As Lord Chancellor, Bacon wielded a degree of power and influence that he could only have imagined as a young lawyer seeking preferment. Yet it was at this point, while he stood at the very pinnacle of success, that he suffered his great Fall. In 1621 he was arrested and charged with bribery. After pleading guilty, he was heavily fined and sentenced to a prison term in the Tower of London. Although the fine was later waived and Bacon spent only four days in the Tower, he was never allowed to sit in Parliament or hold political office again.
The entire episode was a terrible disgrace for Bacon personally and a stigma that would cling to and injure his reputation for years to come. As various chroniclers of the case have pointed out, the accepting of gifts from suppliants in a law suit was a common practice in Bacon’s day, and it is also true that Bacon ended up judging against the two petitioners who had offered the fateful bribes. Yet the damage was done, and Bacon to his credit accepted the judgment against him without excuse. According to his own Essayes, or Counsels, he should have known and done better. (In this respect it is worth noting that during his forced retirement, Bacon revised and republished the Essayes, injecting an even greater degree of shrewdness into a collection already notable for its worldliness and keen political sense.) Macaulay in a lengthy essay declared Bacon a great intellect but (borrowing a phrase from Bacon’s own letters) a “most dishonest man,” and more than one writer has characterized him as cold, calculating, and arrogant. Yet whatever his flaws, even his enemies conceded that during his trial he accepted his punishment nobly, and moved on.
Bacon spent his remaining years working with renewed determination on his lifelong project: the reform of learning and the establishment of an intellectual community dedicated to the discovery of scientific knowledge for the “use and benefit of men.” The former Lord Chancellor died on 9 April, 1626, supposedly of a cold or pneumonia contracted while testing his theory of the preservative and insulating properties of snow.
Thought and
Writings
In a way Bacon’s descent from political power was a fortunate fall, for it
represented a liberation from the bondage of public life resulting in a
remarkable final burst of literary and scientific activity. As Renaissance
scholar and Bacon expert Brian Vickers has reminded us, Bacon’s earlier works,
impressive as they are, were essentially products of his “spare time.” It was
only during his last five years that he was able to concentrate exclusively on
writing and produce, in addition to a handful of minor pieces: These late productions represented the capstone of a writing career that
spanned more than four decades and encompassed virtually an entire curriculum of
literary, scientific, and philosophical studies. Literary Works
Despite the fanatical claims (and very un-Baconian credulity) of a few
admirers, it is a virtual certainty that Bacon did not write the works
traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Even so, the Lord Chancellor’s
high place in the history of English literature as well as his influential role
in the development of English prose style remain well-established and secure.
Indeed even if Bacon had produced nothing else but his masterful Essayes
(first published in 1597 and then revised and expanded in 1612 and 1625), he
would still rate among the top echelon of 17th-century English authors. And so
when we take into account his other writings, e.g., his histories, letters, and
especially his major philosophical and scientific works, we must surely place
him in the first rank of English literature’s great men of letters and among its
finest masters (alongside names like Johnson, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin) of
non-fiction prose. Bacon’s style, though elegant, is by no means as simple as it seems or as it
is often described. In fact it is actually a fairly complex affair that achieves
its air of ease and clarity more through its balanced cadences, natural
metaphors, and carefully arranged symmetries than through the use of plain
words, commonplace ideas, and straightforward syntax. (In this connection it is
noteworthy that in the revised versions of the essays Bacon seems to have
deliberately disrupted many of his earlier balanced effects to produce a style
that is actually more jagged and, in effect, more challenging to the casual
reader.) Furthermore, just as Bacon’s personal style and living habits were prone to
extravagance and never particularly austere, so in his writing he was never
quite able to resist the occasional grand word, magniloquent phrase, or orotund
effect. (As Dr. Johnson observed, “A dictionary of the English language might be
compiled from Bacon’s works alone.”) Bishop Sprat in his 1667 History of the
Royal Society honored Bacon and praised the society membership for
supposedly eschewing fine words and fancy metaphors and adhering instead to a
natural lucidity and “mathematical plainness.” To write in such a way, Sprat
suggested, was to follow true, scientific, Baconian principles. And while Bacon
himself often expressed similar sentiments (praising blunt expression while
condemning the seductions of figurative language), a reader would be hard
pressed to find many examples of such spare technique in Bacon’s own writings.
Of Bacon’s contemporary readers, at least one took exception to the view that
his writing represented a perfect model of plain language and transparent
meaning. After perusing the New Organon, King James (to whom Bacon had
proudly dedicated the volume) reportedly pronounced the work “like the peace of
God, which passeth all understanding.” The New
Atlantis
As a work of narrative fiction, Bacon’s novel New Atlantis may be
classified as a literary rather than a scientific (or philosophical) work,
though it effectively belongs to both categories. According to Bacon’s
amanuensis and first biographer William Rawley, the novel represents the first
part (showing the design of a great college or institute devoted to the
interpretation of nature) of what was to have been a longer and more detailed
project (depicting the entire legal structure and political organization of an
ideal commonwealth). The work thus stands in the great tradition of the
utopian-philosophic novel that stretches from Plato and More to Huxley and
Skinner. The thin plot or fable is little more than a fictional shell to contain the
real meat of Bacon’s story: the elaborate description of Salomon’s House (also
known as the College of the Six Days Works), a centrally organized research
facility where specially trained teams of investigators collect data, conduct
experiments, and (most importantly from Bacon’s point of view) apply the
knowledge they gain to produce “things of use and practice for man’s life.”
These new arts and inventions they eventually share with the outside world. In terms of its sci-fi adventure elements, the New Atlantis is about
as exciting as a government or university re-organization plan. But in terms of
its historical impact, the novel has proven to be nothing less than
revolutionary, having served not only as an effective inspiration and model for
the British Royal Society, but also as an early blueprint and prophecy of the
modern research center and international scientific community. Scientific and
Philosophical Works
It is never easy to summarize the thought of a prolific and wide-ranging
philosopher. Yet Bacon somewhat simplifies the task by his own helpful habits of
systematic classification and catchy pneumonic labeling. (Thus, for example,
there are three “distempers” – or diseases – of learning,” eleven errors or
“peccant humours,” four “Idols,” three primary mental faculties and categories
of knowledge, etc.) In effect, by following Bacon’s own methods it is possible
to produce a convenient outline or overview of his main scientific and
philosophical ideas. The Great
Instauration
As early as 1592, in a famous letter to his uncle, Lord Burghley, Bacon
declared “all knowledge” to be his province and vowed his personal commitment to
a plan for the full-scale rehabilitation and reorganization of learning. In
effect, he dedicated himself to a long-term project of intellectual reform, and
the balance of his career can be viewed as a continuing effort to make good on
that pledge. In 1620, while he was still at the peak of his political success,
he published the preliminary description and plan for an enormous work that
would fully answer to his earlier declared ambitions. The work, dedicated to
James, was to be called Magna Instauratio (i.e., the “grand edifice” or
Great Instauration), and it would represent a kind of summa or
culmination of all Bacon’s thought on subjects ranging from logic and
epistemology to practical science (or what in Bacon’s day was called “natural
philosophy,” the word science being then but a general synonym for “wisdom” or
“learning”). Like several of Bacon’s projects, the Instauratio in its contemplated
form was never finished. Of the intended six parts, only the first two were
completed, while the other portions were only partly finished or barely begun.
Consequently, the work as we have it is less like the vast but well-sculpted
monument that Bacon envisioned than a kind of philosophical miscellany or
grab-bag. Part I of the project, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum
(“Nine Books of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning”), was published in
1623. It is basically an enlarged version of the earlier Proficience and
Advancement of Learning, which Bacon had presented to James in 1605. Part
II, the Novum Organum (or “New Organon”) provides the author’s detailed
explanation and demonstration of the correct procedure for interpreting nature.
It first appeared in 1620. Together these two works present the essential
elements of Bacon’s philosophy, including most of the major ideas and principles
that we have come to associate with the terms “Baconian” and “Baconianism.” The Advancement of
Learning
Relatively early in his career Bacon judged that, owing mainly to an undue
reverence for the past (as well as to an excessive absorption in cultural
vanities and frivolities), the intellectual life of Europe had reached a kind of
impasse or standstill. Yet he believed there was a way beyond this stagnation if
persons of learning, armed with new methods and insights, would simply open
their eyes and minds to the world around them. This at any rate was the basic
argument of his seminal 1605 treatise The Proficience and Advancement of
Learning, arguably the first important philosophical work to be published in
English. It is in this work that Bacon sketched out the main themes and ideas that he
continued to refine and develop throughout his career, beginning with the notion
that there are clear obstacles to or diseases of learning that must be avoided
or purged before further progress is possible. The “Distempers” of
Learning
“There be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath
been most traduced.” Thus Bacon, in the first book of the Advancement. He
goes on to refer to these vanities as the three “distempers” of learning and
identifies them (in his characteristically memorable fashion) as “fantastical
learning,” “contentious learning,” and “delicate learning” (alternatively
identified as “vain imaginations,” “vain altercations,” and “vain
affectations”). By fantastical learning (“vain imaginations”) Bacon had in mind what
we would today call pseudo-science: i.e., a collection of ideas that lack any
real or substantial foundation, that are professed mainly by occultists and
charlatans, that are carefully shielded from outside criticism, and that are
offered largely to an audience of credulous true believers. In Bacon’s day such
“imaginative science” was familiar in the form of astrology, natural magic, and
alchemy. By contentious learning (“vain altercations”) Bacon was referring
mainly to Aristotelian philosophy and theology and especially to the Scholastic
tradition of logical hair-splitting and metaphysical quibbling. But the phrase
applies to any intellectual endeavor in which the principal aim is not new
knowledge or deeper understanding but endless debate cherished for its own
sake. Delicate learning (“vain affectations”) was Bacon’s label for the new
humanism insofar as (in his view) it seemed concerned not with the actual
recovery of ancient texts or the retrieval of past knowledge but merely with the
revival of Ciceronian rhetorical embellishments and the reproduction of
classical prose style. Such preoccupation with “words more than matter,” with
“choiceness of phrase” and the “sweet falling of clauses” – in short, with style
over substance – seemed to Bacon (a careful stylist in his own right) the most
seductive and decadent literary vice of his age. In short, in Bacon’s view the distempers impede genuine intellectual progress
by beguiling talented thinkers into fruitless, illusory, or purely self-serving
ventures. What is needed – and this is a theme reiterated in all his later
writings on learning and human progress – is a program to re-channel that same
creative energy into socially useful new discoveries. The Idea of
Progress
Though it is hard to pinpoint the birth of an idea, for all intents and
purposes the modern idea of technological “progress” (in the sense of a steady,
cumulative, historical advance in applied scientific knowledge) began with
Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning and became fully articulated in his
later works. Knowledge is power, and when embodied in the form of new technical inventions
and mechanical discoveries it is the force that drives history – this was
Bacon’s key insight. In many respects this idea was his single greatest
invention, and it is all the more remarkable for its having been conceived and
promoted at a time when most English and European intellectuals were either
reverencing the literary and philosophical achievements of the past or deploring
the numerous signs of modern degradation and decline. Indeed, while Bacon was
preaching progress and declaring a brave new dawn of scientific advance, many of
his colleagues were persuaded that the world was at best creaking along towards
a state of senile immobility and eventual darkness. “Our age is iron, and rusty
too,” wrote John Donne, contemplating the signs of universal decay in a poem
published six years after Bacon’s Advancement. That history might in fact be progressive, i.e., an onward and upward
ascent – and not, as Aristotle had taught, merely cyclical or, as cultural
pessimists from Hesiod to Spengler have supposed, a descending or retrograde
movement, became for Bacon an article of secular faith which he propounded with
evangelical force and a sense of mission. In the Advancement, the idea is
offered tentatively, as a kind of hopeful hypothesis. But in later works such as
the New Organon, it becomes almost a promised destiny: Enlightenment and
a better world, Bacon insists, lie within our power; they require only the
cooperation of learned citizens and the active development of the arts and
sciences. The
Reclassification of Knowledge
In Book II of De Dignitate (his expanded version of the
Advancement) Bacon outlines his scheme for a new division of human
knowledge into three primary categories: History, Poesy, and Philosophy (which
he associates respectively with the three fundamental “faculties” of mind –
memory, imagination, and reason). Although the exact motive behind this
reclassification remains unclear, one of its main consequences seems
unmistakable: it effectively promotes philosophy – and especially Baconian
science – above the other two branches of knowledge, in essence defining history
as the mere accumulation of brute facts, while reducing art and imaginative
literature to the even more marginal status of “feigned history.” Evidently Bacon believed that in order for a genuine advancement of learning
to occur, the prestige of philosophy (and particularly natural philosophy) had
to be elevated, while that of history and literature (in a word, humanism)
needed to be reduced. Bacon’s scheme effectively accomplishes this by making
history (the domain of fact, i.e., of everything that has happened) a
virtual sub-species of philosophy (the domain of realistic possibility, i.e.,
of everything that can theoretically or actually occur). Meanwhile, poesy
(the domain of everything that is imaginable or conceivable) is set off
to the side as a mere illustrative vehicle. In essence, it becomes simply a
means of recreating actual scenes or events from the past (as in history plays
or heroic poetry) or of allegorizing or dramatizing new ideas or future
possibilities (as in Bacon’s own interesting example of “parabolic poesy,” the
New Atlantis.) The New
Organon
To the second part of his Great Instauration Bacon gave the title
New Organon (or “True Directions concerning the Interpretation of
Nature”). The Greek word organon means “instrument” or “tool,” and Bacon
clearly felt he was supplying a new instrument for guiding and correcting the
mind in its quest for a true understanding of nature. The title also glances at
Aristotle’s Organon (a collection that includes his Categories and
his Prior and Posterior Analytics) and thus suggests a “new instrument”
destined to transcend or replace the older, no longer serviceable one. (This
notion of surpassing ancient authority is aptly illustrated on the frontispiece
of the 1620 volume containing the New Organon by a ship boldly sailing
beyond the mythical pillars of Hercules, which supposedly marked the end of the
known world.) The New Organon is presented not in the form of a treatise or
methodical demonstration but as a series of aphorisms, a technique that Bacon
came to favor as less legislative and dogmatic and more in the true spirit of
scientific experiment and critical inquiry. Combined with his gift for
illustrative metaphor and symbol, the aphoristic style makes the New
Organon in many places the most readable and literary of all Bacon’s
scientific and philosophical works. The Idols
In Book I of the New Organon (Aphorisms 39-68), Bacon introduces his
famous doctrine of the “idols.” These are characteristic errors, natural
tendencies, or defects that beset the mind and prevent it from achieving a full
and accurate understanding of nature. Bacon points out that recognizing and
counteracting the idols is as important to the study of nature as the
recognition and refutation of bad arguments is to logic. Incidentally, he uses
the word “idol” – from the Greek eidolon (“image” or “phantom”) – not in
the sense of a false god or heathen deity but rather in the sense employed in
Epicurean physics. Thus a Baconian idol is a potential deception or source of
misunderstanding, especially one that clouds or confuses our knowledge of
external reality. Bacon identifies four different classes of idol. Each arises from a different
source, and each presents its own special hazards and difficulties. . Induction
At the beginning of the Magna Instauratio and in Book II of the New
Organon, Bacon introduces his system of “true and perfect Induction,” which
he proposes as the essential foundation of scientific method and a necessary
tool for the proper interpretation of nature. (This system was to have been more
fully explained and demonstrated in Part IV of the Instauratio in a
section titled “The Ladder of the Intellect,” but unfortunately the work never
got beyond an introduction.) According to Bacon, his system differs not only from the deductive logic and
mania for syllogisms of the Schoolmen, but also from the classic induction of
Aristotle and other logicians. As Bacon explains it, classic induction proceeds
“at once from . . . sense and particulars up to the most general propositions”
and then works backward (via deduction) to arrive at intermediate propositions.
Thus, for example, from a few observations one might conclude (via induction)
that “all new cars are shiny.” One would then be entitled to proceed backward
from this general axiom to deduce such middle-level axioms as “all new Lexuses
are shiny,” “all new Jeeps are shiny,” etc. – axioms that presumably would not
need to be verified empirically since their truth would be logically guaranteed
as long as the original generalization (“all new cars are shiny”) is true. As Bacon rightly points out, one problem with this procedure is that if the
general axioms prove false, all the intermediate axioms may be false as well.
All it takes is one contradictory instance (in this case one new car with a dull
finish) and “the whole edifice tumbles.” For this reason Bacon prescribes a
different path. His method is to proceed “regularly and gradually from one axiom
to another, so that the most general are not reached till the last.” In other
words, each axiom – i.e., each step up “the ladder of intellect” – is thoroughly
tested by observation and experimentation before the next step is taken. In
effect, each confirmed axiom becomes a foothold to a higher truth, with the most
general axioms representing the last stage of the process. Thus, in the example described, the Baconian investigator would be obliged to
examine a full inventory of new Chevrolets, Lexuses, Jeeps, etc., before
reaching any conclusions about new cars in general. And while Bacon admits that
such a method can be laborious, he argues that it eventually produces a stable
edifice of knowledge instead of a rickety structure that collapses with the
appearance of a single disconfirming instance. (Indeed, according to Bacon, when
one follows his inductive procedure, a negative instance actually becomes
something to be welcomed rather than feared. For instead of threatening an
entire assembly, the discovery of a false generalization actually saves the
investigator the trouble of having to proceed further in a particular direction
or line of inquiry. Meanwhile the structure of truth that he has already built
remains intact.) Is Bacon’s system, then, a sound and reliable procedure, a strong ladder
leading from carefully observed particulars to true and “inevitable”
conclusions? Although he himself firmly believed in the utility and overall
superiority of his method, many of his commentators and critics have had doubts.
For one thing, it is not clear that the Baconian procedure, taken by itself,
leads conclusively to any general propositions, much less to scientific
principles or theoretical statements that we can accept as universally true. For
at what point is the Baconian investigator willing to make the leap from
observed particulars to abstract generalizations? After a dozen instances? A
thousand? The fact is, Bacon’s method provides nothing to guide the investigator
in this determination other than sheer instinct or professional judgment, and
thus the tendency is for the investigation of particulars – the steady
observation and collection of data – to go on continuously, and in effect
endlessly. One can thus easily imagine a scenario in which the piling up of instances
becomes not just the initial stage in a process, but the very essence of the
process itself; in effect, a zealous foraging after facts (in the New
Organon Bacon famously compares the ideal Baconian researcher to a busy bee)
becomes not only a means to knowledge, but an activity vigorously pursued for
its own sake. Every scientist and academic person knows how tempting it is to
put off the hard work of imaginative thinking in order to continue doing
some form of rote research. Every investigator knows how easy it is to become
wrapped up in data – with the unhappy result that one’s intended ascent up the
Baconian ladder gets stuck in mundane matters of fact and never quite gets off
the ground. It was no doubt considerations like these that prompted the English physician
(and neo-Aristotelian) William Harvey, of circulation-of-the-blood fame, to quip
that Bacon wrote of natural philosophy “like a Lord Chancellor” – indeed like a
politician or legislator rather than a practitioner. The assessment is just to
the extent that Bacon in the New Organon does indeed prescribe a new and
extremely rigid procedure for the investigation of nature rather than describe
the more or less instinctive and improvisational – and by no means exclusively
empirical – method that Kepler, Galileo, Harvey himself, and other working
scientists were actually employing. In fact, other than Tycho Brahe, the Danish
astronomer who, overseeing a team of assistants, faithfully observed and then
painstakingly recorded entire volumes of astronomical data in tidy,
systematically arranged tables, it is doubtful that there is another major
figure in the history of science who can be legitimately termed an authentic,
true-blooded Baconian. (Darwin, it is true, claimed that The Origin of
Species was based on “Baconian principles.” However, it is one thing to
collect instances in order to compare species and show a relationship among
them; it is quite another to theorize a mechanism, namely evolution by mutation
and natural selection, that elegantly and powerfully explains their entire
history and variety.) Science, that is to say, does not, and has probably never advanced according
to the strict, gradual, ever-plodding method of Baconian observation and
induction. It proceeds instead by unpredictable – and often intuitive and even
(though Bacon would cringe at the word) imaginative – leaps and bounds.
Kepler used Tycho’s scrupulously gathered data to support his own heart-felt and
even occult belief that the movements of celestial bodies are regular and
symmetrical, composing a true harmony of the spheres. Galileo tossed unequal
weights from the Leaning Tower as a mere public demonstration of the fact
(contrary to Aristotle) that they would fall at the same rate. He had long
before satisfied himself that this would happen via the very un-Bacon-like
method of mathematical reasoning and deductive thought-experiment. Harvey, by a
similar process of quantitative analysis and deductive logic, knew that
the blood must circulate, and it was only to provide proof of this fact that he
set himself the secondary task of amassing empirical evidence and establishing
the actual method by which it did so. One could enumerate – in true Baconian fashion – a host of further instances.
But the point is already made: advances in scientific knowledge have not been
achieved for the most part via Baconian induction (which amounts to a kind of
systematic and exhaustive survey of nature supposedly leading to ultimate
insights) but rather by shrewd hints and guesses – in a word by
hypotheses – that are then either corroborated or (in Karl Popper’s
important term) falsified by subsequent research. In summary, then, it can be said that Bacon underestimated the role of
imagination and hypothesis (and overestimated the value of minute observation
and bee-like data collection) in the production of new scientific knowledge. And
in this respect it is true that he wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor,
regally proclaiming the benefits of his own new and supposedly foolproof
technique instead of recognizing and adapting procedures that had already been
tested and approved. On the other hand, it must be added that Bacon did not
present himself (or his method) as the final authority on the investigation of
nature or, for that matter, on any other topic or issue relating to the advance
of knowledge. By his own admission, he was but the Buccinator, or
“trumpeter,” of such a revolutionary advance – not the founder or builder of a
vast new system, but only the herald or announcing messenger of a new world to
come.