Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Francis

(b. London, England, 22 January 1561; d. London, 9 April 1626)

philosophy of science.

Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal, and Ann, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1573 to 1575, when he entered Gray’s Inn; he became a barrister in 1582. Bacon’s life was spent in court circles, in politics, and in the law; in religion he adhered to the middle road of the Church of England, neither authoritarian nor sectarian. In 1606 he married Alice Barnham. He was knighted on the accession of James I In 1603, became lord chancellor in 1618, and was made viscount St. Albans in 1621. Bacon was dismissed from the chancellorship in 1621 after being convicted of bribery, a strain under which his health broke down. He then lived in retirement near St. Albans, devoting his remaining years to natural philosophy.

Bacon’s writings in history, law, politics, and morals are extensive; but his place in the history of science rests chiefly upon his natural philosophy, his philosophy of scientific method, his projects for the practical organization of science, and the influence of all these upon the science of the later seventeenth century. During and immediately following his lifetime his principal publications in these areas were The Advancement of Learning (1605), expanded and latinized as De augmentis scientiarum (1623); De sapientia veterum (1609); Novum organum (1620); and Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis (1627). Many of his shorter works, some of them fragmentary and published posthumously, are of equal scientific and philosophical interest.

Although Bacon was a contemporary of William Gilbert, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and William Harvey, he was curiously isolated from the scientific developments with which they were associated. His knowledge of and contribution to the natural sciences were almost entirely literary; and, indeed, it has been shown that much of the empirical material collected in his “histories” is not the result of his own firsthand observation, but is taken directly from literary sources. Furthermore, most of Bacon’s comments on both his scientific contemporaries and his philosophical predecessors are critical. For example, he never accepted the Copernican “hypothesis,” attacking both Ptolemy and Copernicus for producing mere “calculations and predictions” instead of “philosophy... what is found in nature herself, and is actually and really true”¹. On similar grounds he attacked the theory of “perspective” as not providing a proper theory of the nature of light because it never went further than geometry. Mathematics was, he thought, to be used as a tool in natural philosophy, not as an end, and he had no pretensions to mathematical learning. He was not unsympathetic to Gilbert’s magnetic philosophy, but he criticized him for leaping too quickly to a single unifying principle without due regard for experiment.

Bacon’s closest associations with contemporary science were with atomism and with the Renaissance tradition of natural magic. His views on atomism underwent considerable change during the period of his philosophical writings, from a sympathetic discussion of Democritus in De sapientia veterum and De principiis atque originibus,² to outright rejection of “the doctrine of atoms, which implies the hypothesis of a vacuum and that of the unchangeableness of matter (both false assumptions)” in Novum organum.³ There were both philosophical and scientific reasons for this change of mind. Even in his earlier works, Bacon posed the fundamental dilemma of atomism: either the atom is endowed with some of the qualities that are familiar to sense, such as “matter, form, dimension, place, resistance, appetite...,”⁴ in which case it is difficult to justify taking these qualities rather than any other sensible qualities as primary; or the atom is wholly different from bodies apprehended by the senses, in which case it is difficult to see how we come to know anything about them. On the other hand, empirical phenomena of cohesion and continuity are impossible to understand in terms of inert atoms alone; and the existence of spirituous substances, even in space void of air, seems to cast doubt upon the existence of the absolute void demanded by atomism.

In any case, Bacon was never an orthodox atomist, for as early as De sapientia veterum he insisted that the atom has active powers other than mere impenetrability—it has “desire,” “appetite,” and “force that constitutes and fashions all things out of matter,”⁵ in Novum organum these qualities are ascribed to bodies in general. All bodies have powers to produce change in themselves and in other bodies; they have “perceptions” that, although distinct from the “sensations” of animals, nevertheless enable them to respond to other bodies, as iron does in the neighborhood of a magnet. That virtues seem thus to emanate from bodies through space is an argument for suspecting that there may be incorporeal substances: “Everything tangible that we are acquainted with contains an invisible and intangible spirit, which it wraps and clothes as with a garment.” It “gives them [bodies] shape, produces limbs, assimilates, digests, ejects, organises and the like.” It “feeds upon” tangible parts and “turns them into spirit.”⁶

Commentators have seen in this dualism of tangible, inert matter and active, intangible spirits a legacy of Renaissance animism, and have tended to apologize for it as being out of harmony with Bacon’s other, more progressive views. Indeed, in seventeenthcentury writings and later, Bacon was most often listed with the revivers of the Democritan philosophy, in company with those to whom his “active spirits” might be an embarrassment. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Bacon necessarily thought of his view on spirits as opposed to a mechanical theory of nature. There are many passages in which he objects to his predecessors’ purely verbal ontologies of spirits and describes his own view as essentially unitary:” “this spirit, whereof I am speaking, is not a virtue, nor an energy, nor an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and indivisible, and yet having place and dimension, and real... a rarefied body, akin to air, though greatly differing from it.”⁷ Both in the description of heat as a species of motion in Novum organum and in the discussion of transmission of light and sound in Sylva sylvarum,⁸ Bacon showed his sympathy with explanations in terms of mechanical analogues.

Bacon’s natural philosophy is indecisive, and also a good deal more subtle than that of his corpuscularian successors. It is not surprising, therefore, that it did not lead to any detailed theoretical developments (as did, for example, Descartes’s) and had, in fact, little direct influence. It can be argued, however, that, unlike Descartes, Bacon was not attempting to reach theoretical conclusions but, rather, to lay the necessary foundations for his inductive method. To that method we now turn.

Bacon’s method is foreshadowed in the early Valerius terminus (1603), but was not developed until the last few years of his life. De augmentis scientiarum and Novum organum are the first and second parts of his projected Great Instauration, and the applications of the method that were to have constituted four further parts reached only a fragmentary stage in the Histories, most of which were published posthumously.

In De augmentis scientiarum, which is concerned primarily with the classification of philosophy and the sciences, Bacon develops his influential view of the relation between science and theology. He distinguishes in traditional fashion between knowledge by divine revelation and knowledge by the senses, and divides the latter into natural theology, natural philosophy, and the sciences of man. Natural philosophy is independent of theology; but in a sense its end is also knowledge of God, for it seeks the “footprints of the Creator imprinted on his creatures.”⁹ Indeed, Bacon sees both speculative and practical science as religious duties, the first for the understanding of creation and the second for the practice of charity to men. We should not read back into Bacon’s separation of science and theology any implication that theology is depreciated or superseded by science. Such a view was hardly influential until the Enlightenment, whereas seventeenth-century natural philosophers generally followed Bacon in claiming a religious function for their investigations; this was undoubtedly one important factor in the public success of the scientific movement.

Having placed his project within the complete framework of knowledge in true Aristotelian fashion, Bacon proceeds to demolish all previous pretensions to natural philosophy. His aim is to lay the foundations of science entirely anew, neither leaping to unproved general principles in the manner of the ancient philosophers nor heaping up unrelated facts in the manner of the “empirics” (among whom he counts contemporary alchemists and natural magicians). “Histories,” or collections of data, are to be drawn up systematically and used to raise an ordered system of axioms that will eventually embrace all the phenomena of nature. Many commentators, in the seventeenth century and later, have been misled, by the apparently unorganized collections of facts that fill Bacon’s works, into supposing that his method was a merely empirical one, with no concern for theoretical interpretation. Such an impression is easily dispelled, however, by a closer reading of the text of Novum organum. We shall follow his account of the method in that work.

The first step in making true inductions is, as in a religious initiation, a purging of the intellect of the “idols” that, in man’s natural fallen state, obstruct his unprejudiced understanding of the world. Bacon holds that we must consciously divest our minds of prejudices caused by excessive anthropomorphism (the “idols of the tribe”), by the particular interests of each individual (the “idols of the cave”), by the deceptions of words (the “idols of the market place”), and by received philosophical systems (the “idols of the theater”).¹⁰ Only in this way can the mind become a tabula abrasa on which true notions can be inscribed by nature itself. The consequences of the Fall for the intellect will then be erased, and man will be able to return to his God-given state of dominion over creation.

The aim of scientific investigation is to discover the “forms of simple natures.” What Bacon means by a “form” is best gathered from his example concerning the form of heat (which is the only application of his method that he works out in any detail): “The Form of a thing is the very thing itself, and the thing differs from the form no otherwise than as the apparent differs from the real, or the external from the internal, or the thing in reference to man from the thing in reference to the universe.” Hence, when the “form or true definition of heat” is defined as “Heat is a motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife upon the smaller parts of bodies,” Bacon means “Heat itself, or the quid ipsum of Heat, is Motion and nothing else.”¹¹ Thus, the form is not to be understood in a Platonic or Aristotelian sense but, rather, as what was later called an “explanation” or “reduction” of a secondary quality (heat) to a function of primary bodies and qualities (matter in motion). In order to discover what primary qualities are relevant to the form, Bacon prescribes his Tables of Presence, Absence, and Comparison: “[the form] is always present when the nature is present.... absent when the nature is absent” and “always decrease[s] when the nature in question decreases, and... always increase[s] when the nature in question increases.”¹²

Therefore, we are to draw up a Table of Instances that all agree in the simple nature, heat—such as rays of the sun, flame, and boiling liquids—and then to look for other natures that are copresent with heat and therefore are candidates for its form. To ensure that as many irrelevant natures as possible are eliminated at this stage, these instances should be as unlike each other as possible except in the nature of heat. Second, a Table of Absence should be drawn up, in which as far as possible each instance in the Table of Presence should be matched by an instance similar to it in all respects except heat, such as rays of the moon and stars, phosphorescence, and cool liquids. This is the method of exclusion by negative instances, which will at once test a putative form drawn from the Table of Presence; if it is not the true form, it will not be absent in otherwise similar instances when heat is absent. The tables are the precursors of Mill’s “Joint Method of Agreement and Differences,” and clearly are more adequate than the method of induction by simple enumeration of positive instances, with which Bacon has so often been wrongly identified. Construction of the tables demands not a passive observation of nature, but an active search for appropriate instances; and it therefore encourages artificial experiment. Nature, Bacon says, must be “put to the question.”¹³

Inference of the form from the tables is, however, only the beginning of the method. Bacon speaks often of raising a “ladder of axioms” by means of the forms, until we have constructed the complete system of natural philosophy that unifies all forms and natures. The conception seems to be something like an Aristotelian classification into genus, species, and differentia, in which every nature has its place. It also has some affinity with the later conception of a theoretical structure that yields observation statements by successive deductions from theoretical premises. But it would be misleading to press these parallels too closely, for the essence of Bacon’s ascent to the axioms is that it is the result of a number of inductive inferences whose conclusions are infallible if they have been properly drawn from properly contrived Tables of Instances. The axioms are emphatically not the result of a leap to postulated premises from which observations may be deduced, for this is not an infallible method and gives no guarantee that the axioms arrived at are unique, let alone true. This deductive method is, in fact, what Bacon calls the method of “anticipation of nature,” which, he thinks, may be useful in designing appropriate Tables of Instances, but is to be avoided in inductive inference proper.

Bacon is not unaware that the infallibility of his method depends crucially on there being only a finite number of simple natures and on our ability to enumerate all those present in any given instance. His faith that nature is indeed finite in the required respects seems to rest upon his natural philosophy. Although he rejected atomism, he retained the belief that the primary qualities are few in number and regarded the inductive method as the means to discover which qualities they are. Forms are the “alphabet of nature”¹⁴ that suffice to produce the great variety of nature from a small stock of primary qualities, just as the letters of the alphabet can generate a vast literature. The whole investigation is further complicated, as Bacon also sees, by the fact that some natures are “hidden” and cannot be taken account of in the tables unless we employ “aids to the senses” to bring them within reach of sensation. Much of the later part of Novum organum is taken up with this problem, which leads Bacon to commend not only instruments such as the telescope, but also “fit and apposite experiments” that bring hidden and subtle processes to light.¹⁵

Complementary to Bacon’s ascent to axioms is his insistence on subsequent descent to works. The aim is not merely passive understanding of nature, but also practical application of that understanding to the improvement of man’s condition; Bacon holds that each of these aspects of his method is sterile without the other. Furthermore, he claims to have given in his method a means whereby anyone who follows the rules can do science—he has “levelled men’s wits.”¹⁶ Thus, with proper organization and financial support, it should be possible to complete the edifice of science in a few years and to gather all the practical fruit that it promised for the good of men. Such a vision inspired Bacon as early as 1592, when he described in a letter to Cecil his “vast contemplative ends... I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries.”¹⁷ Throughout his life he used his status and influence in a succession of frustrated attempts to obtain the Crown’s support for this enterprise. In 1605 it was advertised in The Advancement of Learning —the only work Bacon ever published in English. His unfinished account of the ideal scientific society was published posthumously in New Atlantis, which ranks among the best-known and most delightful Utopian writings in the world and has been perhaps the most influential.

New Atlantis contains a description of the island of Bensalem, on which there is a cooperative college of science called Salomon’s House. Bacon’s account of it begins with a concise expression of his whole vision of science: “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”¹⁸ The house is essentially a religious community, having “certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of laud and thanks to God.”¹⁹ It contains all kinds of laboratories and instruments for the pursuit of science, and is organized on the principle of a division of labor among those who perform experiments and collect information from various sources; those who determine the significance of the information and experiments, and direct and perform new and more penetrating experiments; and the “Interpreters,” who “raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms.”²⁰ It is noticeable that while there are said to be thirty-three men assigned to the experimental parts of this task, only three are assigned to interpretation—a proportion that seems to reflect neither the status Bacon gives to the raising of axioms in his explicit accounts of method, nor the ease with which he thought this part of the task would be completed. Unfortunately, however, it does reflect the way Bacon’s ideas were subsequently understood.

Bacon’s immense prestige and influence in later seventeenth-century science does not rest upon positive achievements in either experiment or theory but, rather, upon his vision of science expressed in Novum organum and New Atlantis, and in particular upon his fundamental optimism about the possibilities for its rapid development. Now that the true method had been described, he thought all that was required was the purgation of the intellect to make a fit instrument for the method, and the human and financial resources to carry it out. When patronage and manpower for the organization of science were eventually forthcoming in the form of the Royal Society, its Philosophical Transactions was soon full of just the sort of “histories” Bacon had prescribed. His program for the raising of axioms, however, was taken less seriously than his strictures against “anticipations” and hypotheses, so that the weight of his influence was toward empiricism rather than toward theoretical system-building. At the time this did provide a useful corrective to Cartesianism, as can even be seen In Newton’s insistence on the inductive “ascent” to the law of gravitation, in contrast with the merely imagined hypotheses of Descartes. But although most leading members of the Royal Society took every opportunity to proclaim themselves Bacon’s loyal disciples, they tacitly adopted a more tolerant attitude toward hypotheses than his; and subsequent theoretical developments took place in spite of, rather than as examples of, his elaboration of method. His successors in this area should be sought among the inductive logicians, beginning with Hume and Mill, and not among the scientists.

NOTES

1. Descriptio globi intellectus (1612), in Works, III, 734; V, 511.

2. Probably written before 1620, published 1653.

3. Novum organum, in Works I, 234; IV, 126.

4. De principiis atque originibus, in Works, III, III; V, 492.

5. De sapientia veterum, in Works, VI, 655, 729.

6. Novum organum, 1, 310; IV, 195.

7. Historia vitae et mortis (1623), in Works, II, 213; V, 321.

8. Sylva sylvarum, in Works, II, 429 ff.

9. De augmentis scientiarum, in Works, I, 544; IV, 341. Also Novum organum, I, 145; IV, 33.

10. Novum organum, I, 169; IV, 58 ff.

11. Ibid., I, 248, 262, 266; IV, 137, 150, 154.

12. Ibid., I, 230, 248; IV, 121, 17.

13. Ibid., I, 403; IV, 263.

14. Abecedarium naturae, in Works, II, 85; V, 208.

15. Novum organum, I, 168; IV, 58.

16. Ibid., I, 217; IV, 109.

17. Letters and Life, I, 109.

18. New Atlantis, in Works, III, 156.

19. Ibid., III, 166.

20. Ibid., III,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The standard edition of Bacon’s works is The Works of Francis Bacon, J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, eds., 7 vols. (London, 1857–1859), which contains valuable prefaces and notes. The philosophical and scientific works are in Vols. I-III and VI, with English translations in Vols. IV and V. Also of value is The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, Including All HIs Occasional Works, J. Spedding, ed., 7 vols. (London, 1861–1874). All page references in the Notes are to these editions. I have modified some of the translations. For further original works and secondary literature, see R. Gibson, Francis Bacon: A Bibliography of His Works and of Baconiana to the Year 1750 (Oxford, 1950). A useful edition of an individual work with notes, introduction, and bibliography is Novum organum, Thomas Fowler, ed. (2nd ed., Oxford, 1889).

II. Secondary Literature. There are many biographies, and their quality varies greatly. The most valuable recent examples are F. H. Anderson, Francis Bacon, His Career and His Thought (Los Angeles, 1962); J. G. Crowther, Francis Bacon (London, 1960); and B. Farrington, Francis Bacon; Philosopher of Industrial Science (London, 1961). The last two interpret Bacon mainly as a “philosopher of works.”

The literature on Bacon’s philosophy and science is enormous, and there is no attempt at completeness here. The recent books and articles listed give references to further material whose absence from this list does not imply any value judgment: B. Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, an Essay on Its Development From 1603 to 1609 With New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool, 1964)—neither the commentary nor the newly translated texts throw much additional light on Bacon’s scientific ideas during this period; Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon of Verulam, Realistic Philosophy and Its Age, John Oxenford, trans. (London, 1857), which is still a useful analysis of Bacon’s method but, like most nineteenth-century works (except those of Ellis and Spedding), underestimates the significance of Bacon’s doctrine of spirits; Thomas Fowler, Bacon (London-New York, 1881), which deals with Bacon’s philosophy and scientific method and their influence; W. Frost, Bacon und die Naturphilosophie (Munich, 1927); Mary B. Hesse, “Francis Bacon,” in D. J. O’Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1964), pp. 141–152; C. W. Lemmi, The Classic Deities in Bacon (Baltimore, 1933), not always accurate on Bacon’s science; A. Levi, II pensiero di F. Bacone considerato in relazione con le filosofie della natura de Rinascimento e col razionalismo cartesiano (Turin, 1925), one of the first detailed accounts of Bacon’s relation to his immediate predecessors; G. H. Nadel, “History as Psychology in Francis Bacon’s Theory of History,” in History and Theory, 5 (1966), 275–287; M. Primack, “Outline of a Reinterpretation of Francis Bacon’s Philosophy,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 5 (1967), 123–132; P . Rossi, Francesco Bacone, dalla magia alla scienza (Bari, 1957; English trans. by S. Rabinovitch, London, 1968), which interprets Bacon’s science as being heavily indebted to the natural magic tradition and his logic as indebted to Ramist rhetoric; P. M. Schuhl, La pensée de lord Bacon (Paris, 1949); and K. R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943).

Recent general works with extensive references to Bacon are R. M. Blake, C. J. Ducasse, and E. H. Madden, Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance Through the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, Wash., 1960), ch. 3; C. Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), esp. ch. 3; R. H. Kargon, Atomism in England From Hariot to Newton (Oxford, 1966), which contains a good bibliography of recent scholarly articles on Bacon, pp. 150–153; R. McRae, The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto, 1961); and Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, Mass. 1967), esp. ch. 2.

Mary Hesse