Nova Atlantis “concerns a utopian society that is carefully organized for the purposes of scientific research and virtuous living” (Urbach 1988, 10) holds true for his entire life's work. In Nova Atlantis, social, political, and scholarly life are all organized according to the maxim of efficiency; but the House of Solomon is a separate and highly esteemed institution for research, which nevertheless is closely connected to the overall system of Bensalem. In his utopian state, Bacon presents a thoroughgoing collective life in society and science, both of which are based on revealed religion. Religion—Christian in essence—is not dogmatic, but it instills into the people of Bensalem veneration for the wise and morally exemplary members of society, and—which is of the utmost importance—the strictest sense of discipline (Gaukroger 2001, 128–30). Discipline is indispensable for those involved in the religious life as well as for the researchers, since both must proceed methodically. The isomorphic structures of nature and science, on the one hand, society and religion, on the other, prescribe patterns of political procedure, social processes, and religious attitudes, which overcome any craving for individuality. If religion and scientific research are both shown as truthful in Bensalem, then, according to Bacon, the imagination functions as a means of illustrating scientific revelation: “Bacon's purpose is … to show that scientific research properly pursued is not inconsonant with religious propriety and social stability…” (Bierman 1963, 497). The scientists in Bensalem are sacred searchers for truth: ethics, religion, and science merge. Bacon's parabolic strategy, which we should not separate from the power of the idols, enables him to make much of his trick of introducing new ideas like a smuggler: his colored wares are smuggled into the minds of his readers by being visualized in terms of sacred and highly symbolic rituals (Peltonen 1996, 175). Science and religion are separated in Nova Atlantis, but they are also interrelated through the offices of the society of Bensalem. What Bacon obviously wants to make clear to his readers is that the example of Bensalem should free them from any fear that scientific progress will lead to chaos and upheaval. This crucial point has made by Jürgen Mittelstrass, who understands Bacon's Nova Atlantis as a utopia and regards utopias as

blueprints of practical reason, not of theoretical, that is: they set in exactly there, where the early modern idea of progress appears meagre with regards to the contents: within ethics and political theory. (Mittelstrass 1960, 369)

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• Quine, W. V. Q., 1951, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, The Philosophical Review 60: 20–43. Reprinted in Quine, 1963, From a Logical Point of View , New York: Harper Torchbook, pp. 20–46.
• Rae, A. I. M., 1986 [2000], Quantum physics: Illusion or Reality? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fourth Canto edition, 2000.
• Russell, B., 1948, Human Knowledge. Its Scope and its Limits , London: Allen & Unwin.
• Schäfer, L., 1998, “Duhems Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der Wissenschaftstheorie”, in: Duhem (1998), pp. X–XXXIII.
• Shell, H. R., 2004, “Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy's Occupation between Maker and Nature”, Configurations , 12(1): 1–40.
• Stegmüller, W., 1973, Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und Analytischen Philosophie, Band II: Theorie und Erfahrung. Zweiter Halbband. Theorienstruktur und Theoriendynamik , Berlin, Heidelberg, New York.
• Swinburne, R. (ed.), 1974, The Justification of Induction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Von Weizsäcker, C. F. and J. Juilfs, 1958, Physik der Gegenwart , Göttingen.
• Wright, G. H. von, 1951, A Treatise of Induction and Probability , London: Routledge and K. Pau.
• Zinner, E., 1988, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der copernicanischen Lehre , Munich.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Francis Bacon , entry by David Simpson in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

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Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance | Boyle, Robert | induction: problem of | Whewell, William

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Some of the passages in this entry are borrowed from Klein 2008.

Copyright © 2012 by Jürgen Klein

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• Introduction

Early legal career and political ambitions

Relationship with essex, career in the service of james i, fall from power.

• The intellectual background
• Bacon’s scheme
• The idols of the mind
• The classification of the sciences
• The new method
• Human philosophy
• Legacy and influence

• When and where did the Enlightenment take place?
• What led to the Enlightenment?
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Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon (born January 22, 1561, York House, London , England—died April 9, 1626, London) was the lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few dozen essays; by students of constitutional history for his power as a speaker in Parliament and in famous trials and as James I ’s lord chancellor; and intellectually as a man who claimed all knowledge as his province and, after a magisterial survey, urgently advocated new ways by which man might establish a legitimate command over nature for the relief of his estate.

Youth and early maturity

Bacon was born January 22, 1561, at York House off the Strand, London, the younger of the two sons of the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon , by his second marriage. Nicholas Bacon, born in comparatively humble circumstances, had risen to become lord keeper of the great seal. Francis’s cousin through his mother was Robert Cecil , later earl of Salisbury and chief minister of the crown at the end of Elizabeth I ’s reign and the beginning of James I’s. From 1573 to 1575 Bacon was educated at Trinity College , Cambridge, but his weak constitution caused him to suffer ill health there. His distaste for what he termed “unfruitful” Aristotelian philosophy began at Cambridge. From 1576 to 1579 Bacon was in France as a member of the English ambassador’s suite. He was recalled abruptly after the sudden death of his father, who left him relatively little money. Bacon remained financially embarrassed virtually until his death.

In 1576 Bacon had been admitted as an “ancient” (senior governor) of Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court that served as institutions for legal education , in London. In 1579 he took up residence there and after becoming a barrister in 1582 progressed in time through the posts of reader (lecturer at the Inn), bencher (senior member of the Inn), and queen’s (from 1603 king’s) counsel extraordinary to those of solicitor general and attorney general . Even as successful a legal career as this, however, did not satisfy his political and philosophical ambitions.

Bacon occupied himself with the tract “Temporis Partus Maximus” (“The Greatest Part of Time”) in 1582; it has not survived. In 1584 he sat as member of Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Dorset and subsequently represented Taunton , Liverpool , the County of Middlesex , Southampton , Ipswich , and the University of Cambridge . In 1589 a “Letter of Advice” to the queen and An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England indicated his political interests and showed a fair promise of political potential by reason of their levelheadedness and disposition to reconcile . In 1593 came a setback to his political hopes: he took a stand objecting to the government’s intensified demand for subsidies to help meet the expenses of the war against Spain. Elizabeth took offense, and Bacon was in disgrace during several critical years when there were chances for legal advancement.

Meanwhile, sometime before July 1591, Bacon had become acquainted with Robert Devereux , the young earl of Essex, who was a favourite of the queen, although still in some disgrace with her for his unauthorized marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney . Bacon saw in the earl the “fittest instrument to do good to the State” and offered Essex the friendly advice of an older, wiser, and more subtle man. Essex did his best to mollify the queen, and when the office of attorney general fell vacant, he enthusiastically but unsuccessfully supported the claim of Bacon. Other recommendations by Essex for high offices to be conferred on Bacon also failed.

By 1598 Essex’s failure in an expedition against Spanish treasure ships made him harder to control; and although Bacon’s efforts to divert his energies to Ireland, where the people were in revolt, proved only too successful, Essex lost his head when things went wrong and he returned against orders. Bacon certainly did what he could to accommodate matters but merely offended both sides; in June 1600 he found himself as the queen’s learned counsel taking part in the informal trial of his patron. Essex bore him no ill will and shortly after his release was again on friendly terms with him. But after Essex’s abortive attempt of 1601 to seize the queen and force her dismissal of his rivals, Bacon, who had known nothing of the project, viewed Essex as a traitor and drew up the official report on the affair. This, however, was heavily altered by others before publication.

After Essex’s execution Bacon, in 1604, published the Apologie in Certaine Imputations Concerning the Late Earle of Essex in defense of his own actions. It is a coherent piece of self-justification, but to posterity it does not carry complete conviction , particularly since it evinces no personal distress.

When Elizabeth died in 1603, Bacon’s letter-writing ability was directed to finding a place for himself and a use for his talents in James I ’s services. He pointed to his concern for Irish affairs, the union of the kingdoms, and the pacification of the church as proof that he had much to offer the new king.

Through the influence of his cousin Robert Cecil, Bacon was one of the 300 new knights dubbed in 1603. The following year he was confirmed as learned counsel and sat in the first Parliament of the new reign in the debates of its first session. He was also active as one of the commissioners for discussing a union with Scotland. In the autumn of 1605 he published his Advancement of Learning , dedicated to the king, and in the following summer he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a London alderman . Preferment in the royal service, however, still eluded him, and it was not until June 1607 that his petitions and his vigorous though vain efforts to persuade the Commons to accept the king’s proposals for union with Scotland were at length rewarded with the post of solicitor general. Even then, his political influence remained negligible, a fact that he came to attribute to the power and jealousy of Cecil, by then earl of Salisbury and the king’s chief minister. In 1609 his De Sapientia Veterum (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), in which he expounded what he took to be the hidden practical meaning embodied in ancient myths , came out and proved to be, next to the Essayes , his most popular book in his own lifetime. In 1614 he seems to have written The New Atlantis , his far-seeing scientific utopian work, which did not get into print until 1626.

After Salisbury’s death in 1612, Bacon renewed his efforts to gain influence with the king, writing a number of remarkable papers of advice upon affairs of state and, in particular, upon the relations between Crown and Parliament. The king adopted his proposal for removing Coke from his post as chief justice of the common pleas and appointing him to the King’s Bench, while appointing Bacon attorney general in 1613. During the next few years Bacon’s views about the royal prerogative brought him, as attorney general, increasingly into conflict with Coke, the champion of the common law and of the independence of the judges. It was Bacon who examined Coke when the king ordered the judges to be consulted individually and separately in the case of Edmond Peacham, a clergyman charged with treason as the author of an unpublished treatise justifying rebellion against oppression. Bacon has been reprobated for having taken part in the examination under torture of Peacham, which turned out to be fruitless. It was Bacon who instructed Coke and the other judges not to proceed in the case of commendams (i.e., holding of benefices in the absence of the regular incumbent) until they had spoken to the king. Coke’s dismissal in November 1616 for defying this order was quickly followed by Bacon’s appointment as lord keeper of the great seal in March 1617. The following year he was made lord chancellor and Baron Verulam, and in 1620/21 he was created Viscount St. Albans.

The main reason for this progress was his unsparing service in Parliament and the court, together with persistent letters of self-recommendation; according to the traditional account, however, he was also aided by his association with George Villiers , later duke of Buckingham, the king’s new favourite. It would appear that he became honestly fond of Villiers; many of his letters betray a feeling that seems warmer than timeserving flattery.

Among Bacon’s papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius Solutus (“Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad “like a Marchant’s wast booke where to enter all maner of remembrance of matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others, eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any maner of restraint.” This book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron , to study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the Tower of London to work on serviceable experiments. It displays the multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the king’s business, his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation. Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 drafts of his most-celebrated work, the Novum Organum , and wrote several minor philosophical works.

The major occupation of these years must have been the management of James, always with reference, remote or direct, to the royal finances. The king relied on his lord chancellor but did not always follow his advice. Bacon was longer sighted than his contemporaries and seems to have been aware of the constitutional problems that were to culminate in civil war; he dreaded innovation and did all he could, and perhaps more than he should, to safeguard the royal prerogative. Whether his policies were sound or not, it is evident that he was, as he later said, “no mountebank in the King’s services.”

By 1621 Bacon must have seemed impregnable, a favourite not by charm (though he was witty and had a dry sense of humour) but by sheer usefulness and loyalty to his sovereign; lavish in public expenditure (he was once the sole provider of a court masque); dignified in his affluence and liberal in his household; winning the attention of scholars abroad as the author of the Novum Organum , published in 1620, and the developer of the Instauratio Magna (“Great Instauration”), a comprehensive plan to reorganize the sciences and to restore man to that mastery over nature that he was conceived to have lost by the fall of Adam. But Bacon had his enemies. In 1618 he fell foul of George Villiers when he tried to interfere in the marriage of the daughter of his old enemy, Coke, and the younger brother of Villiers. Then, in 1621, two charges of bribery were raised against him before a committee of grievances over which he himself presided. The shock appears to have been twofold because Bacon, who was casual about the incoming and outgoing of his wealth, was unaware of any vulnerability and was not mindful of the resentment of two men whose cases had gone against them in spite of gifts they had made with the intent of bribing the judge . The blow caught him when he was ill, and he pleaded for extra time to meet the charges, explaining that genuine illness, not cowardice, was the reason for his request. Meanwhile, the House of Lords collected another score of complaints. Bacon admitted the receipt of gifts but denied that they had ever affected his judgment; he made notes on cases and sought an audience with the king that was refused. Unable to defend himself by discriminating between the various charges or cross-examining witnesses, he settled for a penitent submission and resigned the seal of his office, hoping that this would suffice . The sentence was harsh, however, and included a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower of London during the king’s pleasure, disablement from holding any state office, and exclusion from Parliament and the verge of court (an area of 12 miles radius centred on where the sovereign is resident). Bacon commented to Buckingham: “I acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation’s sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicolas Bacon’s time .” The magnanimity and wit of the epigram sets his case against the prevailing standards.

Bacon did not have to stay long in the Tower, but he found the ban that cut him off from access to the library of Charles Cotton , an English man of letters, and from consultation with his physician more galling. He came up against an inimical lord treasurer, and his pension payments were delayed. He lost Buckingham’s goodwill for a time and was put to the humiliating practice of roundabout approaches to other nobles and to Count Gondomar , the Spanish ambassador; remissions came only after vexations and disappointments. Despite all this his courage held, and the last years of his life were spent in work far more valuable to the world than anything he had accomplished in his high office. Cut off from other services, he offered his literary powers to provide the king with a digest of the laws, a history of Great Britain, and biographies of Tudor monarchs. He prepared memorandums on usury and on the prospects of a war with Spain; he expressed views on educational reforms; he even returned, as if by habit, to draft papers of advice to the king or to Buckingham and composed speeches he was never to deliver. Some of these projects were completed, and they did not exhaust his fertility. He wrote: “If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy.” Two out of a plan of six separate natural histories were composed— Historia Ventorum (“History of the Winds”) appeared in 1622 and Historia Vitae et Mortis (“History of Life and Death”) in the following year. Also in 1623 he published the De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum , a Latin translation, with many additions, of the Advancement of Learning . He also corresponded with Italian thinkers and urged his works upon them. In 1625 a third and enlarged edition of his Essayes was published.

Bacon in adversity showed patience, unimpaired intellectual vigour, and fortitude . Physical deprivation distressed him but what hurt most was the loss of favour; it was not until January 20, 1622/23, that he was admitted to kiss the king’s hand; a full pardon never came. Finally, in March 1626, driving one day near Highgate (a district to the north of London) and deciding on impulse to discover whether snow would delay the process of putrefaction, he stopped his carriage, purchased a hen, and stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, which brought on bronchitis, and he died at the earl of Arundel’s house nearby on April 9, 1626.

A-Level: Francis Bacon and the Scientific Revolution

The Four Humors, from Deutche Kalendar, 1498 (Pierpont Morgan Library)

How do we know that something is true?

The word science comes from the latin root scientia , meaning knowledge. But where does the knowledge that makes up science come from? How do you ever really know that something is true?

For instance, modern science tell us that some types of disease spread through tiny organisms. Medieval people believed instead that sickness arose from an imbalance of the body’s four humors. How do we know with certainty that modern science is correct? Microscopes enable us to see the germs that cause sickness, but when we look through microscopic lenses to examine microbes, how do we know our understanding of what they are and what they are doing is true? Of course, medieval philosophers did not have microscopic lenses—but if they did, they very likely would have disagreed with our modern understanding of disease. Believing in the inaccuracy of the human senses, and moreover of the human mind’s inability to correctly judge anything, medieval knowledge instead privileged ancient texts as the best way of making sense of the world.

Sir Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, c. 1622, oil on canvas, 470 x 610 cm (Dulwich Picture Gallery)

In 1620, around the time that people first began to look through microscopes, an English politician named Sir Francis Bacon developed a method for philosophers to use in weighing the truthfulness of knowledge. While Bacon agreed with medieval thinkers that humans too often erred in interpreting what their five senses perceived, he also realized that people’s sensory experiences provided the best possible means of making sense of the world. Because humans could incorrectly interpret anything they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt, Bacon insisted that they must doubt everything before assuming its truth.

Testing hypotheses

In order to test potential truths, or hypotheses, Bacon devised a method whereby scientists set up experiments to manipulate nature, and attempt to prove their hypotheses wrong. For example, in order to test the idea that sickness came from external causes, Bacon argued that scientists should expose healthy people to outside influences such as coldness, wetness, or other sick people to discover if any of these external variables resulted in more people getting sick. Knowing that many different causes for sickness might be missed by humans who are unable or unwilling to perceive them, Bacon insisted that experiments must be consistently repeated before truth can be known: a scientist must show that patients exposed to a specific variable more frequently got sick again, and again, and again.

Frontispiece for the Opere di Galileo Galilei , 1656, etching, 17.8 x 24.9 (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). Galileo is shown kneeling before personifications of mathematics (holding a compass), astronomy (with the crown of stars) and optics.

​Although modern scientists have revised many of the truths subsequently adopted by Bacon and his contemporaries, we still utilize the method of proving knowledge to be true via doubt and experimentation that Bacon laid out in 1620. Bacon’s philosophical work marks a very significant breakthrough for the study of the world around us, but it is important to stress that this method of investigation was not completed in a vacuum. Rather, Bacon’s work should be seen as a part of a widespread cultural revolution accelerated by the rise of the printing press in the fifteenth century.

Importance of the printing press

Advances in the ability to disseminate new ideas by making standardized letters, numbers, and diagrams repeatable allowed for an unprecedented level of cooperation among philosophers who could now build on each other’s ideas over long periods of time. It would be difficult to overstate the effect of the print revolution. Astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo began to share and build upon their experiments, and religious reformers began to publicize new (and increasingly radical) Protestant ideas. In a mutually beneficial relationship the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution encouraged philosophers to discover all they could about nature as a way to learn more about God, an undertaking that promoted a break with past authorities.

A direct engagement with nature

Artisans and craftspeople soon began engaging in the new “natural philosophy,” exemplifying the fact that a monumental shift in what constituted evidence for truth was under way. Not only did renaissance artisans create lenses to see, tools to measure, and artworks to replicate the natural world, but by the sixteenth century, they began to publish philosophical treatises asserting that through the imitation and reproduction of nature in their arts, they were able to achieve a state of direct engagement with nature. Rather than taking knowledge from ancient sources, they argued that true knowledge came from direct experience. Alchemists likewise prioritized direct engagement with nature. In using fire to divide elements into their “smallest” components (and discovering that there were more than four of them), alchemists promoted the revolutionary idea that observation of nature itself, rather than reliance on ancient authorities, provided the best foundation for knowledge.

Attributed to Bernard Palissy, Oval Basin , c. 1550, lead-glazed earthenware, 18 7/8 x 14 1/2″ (The J. Paul Getty Museum)

The Royal Society

These new ideas crystallized with the work of Francis Bacon. In his work as a politician he called for the development of an institution that would promote and regulate the acquisition of knowledge derived from observation. After considerable delay, caused by a civil war and the execution of King Charles I, the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. A gentleman’s club composed of tinkering aristocrats, the Royal Society promoted Bacon’s principles of exact observation and measurement of experiments in its periodical Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, generally credited as being the first scientific journal.

Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London , etching by Winceslaus Hollar, after John Evelyn, 1667. “The book was a manifesto of the Society’s aims and methods….primarily aimed at the king in the (unrealised) hope that he would fund their future activities. The frontispiece flatters Charles II by presenting him as a classical bust being wreathed by an allegorical figure of Fame. The Society President, Viscount Brouncker, points to the Latin inscription ‘Charles II founder and Patron of the Royal Society.’ Francis Bacon, gesturing towards an array of scientific instruments, is indentified as the ‘Renewer of Arts’.” (National Portrait Gallery, London)

Once Bacon’s philosophies regarding experimentation and observation came to be accepted, people began using them to harness nature for profit. The study of nature came to be less about changing traditional attitudes and beliefs, and more about stimulating the economy. By the end of the following century, the Scientific Revolution had given birth to an Industrial Revolution which dramatically transformed the daily lives of people around the world.  Western society has been moving forward on Bacon’s model for the past three hundred years. Perhaps though, we are in danger of forgetting the vital role doubt played in Bacon’s philosophy.  Even with powerful microscopes, there is still a lot that human senses miss.

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Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion of the scientific method.

(1561-1626)

Who Was Francis Bacon?

Francis Bacon served as attorney general and Lord Chancellor of England, resigning amid charges of corruption. His more valuable work was philosophical. Bacon took up Aristotelian ideas, arguing for an empirical, inductive approach, known as the scientific method, which is the foundation of modern scientific inquiry.

Statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon was born in London on January 22, 1561. His father, Sir Nicolas Bacon, was Lord Keeper of the Seal. His mother, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, was his father's second wife and daughter to Sir Anthony Cooke, a humanist who was Edward VI's tutor. Francis Bacon’s mother was also the sister-in-law of Lord Burghley.

The younger of Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne's two sons, Francis Bacon began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1573, when he was 12 years old. He completed his course of study at Trinity in December 1575. The following year, Bacon enrolled in a law program at Honourable Society of Gray's Inn, the school his brother Anthony attended. Finding the curriculum at Gray's Inn stale and old fashioned, Bacon later called his tutors "men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells if a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their dictator." Bacon favored the new Renaissance humanism over Aristotelianism and scholasticism, the more traditional schools of thought in England at the time.

A year after he enrolled at Gray's Inn, Bacon left school to work under Sir Amyas Paulet, the British ambassador to France, during his mission in Paris. Two and a half years later, he was forced to abandon the mission prematurely and return to England when his father died unexpectedly. His meager inheritance left him broke. Bacon turned to his uncle, Lord Burghley, for help in finding a well-paid post as a government official, but Bacon’s uncle shot him down. Still just a teen, Francis Bacon was scrambling to find a means of earning a decent living.

Counsel and Statesman

Fortunately for Bacon, in 1581, he landed a job as a member for Cornwall in the House of Commons. Bacon was also able to return to Gray's Inn and complete his education. By 1582, he was appointed the position of outer barrister. Bacon's political career took a big leap forward in 1584 when he composed A Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth, his very first political memorandum.

Bacon held his place in Parliament for nearly four decades, from 1584 to 1617, during which time he was extremely active in politics, law and the royal court. In 1603, three years before he married heiress Alice Barnham, Bacon was knighted upon James I's ascension to the British throne. He continued to work his way swiftly up the legal and political ranks, achieving solicitor general in 1607 and attorney general six years later. In 1616, his career peaked when he was invited to join the Privy Council. Just a year later, he reached the same position of his father, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. In 1618, Bacon surpassed his father's achievements when he was promoted to the lofty title of Lord Chancellor, one of the highest political offices in England. In 1621, Bacon became Viscount St. Albans.

In 1621, the same year that Bacon became Viscount St. Albans, he was accused of accepting bribes and impeached by Parliament for corruption. Some sources claim that Bacon was set up by his enemies in Parliament and the court faction, and was used as a scapegoat to protect the Duke of Buckingham from public hostility. Bacon was tried and found guilty after he confessed. He was fined a hefty 40,000 pounds and sentenced to the Tower of London, but, fortunately, his sentence was reduced and his fine was lifted. After four days of imprisonment, Bacon was released, at the cost of his reputation and his long- standing place in Parliament; the scandal put a serious strain on 60-year-old Bacon's health.

Philosopher of Science

Bacon remained in St. Alban's after the collapse of his political career. Retired, he was now able to focus on one of his other passions, the philosophy of science. From the time he had reached adulthood, Bacon was determined to alter the face of natural philosophy. He strove to create a new outline for the sciences, with a focus on empirical scientific methods—methods that depended on tangible proof—while developing the basis of applied science. Unlike the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato, Bacon's approach placed an emphasis on experimentation and interaction, culminating in "the commerce of the mind with things." Bacon's new scientific method involved gathering data, prudently analyzing it and performing experiments to observe nature's truths in an organized way. He believed that when approached this way, science could become a tool for the betterment of humankind.

Biographer Loren Eisley described Bacon's compelling desire to invent a new scientific method, stating that Bacon, "more fully than any man of his time, entertained the idea of the universe as a problem to be solved, examined, meditated upon, rather than as an eternally fixed stage upon which man walked." Bacon himself claimed that his empirical scientific method would spark a light in nature that would "eventually disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the universe."

During his young adulthood, Bacon attempted to share his ideas with his uncle, Lord Burghley, and later with Queen Elizabeth in his Letter of Advice. The two did not prove to be a receptive audience to Bacon's evolving philosophy of science. It was not until 1620, when Bacon published Book One of Novum Organum Scientiarum (novum organum is Latin for "new method"), that Bacon established himself as a reputable philosopher of science.

According to Bacon in Novum Organum , the scientific method should begin with the "Tables of Investigation." It should then proceed to the "Table of Presence," which is a list of circumstances under which the event being studied occurred. "The Table of Absence in Proximity" is then used to identify negative occurrences. Next, the "Table of Comparison" allows the observer to compare and contrast the severity or degree of the event. After completing these steps, the scientific observer is required to perform a short survey that will help identify the possible cause of the occurrence. Unlike a typical hypothesis, however, Bacon did not emphasize the importance of testing one's theory. Instead, he believed that observation and analysis were sufficient in producing a greater comprehension, or "ladder of axioms," that creative minds could use to reach still further understanding.

Writing Career

During his career as counsel and statesman, Bacon often wrote for the court. In 1584, he wrote his first political memorandum, A Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth . In 1592, to celebrate the anniversary of the queen's coronation, he wrote an entertaining speech in praise of knowledge. The year 1597 marked Bacon's first publication, a collection of essays about politics. The collection was later expanded and republished in 1612 and 1625.

In 1605, Bacon published The Advancement of Learning in an unsuccessful attempt to rally supporters for the sciences. In 1609, he departed from political and scientific genres when he released On the Wisdom of the Ancients , his analysis of ancient mythology.

Bacon then resumed writing about science, and in 1620, published Novum Organum , presented as Part Two of The Great Saturation . In 1622, he wrote a historical work for Prince Charles, entitled The History of Henry VII . Bacon also published Historia Ventorum and Historia Vitae et Mortis that same year. In 1623, he published De Augmentis Scientarium , a continuation of his view on scientific reform. In 1624, his works The New Atlantis and Apothegms were published. Sylva Sylvarium, which was published in 1627, was among the last of his written works.

Although Bacon's body of work covered a fairly broad range of topics, all of his writing shared one thing in common: It expressed Bacon's desire to change antiquated systems.

Death and Legacy

In March 1626, Bacon was performing a series of experiments with ice. While testing the effects of cold on the preservation and decay of meat, he stuffed a hen with snow near Highgate, England, and caught a chill. Ailing, Bacon stayed at Lord Arundel's home in London. The guest room where Bacon resided was cold and musty. He soon developed bronchitis. On April 9, 1626, a week after he had arrived at Lord Arundel's estate, Francis Bacon died.

In the years after Bacon's death, his theories began to have a major influence on the evolving field of 17th-century European science. British scientists belonging to Robert Boyle's circle, also known as the "Invisible College," followed through on Bacon's concept of a cooperative research institution, applying it toward their establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662. The Royal Society utilized Bacon's applied science approach and followed the steps of his reformed scientific method. Scientific institutions followed this model in kind. Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes played the role of Bacon's last amanuensis. The "father of classic liberalism," John Locke, as well as 18th-century encyclopedists and inductive logicians David Hume and John Mill, also showed Bacon's influence in their work.

Today, Bacon is still widely regarded as a major figure in scientific methodology and natural philosophy during the English Renaissance. Having advocated an organized system of obtaining knowledge with a humanitarian goal in mind, he is largely credited with ushering in the new early modern era of human understanding.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Francis Bacon
• Birth Year: 1561
• Birth date: January 22, 1561
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion of the scientific method.
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• Death Year: 1626
• Death date: April 9, 1626
• Death City: London
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Scientific Method

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The Scientific Method was first used during the Scientific Revolution (1500-1700). The method combined theoretical knowledge such as mathematics with practical experimentation using scientific instruments, results analysis and comparisons, and finally peer reviews, all to better determine how the world around us works. In this way, hypotheses were rigorously tested, and laws could be formulated which explained observable phenomena. The goal of this scientific method was to not only increase human knowledge but to do so in a way that practically benefitted everyone and improved the human condition.

A New Approach: Bacon 's Vision

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, and author. He is considered one of the founders of modern scientific research and scientific method, even as "the father of modern science " because he proposed a new combined method of empirical (observable) experimentation and shared data collection so that humanity might finally discover all of nature's secrets and improve itself. Bacon championed the need for systematic and detailed empirical study, as this was the only way to increase humanity's understanding and, for him, more importantly, gain control of nature. This approach sounds quite obvious today, but at the time, the highly theoretical approach of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE) still dominated thought. Verbal arguments had become more important than what could actually be seen in the world. Further, natural philosophers had become preoccupied with why things happen instead of first ascertaining what was happening in nature.

Bacon rejected the current backward-looking approach to knowledge, that is, the seemingly never-ending attempt to prove the ancients right. Instead, new thinkers and experimenters, said Bacon, should act like the new navigators who had pushed beyond the limits of the known world. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had shown there was land across the Atlantic Ocean. Vasco da Gama (c. 1469-1524) had explored the globe in the other direction. Scientists, as we would call them today, had to be similarly bold. Old knowledge had to be rigorously tested to see that it was worth keeping. New knowledge had to be acquired by thoroughly testing nature without preconceived ideas. Reason had to be applied to data collected from experiments, and the same data had to be openly shared with other thinkers so that it could be tested again, comparing it to what others had discovered. Finally, this knowledge must then be used to improve the human condition; otherwise, it was no use pursuing it in the first place. This was Bacon's vision. What he proposed did indeed come about but with three notable factors added to the scientific method. These were mathematics, hypotheses, and technology.

The Importance of Experiments & Instruments

Experiments had always been carried out by thinkers, from ancient figures like Archimedes (l. 287-212 BCE) to the alchemists of the Middle Ages, but their experiments were usually haphazard, and very often thinkers were trying to prove a preconceived idea. In the Scientific Revolution, experimentation became a more systematic and multi-layered activity involving many different people. This more rigorous approach to gathering observable data was also a reaction against traditional activities and methods such as magic, astrology, and alchemy , all ancient and secret worlds of knowledge-gathering that now came under attack.

At the outset of the Scientific Revolution, experiments were any sort of activity carried out to see what would happen, a sort of anything-goes approach to satisfying scientific curiosity. It is important to note, though, that the modern meaning of scientific experiment is rather different, summarised here by W. E. Burns: "the creation of an artificial situation designed to study scientific principles held to apply in all situations" (95). It is fair to say, though, that the modern approach to experimentation, with its highly specialised focus where only one specific hypothesis is being tested, would not have become possible without the pioneering experimenters of the Scientific Revolution.

The first well-documented practical experiment of our period was made by William Gilbert using magnets; he published his findings in 1600 in On the Magnet . The work was pioneering because "Central to Gilbert's enterprise was the claim that you could reproduce his experiments and confirm his results: his book was, in effect, a collection of experimental recipes" (Wootton, 331).

There remained sceptics of experimentation, those who stressed that the senses could be misled when the reason of the mind could not be. One such doubter was René Descartes (1596-1650), but if anything, he and other natural philosophers who questioned the value of the work of the practical experimenters were responsible for creating a lasting new division between philosophy and what we would today call science. The term "science" was still not widely used in the 17th century, instead, many experimenters referred to themselves as practitioners of "experimental philosophy". The first use in English of the term "experimental method" was in 1675.

The first truly international effort in coordinated experiments involved the development of the barometer. This process began with the efforts of the Italian Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) in 1643. Torricelli discovered that mercury could be raised within a glass tube when one end of that tube was placed in a container of mercury. The air pressure on the mercury in the container pushed the mercury in the tube up around 30 inches (76 cm) higher than the level in the container. In 1648, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and his brother-in- law Florin Périer conducted experiments using similar apparatus, but this time tested under different atmospheric pressures by setting up the devices at a variety of altitudes on the side of a mountain. The scientists noted that the level of the mercury in the glass tube fell the higher up the mountain readings were taken.

The Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) named the new instrument a barometer and conclusively demonstrated the effect of air pressure by using a barometer inside an air pump where a vacuum was established. Boyle formulated a principle which became known as 'Boyle's Law'. This law states that the pressure exerted by a certain quantity of air varies inversely in proportion to its volume (provided temperatures are constant). The story of the development of the barometer became typical throughout the Scientific Revolution: natural phenomena were observed, instruments were invented to measure and understand these observable facts, scientists collaborated (sometimes even competed), and so they extended the work of each other until, finally, a universal law could be devised which explained what was being seen. This law could then be used as a predictive device in future experiments.

Experiments like Robert Boyle's air pump demonstrations and Isaac Newton 's use of a prism to demonstrate white light is made up of different coloured light continued the trend of experimentation to prove, test, and adjust theories. Further, these endeavours highlight the importance of scientific instruments in the new method of inquiry. The scientific method was employed to invent useful and accurate instruments, which were, in turn, used in further experiments. The invention of the telescope (c. 1608), microscope (c. 1610), barometer (1643), thermometer (c. 1650), pendulum clock (1657), air pump (1659), and balance spring watch (1675) all allowed fine measurements to be made which previously had been impossible. New instruments meant that a whole new range of experiments could be carried out. Whole new specialisations of study became possible, such as meteorology, microscopic anatomy, embryology, and optics.

The scientific method came to involve the following key components:

• conducting practical experiments
• conducting experiments without prejudice of what they should prove
• using deductive reasoning (creating a generalisation from specific examples) to form a hypothesis (untested theory), which is then tested by an experiment, after which the hypothesis might be accepted, altered, or rejected based on empirical (observable) evidence
• conducting multiple experiments and doing so in different places and by different people to confirm the reliability of the results
• an open and critical review of the results of an experiment by peers
• the formulation of universal laws (inductive reasoning or logic) using, for example, mathematics
• a desire to gain practical benefits from scientific experiments and a belief in the idea of scientific progress

(Note: the above criteria are expressed in modern linguistic terms, not necessarily those terms 17th-century scientists would have used since the revolution in science also caused a revolution in the language to describe it).

Scientific Institutions

The scientific method really took hold when it became institutionalised, that is, when it was endorsed and employed by official institutions like the learned societies where thinkers tested their theories in the real world and worked collaboratively. The first such society was the Academia del Cimento in Florence, founded in 1657. Others soon followed, notably the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1667. Four years earlier, London had gained its own academy with the foundation of the Royal Society . The founding fellows of this society credited Bacon with the idea, and they were keen to follow his principles of scientific method and his emphasis on sharing and communicating scientific data and results. The Berlin Academy was founded in 1700 and the St. Petersburg Academy in 1724. These academies and societies became the focal points of an international network of scientists who corresponded, read each other's works, and even visited each other as the new scientific method took hold.

Official bodies were able to fund expensive experiments and assemble or commission new equipment. They showed these experiments to the public, a practice that illustrates that what was new here was not the act of discovery but the creation of a culture of discovery. Scientists went much further than a real-time audience and ensured their results were printed for a far wider (and more critical) readership in journals and books. Here, in print, the experiments were described in great detail, and the results were presented for all to see. In this way, scientists were able to create "virtual witnesses" to their experiments. Now, anyone who cared to be could become a participant in the development of knowledge acquired through science.

Subscribe to topic Related Content Books Cite This Work License

Bibliography

• Burns, William E. The Scientific Revolution in Global Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Burns, William E. The Scientific Revolution. ABC-CLIO, 2001.
• Bynum, William F. & Browne, Janet & Porter, Roy. Dictionary of the History of Science . Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Henry, John. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science . Red Globe Press, 2008.
• Jardine, Lisa. Ingenious Pursuits. Nan A. Talese, 1999.
• Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge. Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Wootton, David. The Invention of Science. Harper, 2015.

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Famous Scientists

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon discovered and popularized the scientific method, whereby the laws of science are discovered by gathering and analyzing data from experiments and observations, rather than by using logic-based arguments.

The Baconian method marked the beginning of the end for the 2,000-year-old natural philosophy of Aristotle, unleashing a wave of new scientific discoveries, particularly in the hands of devotees such as Robert Boyle.

Francis Bacon was born into a prominent wealthy family in London, England, on January 2, 1561. He was the family’s youngest son.

Bacon’s father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who held the powerful government position of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

His mother was Anne Cooke, a scholar, translator, and holder of strong Puritan beliefs. She tried hard to ensure her children were as well-educated and as puritanical as she was. Anne Cooke’s father had been tutor to King Henry the Eighth’s son, who became King Edward the Sixth of England.

Other notable people who lived in the same era as Bacon include Galileo Galilei and William Shakespeare, both born in 1564, and Johannes Kepler , born in 1571.

Bacon’s education reflected his upper-class background. He was tutored at home until, aged 12, he entered the University of Cambridge, where he was again tutored privately. His lessons were conducted entirely in Latin, focusing on arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, grammar, music theory, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were considered the most important subjects. Bacon earned a reputation as a serious boy who worked hard.

At Cambridge and other European universities the sciences, then known as natural philosophy, were dominated by the ancient works of Aristotle .

Bacon began to think that, although Aristotle’s intellect was formidable, his ideas and methods led nowhere. Bacon deplored the unquestioning way scholars treated Aristotle’s work, making the Ancient Greek philosopher a dictator in all but name – a dictator Bacon believed now stood in the way of scientific progress.

Francis Bacon and Science

We have the technology.

Bacon produced a large body of scientific work. His science produced no world-changing results, but his guidelines for how science should be carried out did .

It was obvious to Bacon that Europe in the early 1600s enjoyed significantly better technology than the classical world had. For example, the printing press had democratized knowledge; gunpowder had made armies much more powerful; and the magnetic compass had facilitated better navigation and the discovery of the Americas.

He found it monumentally frustrating that people’s intellectual understanding of the world had not progressed beyond that of the Ancient Greeks’.

The Scientific New World

The image below is taken from Instauratio magna , a multi-volume work in which Bacon explained how new knowledge in all human activities could be discovered.

The image conveys an important symbolic message from Bacon to his readers.

Part of the title page illustration of Instauratio magna .

Bacon believed it was time to move beyond the ancient philosophies which had come from Mediterranean countries, and with fresh minds and new methods set out on an up-to-date exploration of the laws of Nature. The discoveries would be rewarding, both financially and intellectually, as the voyages to the New World had been.

The image shows one ship returning, bringing new discoveries, while another sets off in search of more. The words in Latin at the bottom of the image are “Multi pertransibunt & augebitur Scientia.” The meaning is: “Many will pass through and knowledge will be increased.”

Throwing Out Aristotle

The attitude of most scholars in the early 1600s was, in short, that after you had mastered what Aristotle had to say about Nature, you knew everything. You could then go off and do something else.

Bacon’s objective was to replace Aristotle and Plato’s works, which were based on logical and philosophical arguments, with a new body of scientific knowledge secured by experiments and observations.

He also objected to the tendency of Aristotle, Plato, and others including Pythagoras to mix scientific ideas with religious ideas. Bacon believed that the two should be kept separate. He was highly suspicious of people who said the laws of nature were there as part of a greater purpose. He thought they were there to be discovered and, if possible, exploited.

Bacon’s most significant work, Novum Organum ( The New Tool ), described what came to be called the Baconian Method of science. Published in 1620, it was part of his Instauratio magna series of books.

The Inductive Method

Bacon championed the inductive method in science. This means you move from specific facts to a general rule. You do not start with a hypothesis or theory.

Aristotle, on the other hand, used the deductive method. He would move from a general rule to specific facts. He started with rules he had developed from logical arguments.

For example, imagine you lived in the 1800s and were interested in the electric conductivity of solids.

An inductive investigation could have involved measuring the electric conductivities of a number of solid materials such as silver, gold, iron, platinum, lead, copper, zinc, tin, brass, sulfur, phosphorus, wood, table salt, granite, sand and sugar. The specific results would allow you to state the general rule that metals conduct electricity better than nonmetals.

In a deductive investigation Aristotle, had he still been around, would have started with his general rule saying something like: “I believe that because [insert logical argument here], metals will be better electrical conductors than nonmetals.” He would then have used his rule to say that, for example, copper will be a better conductor than wood.

Of course, if Aristotle’s rule turned out to be wrong, as it often did, then anyone who used his ideas would end up with a defective understanding of Nature, as indeed they often did.

Interrogating Nature to Discover her Laws

Bacon believed that Nature never tells you her secrets easily. (He visualized Nature as female.)

Hard work and vigorous interrogation are required. You need to devise experiments that ask Nature the right questions. Only then might she reveal the truth to you.

She would not reveal the truth to philosophers such as Aristotle, who thought they could sit in a chair or lie on a beach and coax her into revealing her secrets simply by thinking. You needed to gather solid data first to guide your thinking.

The Triumph of Bacon’s Ideas

The man who epitomized the success of Bacon’s inductive method was born nine months after Bacon died.

His name was Robert Boyle .

Boyle was a Baconian. He believed that amassing data by experiment would allow him to discover new laws of Nature. And he was right. Using the inductive method he tore away the alchemists’ bonds of mysticism, unleashing chemistry as a genuine quantitative science.

With the advantage of greater hands-on laboratory experience that Bacon, Boyle was able to enhance Bacon’s method. Boyle was the first person to write specific experimental guidance for other scientists, emphasizing the importance of achieving reliable, repeatable results.

In 1660 Boyle helped found the Royal Society, the oldest scientific society in existence.

History of the Royal Society . The frontispiece features William Brouncker, the founding President of the Royal Society and Francis Bacon seated alongside a bust of Charles II, the founding King.

The esteem Bacon was held in by the society is shown by his appearance on the frontispiece (see image) of the 1702 edition of History of the Royal Society by Thomas Sprat, published 76 years after Bacon’s death.

Of course, while Bacon was writing in England about the importance of data and observations, Galileo in Italy had actually gathered data and observations, producing new ideas that were to replace Aristotle’s physics and astronomy. Galileo’s work was also an inspiration to Boyle. In England itself, William Gilbert had already practiced what Bacon preached, discovering by experiment in 1600 that our planet acts like a giant magnet.

Likewise Johannes Kepler in Bohemia had discovered the laws of planetary motion using the superb planet data gathered by Tycho Brahe . Kepler’s laws revealed, among other things, that the earth and other planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun.

Bacon, Galileo, Gilbert, and Kepler probably did more than anyone else to fatally undermine Aristole’s natural philosophy and begin a new age of rational science.

The Crucial Experiment

In Novum Organum Bacon considered the instantia crucis – the crucial example. In a situation where there are competing theories, this would be the example that proves which theory is true. Obviously, a crucial example is highly desirable in science.

In the 1660s Bacon’s idea was developed into the experimentum crucis – the crucial experiment – by Robert Boyle and/or Robert Hooke .

In 1672 Isaac Newton performed the most famous crucial experiment of all, when he used a glass prism to split sunlight into a rainbow of colors and then recombined these colors into white light using a second prism. This proved that sunlight consists of light of different colors which have different refractive indexes.

Newton’s crucial experiment with two prisms. The result absolutely demolished competing theories, such as the proposal that glass added the colors to sunlight.

The Scientific Method Today – The Hypothetico Deductive Method

Bacon’s ideas are still used today – the vital importance to science of experimental data and observations are now beyond doubt.

Nowadays many scientists use the Hypothetico Deductive Method . The basis of this method is that a scientist states a hypothesis and then uses data to establish whether the hypothesis is true or false. When using this method it is important that the hypothesis is written in such a way that clear criteria are stated to establish its falseness.

Noble Science, Ignoble Greed

Bacon’s attempts to organize and systematize the way science is done were only a small part of his life’s work. He actually devoted most of his time to his legal career, in which he rose to be one of the most powerful men in England, before he was brought swiftly to earth by a bribery and corruption scandal.

Legal and Political Career: Rise and Fall

Rise At the age of 15, Bacon followed in his father’s footsteps and began studying to become a lawyer. He moved to London for training at Gray’s Inn. Before his sixteenth birthday he began a three-year tour of Europe taking in France, Italy and Spain. A grand tour like this was seen in wealthy society as the perfect way to complete a young person’s formal education. In Bacon’s case, his father placed him with the English Ambassador to France for two years, so he could learn politics and diplomacy. Despite his young age, Bacon performed diplomatic duties on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s government in France.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, news reached Bacon that his father had died. He returned to England and subsequently began working very seriously as a lawyer. His legal and political careers would eventually carry him to the highest position in England’s legal profession.

• Aged 20 he became a Member of Parliament
• Aged 42 he was knighted for his service to King James, becoming Sir Francis Bacon.
• Aged 52 he was appointed as England’s Attorney General
• Aged 56 he reached the top, becoming Lord High-Chancellor of England

His career really took off in 1603 when he was 42 years old. In that year Queen Elizabeth died and was replaced by King James. Bacon was a very loyal servant to King James.

A Man of Many Talents As he grew older, Bacon’s considerable skill as a writer also began to emerge. Starting in his thirties he authored a prodigious number of highly regarded essays on a wide variety of topics including friendship, wisdom, health, beauty, anger, parents & children, atheism, the union of England & Scotland, and innovation.

He seems to have needed little sleep. He would go to bed late and rise early, giving him an unusually long working day.

The quality and quantity of his work is so high that a number of people have proposed that William Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Bacon, who needed to remain anonymous because of his political ambitions.

He certainly had a way with words. Here he is on good government:

Fall Bacon reached the top when, at the start of 1618, he became Lord High-Chancellor of England.

His term at the top of the greasy pole was short.

His political downfall came in 1621, when he was 60, and was perhaps inevitable. Although he was a highly intelligent man and seems genuinely to have wanted to act in the best interests of his country, he also had an insatiable craving for money.

In terms of Bacon’s own words quoted above, the modern perception of him is that instead of spreading the manure fruitfully, he conspired to build his own colossal pile of it. But this is untrue. Bacon really did spread the money, in most years spending more than he earned. The fact that he married a woman many years his junior, and she had expensive tastes, might go some way to explaining this.

Bacon was eventually investigated for bribe taking and corruption. He admitted his guilt to this. In his defense he said that, although he had taken bribes, he had still applied the law correctly, even if this disadvantaged the people who had bribed him.

In fairness to Bacon, the giving of gifts in expectation of a favorable outcome was very common in the legal environment he worked in. He was not acting especially unusually, although had his Puritan mother still been alive, she would have been mortified by his behavior.

His punishment was minimal, particularly given the brutal punishments often inflicted for wrongdoing in those days. In the end he spent a few days in prison and was fined a large sum of money, but the fine was canceled. He was banned from holding any more positions in government, and he lost most of his government pension.

Some Personal Details and the End

Bacon married rather late in life, on May 10, 1606, at the age of 45. His bride was Alice Barnham. The marriage took place four days before her fourteenth birthday. Alice Barnham came from a wealthy family.

Alice Barnham appears to have been a rapacious woman, and for a time, her appetite for the trappings of wealth was amply satisfied. When Bacon was disgraced in 1621 she stuck with him at first, but in 1625 they broke up. The marriage had produced no children. Bacon died in the year following their separation.

He died because he spent too long working in low temperatures. This was the time of the “Little Ice Age” when winters in Europe were colder and longer than today. At the beginning of April 1626 snow still lay on the ground, and Bacon became inspired to carry out some experiments on food preservation by freezing a chicken. Unfortunately he became chilled by the cold conditions. He got a bad cough and his health then deteriorated rapidly.

On his deathbed, he wrote:

Francis Bacon died aged 65 on April 9, 1626 of pneumonia in Highgate, near London. He was buried at St Michael’s Church in the town of St Albans, where he owned a mansion on a 2,000 acre estate he inherited from his father.

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Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading Francis Bacon The works of Francis Bacon, Volume 2 H. Bryer, Bridge Street, Blackfriars, 1803

Arthur Rowland Skemp Francis Bacon T.C. & E.C. Jack, London, 1912

Nieves Mathews Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination Yale University Press, 1996

Brian Vickers Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Jul. – Sep., 1992), pp. 495-518

Tina Skouen, Ryan Stark Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society: A Sourcebook BRILL, 28 Nov 2014

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ISSN 2668-0998, ISSN-L 2668-0998 A publication of PhilScience Press

PhilScience Magazine

Contemporary science, philosophy of science, and science communication

Francis Bacon and the philosophy of the new scientific methodology

The period of transition from the Renaissance to the early modern era was marked by radical shifts in what concerns foundations of science and the theoretical approach of science, deviating many times from the traditional philosophical line standing since the ancient Greeks. Among the pioneers – philosophers and scientists – who contributed through their innovative views and theories to such shifts only two qualifies for being associated with the concept of scientific revolution – one is Galileo Galilei in Italy and the other is Francis Bacon, in England (although Copernicus is also a valuable candidate for the short list). Although they lived and created in about the same period, their work in founding the new science is independent of each other and focused on different philosophies and core concepts.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban by George Vertue, line engraving after Paul van Somer, 1728

Contrary to Galileo, who studied mathematics and taught it after attending the university, Francis Bacon was a lawyer, concerned more with law and religion than with science, and after his studies he did not take up a post at a university, but instead tried to start a political career.  There were his last years that brought him international fame, when he focused exclusively on his philosophical work, which influenced the scientific and philosophical community.

Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy against tradition

School of Athens , fresco by Raphael painted between 1509-1511.

Francis Bacon’ approach to the foundation of science was radical and critic, starting with the old ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Galileo at his turn also criticized the ancient Greek philosophy as no longer qualifying as a valid foundation for the new kind of science, especially in what concerns the physics that such philosophy has shaped. However, Francis Bacon’s criticism targeted the core concepts that linked that philosophy to the primary principles that human reason should follow in order to adequately investigate and discover nature. It was the natural and necessary attitude leading to the main revolutionary Baconian concept, that of methodology of science.

In particular, Bacon’s general objection to the Aristotle’s work is that, although it offers axioms for every scientific discipline, it lacks a supreme principle or a general theory of science, which to be applicable to all branches of natural history and philosophy. Bacon reformulates and changes into a functional form the Aristotelian concept of science as knowledge of necessary causes, according to which experience acquired through senses automatically shows us the things as they really are, while rejecting the Aristotelian logic based on metaphysics and focused on syllogism and dialectics (Klein, 2003).

The essential theoretical product of Francis Bacon’s critical organizing thought in regard to the new adequate science is the concept of philosophia prima , as a reference level for all scientific disciplines, distinct from metaphysics, where general categories of a general theory of science are treated as universal categories of thought that are relevant for all disciplines. It is the epistemological motivation for and the origin of the new concept of scientific method that Bacon proposes.  The necessity of philosophia prima is indicated in Bacon’s Novum Organum (part of his major work Instauratio Magna , 1620) as the basis for the materialistic concept of unity of sciences and the new methodological foundation of sciences.

One of Cambridge University libraries

One of Francis Bacon’s revolutionary attitude was the rejection on humanists’ learning ‘by the book’, arguing that they “hunt more after words than matter” (Bacon III, 1887, p.283). On the same line of argument, he criticizes the Cambridge University curriculum for being focused on dialectical and sophistical training asked of “minds empty and unfraught with matter” (Bacon III, 1887, p.326), as well as the technical literature of that time, for lacking a vision on nature and an innovative methodological program.

The Baconian revolution is also a systematic one. In his The Advancement of Learning (1605) he proposes a new structuring of the disciplines, on the same principle of opposing to the ancient tradition. This principle also assumes that science should concentrate on the investigation of new subjects instead of controversies, while rejecting superstition, zealous religiosity, and false authorities. This restructuring is based on a systematic vision of the knowledge domains, going along with the identification and critical description of their deficiencies. Therefore, it is not just a simple classification of knowledge, but is part of a new epistemology of science, grounded on philosophia prima . Advancing knowledge through natural philosophy is for Francis Bacon a contribution to the glorification of God, as it is for Galileo the dogmatic-free scientific truth empowered by mathematical truth.

Bacon’s theory of idols and the pyramid of knowledge

Francis Bacon is strongly systematic not only in what concerns his program of redesigning scientific knowledge (crystallized in his Instauratio Magna ), but also his own mere theory about science. He starts his investigation with an analysis of the human mind and the primary premises of human adequate reasoning, then moves to the acquisition of knowledge and only after these necessary prequisites are clarified he shapes the principles of the new methodology of science.

Bacon sees human mind not as the empiricist tabula rasa , but rather as a distorting mirror through which the images formed in our mind from the beginning do not depict an objective picture of the true objects. Therefore, we have to improve our mind before we start acquiring knowledge, in order for that to be objective. The “mirrored” cognitive distortions are amplified by what Bacon calls idols (of our mind). The ‘idols’ reflect misconceptions, fallacies, superstitions, imposture, and falsity coming from every day experience, including intellectual and including what we are provided with as knowledge from other people. In the interpretation of Malherbe (1996), idols are for Bacon products of the human imagination (due to the distorting mirror) and nothing more than “untested generalities”. Bacon includes the idols (as ‘false appearances’) in his taxonomy of errors along with sophistical fallacies and fallacies of interpretation. His doctrine of detection of fallacies is considered a precursory phase in the history of theories of error and an important theoretical contribution within the rise of modern empiricism (Brandt, 1979).

Mosaic from Pompeii (1st c. BC) depicting Plato’s Academy

For Bacon, once our mind is made free of the idols, we can acquire knowledge and this acquisition follows a certain structure and flow, expressed through the Baconian pyramid of knowledge: This pyramid has as its base the observations, then ascends to invariant relations, and then to more inclusive correlations until it reaches the stage of forms . The forms are more general than Aristotle’s forms as causes; they are the most general properties of matter and the last step for the human reason when investigating nature. Laws of nature are expressed through forms, where the continuous ascension ends. By these forms, the natural philosopher understands the general causes of the phenomena, however only the method leads to knowledge about nature.

By his pyramid, Bacon proposes progressive stages for the certitude, tightly related to his inductive method. For Bacon, there are two ways of searching for and discovering the truth: The first starts from senses and particulars toward the more general axioms, from which we proceed to the discovery of the middle axioms. The second derives axioms from senses and particulars, in a gradual continuous way, reaching the most general axioms.

The theory of idols and the functional system of acquiring objective knowledge are for Francis Bacon the necessary premises of introducing his revolutionary concept of scientia operativa .

The new scientific methodology

University of Kent labyrinth.

For Francis Bacon, nature is like a labyrinth, whose works cannot be explained only by the supremacy of the logical wisdom and the observation of patterns and repetitions. Rather, “Our steps must be guided by a clue, and see what way from the first perception of the sense must be laid out upon a sure plan.” (Bacon IV, 1901, p.18). It is a way to say that the scientific method of investigation should precede the core faculties of the human reason, like logic and observation and is at least as important as these latter.

The nature and goals of the new scientific method are described in Novum Organum (Part II). It is supposed to help the reason to pass beyond the influence of ancient arts and thus to enter a radical revision of the methods of knowledge; as such, it introduces a new epistemology. Bacon calls it Interpretatio Naturae , which is a logic of research going beyond classical logic, required for a science aiming at three “inventions”: of arts (instead of arguments), of principles (instead of things in accordance to principles), and of designations and directions for works (instead of probable reasons).

Bacon’s methodology assumes a double starting point – empirical and rational – based on the principle that true knowledge is acquired if we start from a low certitude to a high liberty and from a low liberty to a high certitude. This certitude-liberty rule converges with Bacon’s rejection of old Aristotelian logic and accordingly he opposes his Interpretatio Naturae to the Aristotelian Anticipation Naturae , seen as a form of conventionalism (Urbach 1987, pp.30–41). Interpretation of nature starts with collecting facts and investigating them by method, which is mainly inductive. However, this stage only leads to correlations and pure taxonomy, establishes the order of things, and does not produce knowledge. For Francis Bacon, to do is to know and to know is to do. The effect Bacon looks for is to command nature in action, rather than to overcome an opponent in argument. It is the primary principle that justifies the name of the Baconian new science as scientia operativa .

Making science operative means for Bacon using an effective method of induction and an experimental method based on objective observation, such that both methods to have the capacity of exclusion of what is not true. It is this requirement that would make the Baconian inductive methodology the alleged valid alternative to the Aristotelian syllogistic method.

Baconian induction and meticulous observation

A portrait of Francis Bacon from his book The Historie of King Henry VII , from an engraving by William Marshall, 1640.

For Bacon, induction is the means by which we gather information from things and, by slow and loyal labor, we transform them in knowledge (Farrington 1964, p.89). Baconian induction means ascending from sense experience to axioms, as well as descending to works, such that new particulars and axioms are obtained from previous axioms. From the general axioms, Bacon tries to reach fundamental laws of nature (knowing the forms), which in turn lead to practical deductions as new works or experiments. Such inductive process is seen as the link between the parts of a systematic chain of knowledge, an aid for human reason to find the path toward the certification of true knowledge and hence a method of discovery.

For Bacon, induction is effective only if it is able to eliminate by exclusion the negative instances of the path to discovery. This focus on negativity for the procedure itself is an innovative element and some historians have seen in Francis Bacon a forerunner of Karl Popper with regard to the method of falsification. Some historians of science have criticized Bacon’s approach to induction, claiming that his inductive science has nothing to do with contemporary science and even contradicts it (Malherbe, 1996, p.75).

But the unquestionable innovative and effective achievement of Bacon’s inductive interpretation of nature was the use of ‘tables and arrangements of instances’ for the investigated phenomena, as a necessary condition for the effective decoding of the causality. Within his method of ‘analysis through exclusion’, these tables have their first place before the interpretation by exclusion. Through these tables, the gained experience is regimented from known to unknown. Next, exclusion works by reducing the empirical character of the experience – where tables have their role, too – and is a process of determination between the empirical and formal nature of knowledge. Bacon employs not only tables of pure observation, but also conceives tables of degrees and of exclusion, necessary for the discovery of the causes, which follow to be progressively generalized to forms, as the final result of the inductive procedure.

Francis Bacon was the first philosopher whose theory of science did not draw any border between the foundational philosophy (as a metatheory of science) and science itself, in the spirit of modern to contemporary naturalists about science. What is remarkable is that his investigation has run from the abstract philosophical concepts concerning science and its methodology down to the functional dimension of science, in its experimental and methodological details; the latter part was not neglected in any way, which is not specific to many of the contemporary philosophers of science. The ‘labor’ that he advocated for in regard to the adequate scientific methodology is also reflected as a labor of his research work.

Paul van den Doort, The laboratory of the alchemist, copperplate engraving, 1609

The importance of the experimental dimension of the scientific methodology was also stressed by Galileo. While in the Galilean science the experiment is aimed as a confirmation of the results obtained by deduction and as a means of providing new subjects for investigation, at Bacon it is integrated in his inductive methodology, designed to help the scientific discovery. For Galileo, the scientific truth is achieved from the mathematical truth via experiment. For Bacon, it is achieved through hard operational labor involving integrated induction and experiment. The two scientific methodologies are not in opposition, but rather complementary, and they proved to aggregate effectively in the evolution of modern science. This is why Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon should be referred to together as founders of modern science.

References :

Brandt, R. (1979). Francis Bacon, Die Idolenlehre. In J. Speck (Ed.), Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen . Philosophie der Neuzeit I . Göttingen, 9–34.

Farrington, B. (1964).  The Philosophy of Francis Bacon . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Klein, J. (2003). Bacon’s Quarrel with the Aristotelians,  Zeitsprünge , Vol. 7, 19–31.

Malherbe, M. (1996). Bacon’s Method of Science. In M. Peltonen (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 75–98.

Navarro, Á. G. (2018). Epistemología y metodología de la investigación científica en la filosofía experimental de Galileo Galilei y Francis Bacon.  Consensus , 23(1), 9-16.

Spedding J., Ellis R. L., and Heath D. D. (1889–1901).  The Works of Francis Bacon , Volumes I (1889), II (1887), III (1887), IV (1901), V (1889), VI (1890), VII (1892). Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Urbach, P. (1987).  Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal , La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Catalin Barboianu is mathematician and philosopher of science. He is the founder of PhilScience .

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The Clue to the Labyrinth: Francis Bacon and the Decryption of Nature

Even after the scientists have been tested and prepared, and after they wrestle with nature through experiment, the message they receive is still enigmatic. Nature’s message is mysterious even when its text is disclosed. Before Francis Bacon, others had begun to think of nature’s secrets as if they were hidden in code. Bacon’s contribution was to point out that the code may be solvable, something that his contemporaries doubted possible. He even set out a method of solving the code that parallels the techniques of codebreaking used in his time for diplomatic purposes. Though he did not anticipate the power of symbolic mathematics, by invoking the example of codebreaking, he prepared for the later union of mathematics with experimental science.

By the middle ages, thinkers were referring to the “Book of Nature,” meaning that nature and the Book of Scripture both bear divine messages. However, the language in which the Book of Nature was written was hard to determine. In the earlier sources, it seemed that the Book was somehow in a natural, human language, though mysteriously expressed, since the creatures are not “readable” as words or characters. The Book of Scripture offered the prime candidate for the archetypal language. Scripture was the Book of Books, and its study was the touchstone for all interpretation of texts; its enigmas were much pondered, including the famous “writing on the wall” in the Book of Daniel, and pointed to the possibilities of secret writing. In fact, the Hebrew scriptures themselves display several ways to disguise words by substitution, which are among the earliest known ciphers.

Code and ciphers substitute certain symbols (the encrypted text) for the plain text. A cipher operates letter by letter, so that “Science” might be enciphered as “Uelgpeg”; codes work on larger groups of symbols, so “Science” may be encoded as “Sphinx.” The few references to secret communications in ancient sources utilize only the simplest sorts of codes or secret writing; ancient writers thought it amazing that Caesar disguised his dispatches by substituting (say) a by E, b by F, and so forth, a simple cipher now used by children. In medieval times, literacy was so rare that any writing was effectively secret. Islamic-Spanish culture was the source for the later concept of cipher; the Arabic word ṣifr means zero, as in: “he’s only a cipher.” In late medieval France and Italy, there was a fashion for “emblems” or “devices,” hieroglyphic images capable of representing a concept without using words. Many Renaissance scholars tried their hand at these emblems, inventing new hieroglyphs on the model of the ancient Egyptians and thinking further about the possibilities of encoding messages in symbols.

The 16th-century cryptologist Blaise de Vigenère assumed that stars or plants encrypted their divine message in a natural, human language.

Complex cryptography emerged fully during the late middle ages and Renaissance. By Bacon’s time, diplomatic correspondence was routinely enciphered. The intercepted dispatches of foreign powers were opened and, at least in Italy, France, and England, subjected to attempts at cryptanalysis. This modern word denotes the solution of a ciphered text by unauthorized persons; the intended readers “decipher” it. The development of techniques of cryptanalysis was quite late. Its first efflorescence seems to have been in Venice, in the early years of the 16th century, but soon there were master codebreakers elsewhere in Italy and France. Those familiar with sophisticated ciphers began to associate them with the Book of Nature. In 1586, the French diplomat and cryptologist Blaise de Vigenère wrote that “all nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing,” as if this were already a familiar concept. However, Vigenère assumed that stars or plants encrypted their divine message in a natural, human language, on the model of certain ciphers known to him that could hide a given text in musical scores, or in the positions of stars in the sky.

Vigenère denied the possibility of solving the divine cipher through human artifice; not only is the cipher too difficult, but also men are too corrupt. He thought that only through the esoteric Hebrew kabbalah did God permit his elect access to his cipher by providing them with the divine alphabet. They must follow an ancient esoteric tradition strictly, not question or strike out anew. The chosen few may learn ancient mysteries, but must keep the secret from the profane world. Vigenère thought that codebreaking, even of human ciphers, was “a priceless cracking of the brain, and finally a quite inglorious labor.” Despite his knowledge of the practical success of others, Vigenère was sure that codebreaking was futile in all but easy cases.

In fact, there were already available powerful techniques of codebreaking that Vigenère pessimistically ignored. Bacon showed considerable awareness of these new advances in the art of secret writing and had direct contact with its practitioners. His brother, Anthony, spent most of his time on the Continent, in charge of a number of “correspondents,” who acted as spies abroad. In 1586, enciphered letters of Mary Queen of Scots were intercepted and cryptanalyzed, revealing a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, incite a Catholic uprising in England, and bring Mary to the English throne. The revelation of the exact texts of these letters gave evidence of Mary’s complicity and led to her execution in 1587. Cryptanalysis also gave valuable evidence concerning Spanish designs on the English crown.

No one privy to these great events could miss the significance and utility of cryptography, and it surely was not lost on Francis Bacon, then 26 and at the beginning of his parliamentary career. Bacon spoke on the “Great Cause” of Mary’s case as it was deliberated in Parliament. Through Anthony he must have gained further insight into the use of ciphers in more hidden affairs of state. Though Bacon constantly points to the reserved nature of things, he does so in order to disclose those secrets, always excepting divine matters and the secrets of the human heart. As Lord Chancellor, Bacon continually had to decipher King James’s hidden intent, whether expressed in cryptic comments or the elaborate symbolism of the court masques the king cultivated.

Bacon considers ciphers central to the “Art of Transmission,” the general study of discourse and writing. His interest goes beyond common letters and languages; he is interested in Chinese characters, as well as in the sign language of the deaf. Chinese he describes as being formed of ‘‘real characters,’’ which represent things themselves, as do Egyptian hieroglyphics and gestures. These early forms of “transmission” unlocked important possibilities. An ancient tyrant once sent a messenger to a neighboring king; the messenger was to greet the king and then cut down the highest flowers in his garden. The gestures bewildered the messenger, but the cruel message was faithfully conveyed: Kill the nobles. This “transitory Hieroglyph” fulfills some of the requirements of secret communications that Bacon lays down, “that they be easy and not laborious to write; that they be safe, and impossible to be deciphered; and lastly that they be, if possible, such as not to raise suspicion.”

Bacon notes even more powerful ways to transmit and hide a message. As an example, he describes a cipher he devised as a young man, the single discovery for which he claims personal credit. Bacon is proud of this work, “for it has the perfection of a cipher, which is to make anything signify anything.” That is, his cipher will hide any plain text in any cover text, given only that the encrypted text is at least five times longer than the plain. Bacon’s biliteral cipher involves two stages. In the first, he represents the letters of the alphabet in terms of two letters only, arranged in groups of five (see table 1).

Instead of a and b, one could have used any two recognizably different symbols; two different symbols transposed through five different places yield 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32 different possibilities, enough to include all 24 letters of the English alphabet. Bacon notes that the “differences” need not even be between letters; instead of the letters a and b, one could use two bells of different pitch, or two different gunshots or torch signals. Thus this code is able to remove the letters from language and yet can reconstitute its meaning for the recipient. This feature, which it shares with gestures and “real characters,” already renders it more fit to be a code of things rather than of words alone; it may be a step toward the symbolic code of nature, even though it is invented to serve the conventions of human communication. This code is also binary, like the code widely used for the machine language of computers.

Bacon then embeds this code into a cover text, probably because a stream of “differences,” of gunshots or patterned bell ringing, might excite suspicion, or might be too difficult to convey with sufficient accuracy. Thus Bacon reduces the plain text FLY using the two-letter alphabet (see table 2). He then uses two different ‘‘forms’’ (fonts) of the alphabet, an ‘‘a’’ and a ‘‘b’’ form, similar enough so as not to arouse suspicion and yet different enough to register the difference between the forms (see table 3). Using these two very slightly different alphabets Bacon can then encode the plain text “FLY” into the innocent cover text, “Do not go till I come” (see table 4).

His example relishes the code’s ability to convey just the exact opposite of the plain text in its cover text, not only avoiding suspicion but even misleading the enemy by a text that can mean exactly the opposite of what it seems. Bacon indicates that, if the ancients had used his cipher, they could have escaped detection and fooled their enemies. Despite its cleverness, Bacon’s cipher does not seem to have had any actual usage in the diplomatic practice of his own time, which relied on far simpler devices. His cipher violates his own first rule, that it “be easy and not laborious to write,” for minute variations of typography must be carefully guarded in order to render accurately the two different alphabets required. Bacon seems aware of such objections, for he complains of “the rawness and unskillfulness of secretaries and clerks in the courts of kings,” on account of whom “the greatest matters are commonly trusted to weak and futile ciphers.” He evidently had learned of this practical limitation on cryptographic ingenuity either the hard way himself or through the testimony of others. His publication of the biliteral cipher was a call for greater cryptographic security through stronger ciphers and more skillful clerks. Because of these practical limitations, such improvements were not implemented until several centuries later.

Bacon’s interest in ciphers goes beyond their purely diplomatic use. His cipher suggests a more keen and suspicious reading not only of any given text, but also of any system of “differences,” such as Bacon says may be found in anything seen or heard — that is, anywhere in Nature. This larger goal eclipses the narrower one of improving diplomatic ciphers, for which concealing a new sort of cipher would be the logical step, rather than publishing it. Bacon’s readings of ancient fables are really “decodings.” The outward symbols are “a veil, as it were, of fables,” concealing hidden depths. He remarks that “religion delights in such veils and shadows, and to take them away would be almost to interdict all communion between divinity and humanity,” so deeply are they required for the communion of such diverse and unequal minds. Parables were meant originally not to conceal the meaning, but to make it better understood. For instance, each detail of the Sphinx has a precise analogy with some aspect of Science. Likewise, nature’s enigmatic messages are not perversely obscure; rather, we are too dull and impatient to solve them. His writings teach us an art of interpretation through decoding.

Nature’s enigmatic messages are not perversely obscure, believed Bacon; rather, we are too dull and impatient to solve them.

Bacon did not presume that the book of nature is written in any human language, even veiled by cipher. His crucial insight is that the methodical decryption of nature must grapple with a “language” that requires a whole new order of interpretation. Indeed, Bacon’s yoking of interpretation with nature represents a great shift in understanding. For Aristotle, it is not nature that needs interpretation, but human language. For Bacon, “interpretation is the true and natural work of the mind when freed from impediments.” Those impediments include the radical flaws in human understanding, beset with idols, and the labyrinthine intricacy of the world itself. The ancient labyrinth concealed the Minotaur that devoured Athenian children until Theseus killed it and escaped by means of a thread, or “clue.” Bacon, the author of “The Clue to the Maze , ” presents himself as a new Theseus, delivering humanity from the Minotaur of death by scientific secrets wrested from the labyrinth.

Just as Daedalus both built the labyrinth and found its deciphering clue, Bacon calls on science to breach the inmost sanctuary. Salomon’s House is prepared to penetrate the veil over nature through a certain kind of interpretation whose key Bacon calls “induction.” To find this key, Bacon envisaged a symbolic and schematic “alphabet of Nature.” This key is not a fixed structure like a skeleton key, but rather a “key” in the cryptographic sense: a flexible indicator that guides decryption by delineating the structure of the cipher as it emerges. The essential preparation for induction is the exhaustive preparation of “tables and arrangements of instances, in such a method and order that the understanding may be able to deal with them”; Bacon also organizes his “alphabet of Nature” in similar tables. He cannot give full examples; however, he does give an extended attempt at tables regarding the nature of heat, leading to results strikingly like the modern view, in which heat is a form of atomic motion. What is important here are the tables themselves, which are manifold and detailed, going through many possible permutations of the instances, enumerating instances of “essence and presence” or “proximity where the nature of heat is absent” or “exclusion” or “degrees” of heat. These tables resemble the tables used for encipherment and decipherment, though applied here not to a natural language, but to “things themselves.” A cryptanalyst examines the possible correlations between the appearances of certain letters in the cipher text, singly or by pairs or triplets, arranging the results in tabular form. Read negatively, this table also shows which ciphered letters are not correlated with which others. Other tables note the order in which letters are correlated, preceding or following others. Likewise, Bacon’s tables marshal parallel data for heat, citing all known correlations and exclusions.

From the earliest sources on, cryptography had relied on such tabular arrays to give the visible key for the encipherment and, later, decryption. Given Bacon’s detailed knowledge, it seems very likely that either he himself tried his hand at cryptanalysis, saw such work in progress, or heard accounts of it. His posing of a new, more secure cipher shows that he was fully aware of the powers of expert cryptanalysts and, quite likely, of their detailed methods. He certainly sets out his own biliteral cipher in tabular form. The cryptanalyst’s tables are the necessary starting point to break the cipher in a systematic way. After that, certain deeply embedded linguistic features (such as the frequency of the letter “e” in English) can be much more readily brought to light and form the opening wedge to full solution. Bacon’s tables proceed by the same logical categories of inclusion and exclusion, of quantity and correlation, that give the cryptanalyst’s tables their revelatory power. In both cases, the tables are the beginning of reading, with all the interpretative acuity that word suggests. Telling passages in the cipher text must be located and probed; hypotheses need to be formed and tested, even if finally discarded, in order that correct order might finally emerge.

Both cryptanalysis and Bacon’s hunt for the inner forms of nature require imaginative leaps that go beyond merely pedestrian accumulation of data. Although Bacon calls for a science that should be done “as if by machinery,” he is also aware of the importance of the exceptional individual. The Fathers of Salomon’s House are few, yet they rely on many others for the immense work of collecting instances. Only select minds can make the leap from the tables to the unifying insight that completes the work of discovery. Bacon gives images of these singular discoverers in his mythical tales; the solvers of the labyrinth are not to be confounded with their crews and companions, however valuable. The key to the labyrinth is a delicate thread that must be handled with care, for it might break. Bacon thought that true reading of the Book of Nature was reserved to those few who could follow the thread; the rest of humanity — including the wise king of Bensalem — must wait.

Moreover, even the scientists cannot anticipate what is to come; the great discoveries of the past had been quite unexpected. Genuinely new interpretations must “seem harsh and out of tune, much as the mysteries of faith do.” He was wise enough to anticipate that he, too, would be surprised by what was to come. Experience can only be fully appreciated as it emerges, and not before. To read the Book of Nature means to experience it, to experiment with it, even at the risk of destroying old certainties. He envisioned a bridge between symbols, the “alphabet of nature,” and things themselves. In so doing, he discerned a fundamentally new approach to the Book of Nature that transformed the character both of the Book and, finally, of Nature itself.

Peter Pesic , writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute, Musician-in-Residence, and Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. He is the author of several books , including” Labyrinth ,” from which this article is excerpted.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban KC ( 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626 ) was an English philosopher , statesman and essayist . His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be achieved by use of a sceptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. His general idea of the importance and possibility of a skeptical methodology makes Bacon the father of the scientific method . This marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and methodology today.

• 1.1 Meditationes sacræ (1597)
• 1.2 The Advancement of Learning (1605)
• 1.3.1 Book I
• 1.3.2 Book II
• 1.4 Apophthegms (1624)
• 1.5 The World (1629)
• 1.6 Resuscitatio (1657)
• 2 Quotes about Francis Bacon
• 4 Misattributed
• 6 External links
• Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

• Letter to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (ca. 1593), published in The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England , 14 Vols. (1870), James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, Douglas D. Heath, editors, Vol. VIII, p. 109. See also, for approximate date, Mrs. Henry Pott, Francis Bacon and His Secret Society (1891) p. 114 .
• Essex's Device (1595)
• For knowledge itself is power .
• Meditationes Sacræ [ Sacred Meditations ] (1597), "De Hæresibus" [Of Heresies]
• Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."
• Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works , Vol. I, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
• Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works , Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133
• Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works , Vol. 1; The Works of Francis Bacon (1857), Vol. 3, p. 232
• Rerum Novarum (1605)
• History of King Henry VII , III (1622)
• Nothing is terrible except fear itself.
• De Augmentis Scientiarum , Book II, "Fortitudo" (1623)
• De Augmentis Scientiarum , Book II, "Antitheta" (1623)
• Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.
• De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623)
• De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) as quoted by Edward Thorpe , History of Chemistry , Vol. 1, p. 43.
• His will (1626)
• New Atlantis (1627)
• Sylva Sylvarum Century X (1627)
• An Essay on Death , published in The Remaines of the Right Honourable Francis Lord Verulam (1648), which may not have been written by Bacon
• Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1653, written ca. 1612), Chap. 6, as quoted in "Description of the Intellectual Globe," The Works of Francis Bacon (1889), Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding , Robert Leslie Ellis , Douglas Denon Heath , pp. 517-518 .
• Exempla Antithetorum , IX. Laus, Existimatio (Pro.)
• Ornamenta Rationalia , [ §55 ]
• Quoted by Baron John Campbell (1818), J. Murray in "The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England"
• Quoted by Thomas Fowler in "Francis Bacon 1561–1626 (1885)
• Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum , Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations , 10th ed. (1919)
• Letter of Expostulation to Coke, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations , 10th ed. (1919)
• See Silent Truth by Mark Edwards
• Of Beauty https://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-43.html

Meditationes sacræ (1597)

• Of The Works Of God and Man
• Of The Exaltation of Charity
• Of Heresies

The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• Book I, i, 3
• Book I, iv, 10
• Book I, iv, 12
• Book I, v, 8
• Book I, v, 11
• Book II, iv, 2
• Book II, vii, 5
• Book II, xx, 8
• Book II, xxi, 9
• Book II, xxii, 14
• Book II, xxii
• Book II, xxiii
• Book II, xxxi
• Book III, viii
• Book VI, xxxi
• Book VII, 3
• Book VII, 7
• Neither did the dispensation of God vary in the times after our Saviour came into the world; for our Saviour himself did first show His power to subdue ignorance, by His conference with the priests and doctors of the law, before He showed His power to subdue nature by His miracles . And the coming of this Holy Spirit was chiefly figured and expressed in the similitude and gift of tongues, which are but vehicula scientiæ.

Novum Organum (1620)

• Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood , whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury . For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far.... Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.
• We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply to Nature the anticipation of Nature (as being rash and premature) and that which is properly deduced from things the interpretation of Nature .

• Aphorism 19
• Aphorism 23
• Aphorism 24
• Aphorism 129
• Aphorism 39
• Aphorism 41
• Aphorism 42
• Aphorism 43
• Aphorism 44
• Aphorism 45
• Aphorism 46
• Aphorism 47
• Aphorism 48
• Aphorism 50
• Aphorism 70
• Aphorism 73
• Aphorism 81
• Aphorism 92
• Aphorism 93
• Aphorism 95
• Aphorism 97
• Aphorism 109
• Aphorism 111
• Aphorism 124

• Aphorism 20
• Aphorism 29
• Aphorism 52
• Aphorism XV

Apophthegms (1624)

The World (1629)

• The world's a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.
• Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
• What then remains but that we still should cry Not to be born, or, being born, to die?

Resuscitatio (1657)

• Proposition touching Amendment of Laws

Quotes about Francis Bacon

• Helena Blavatsky in " The Secret Doctrine " Vol. 1, (1888) p. 481
• Clifford D. Conner , A People's History of Science (2005)
• John Davies (D.D., Hon. Canon of Durham), The Handmaid, or, The Pursuits of Literature and Philosophy, Considered as Subservient to the Interests of Morality and Religion: Five Dissertations (1841)
• Will Durant , The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (1926)
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno , Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), p. 2
• H. Gordon Hullfish, Philip G. Smith, Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education (1961)
• Thomas Henry Huxley , The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1889)
• Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1889)
• Naomi Klein On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019)
• C. W. Leadbeater in The Masters and the Path (1925)
• George Henry Lewes , Aristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science (1864)
• Basil Montagu , Essays and Selections , pp. 325–326. ISBN-13 : 978-1164636656. (1837)
• John Henry Newman , A Grammar of Assent (London: Burns, Oates, & Co., 1870), p. 366
• Michael Oakeshott , "Rationalism in Politics" (1947), published in Rationalism in Politics and other essays (1962)
• Alexander Pope , Essay on Man (1732-1734)
• William Rawley , "The Life Of the Honourable Author" in Lord Bacon's Essays, &c. Vol. II (London: 1720), pp. xiii–xiv. Cf. Francis Osborne , Advice to a Son : "Thus he [Lord Bacon] did not only learn himself, but gratify such as taught him; who looked upon their callings as honoured through his notice".
• R. H. Tawney , The Acquisitive Society (1920); also see Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622)
• Carlos G. Noreña. 1907. Juan Luis Vives. Springer Science & Business Media. 241.
• Richard Weaver , Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), pp. 14-15
• William Whewell , History of the Inductive Sciences (1837)
• William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (1837)
• Attributed to Bacon without citation of work in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007) by James Geary, p. 112; this is sometimes attributed to others, also without citation of works, but is most often quoted as an anonymous aphorism, with no published sources yet located prior to The Deke Quarterly , Vol. 56, No. 3 (1938)

Misattributed

• Epictetus , Fragment 144
• In an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson , "Solitude and Society" in The Atlantic Monthly , Vol. 1, (December 1857), p. 228, this follows a statement clearly attributed to Bacon, which might be a paraphrase. Without explicit citation, this is added to the parapgraph with quote marks but seems to be a paraphrase of lines by William Shakespeare , from King Henry IV , Part II, Act V, scene 1: "It is certain that either wife bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another: therefore let men take heed of their company."
• A translation of chorus lines in a classical tragedy by Seneca the Younger , Thyestes , lines 401-403, appearing in Essays, Civil and Moral by Francis Bacon, part XI, Of Great Place. The original lines in latin are Illi mors gravis incubate/Qui notus nimis omnibus/Ignotus moritur sibi . Inaccurately attributed to Francis Bacon in Amazing Grace , a 2006 historical drama.

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Works by Francis Bacon at Project Gutenberg
• Online editions of Bacon's works
• Bacon's Essays, 1601 edition, modernized spelling
• Novum Organum Online
• The New Organon (PDF versions)
• Sir Francis Bacon's New Advancement of Learning
• Essays on the English Renaissance
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas : Baconianism
• "Queen James and His Courtiers : Sir Francis Bacon" by Rictor Norton
• The Twickenham Museum - Sir Francis Bacon

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