BACON, FRANCIS
(1561–1626)

Francis Bacon, Baron Veralum, Viscount St. Albans, gained renown both as an English statesman and a natural philosopher. Bacon was instrumental in the replacement of Aristotelian natural philosophy, effecting a major shift to thinking about the natural world in exclusively empirical and experimental terms, although he remained entrenched in Aristotelian thought to a significant degree. His achievement was twofold: First, he transformed the discipline of philosophy from something contemplative that focused above all on moral questions into something practical that focused centrally on questions in natural philosophy (what is now called science). Second, his work in the natural sciences resulted in the formulation of precepts that are now regarded as foundation stones of the inductive modern scientific method: moving inferentially from observable effects to deeper underlying causes and eliminating various possible explanations by testing their consequences against experiment or observation.

Life

Bacon was born on January, 22, 1561, the eldest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the Great Seal, and Ann, second daughter of Sir Anthony Coke, known for her strong Protestant sympathies. Bacon attended Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1573 to 1575, but moved to Gray's Inn in 1575, traveling to France—where he came into contact with Italian republican ideas—in 1576 and remaining there until his father's death in 1579. From that time onward he began a career in law and politics that took him from his first parliamentary seat (1581), admission to the bar (1582), deputy chief steward of the Duchy of Lancaster (1594), solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), member of the Privy Council (1616), lord keeper of the Great Seal (1617), to his being created viscount of St. Albans in 1621. In that same year he was impeached and spent the rest of his life in comparative isolation from the court society he had enjoyed for the previous fifteen years. He died on April 9, 1626. His death has traditionally been attributed to his contracting pneumonia as a result of leaving his carriage to test the preserving effects of cold on a chicken, but it is more likely that he died of an overdose of inhaled niter or opiates, self-prescribed to cure a long-running illness.

His intellectual career falls into three stages. From 1592 to 1602, his main concern was the reform of English law. From 1602 to around 1620, he worked on a very ambitious project in natural philosophy, advocating a form of atomism and setting out a new method of inquiry in natural philosophy, as well as investigating a huge number of topics in natural history. Around 1620 he began to publish parts of his grand scheme on a systematic basis, although Bacon could never be called a systematic philosopher. His plans for the reform of natural philosophy were not taken seriously by his English contemporaries during his lifetime, but within a few years of his death, critics of contemporary natural philosophy and founders of scientific academies in Italy, France, and England took him as their model, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century his name was linked with Newton's among the founders of modern science.

Law and Rhetoric

Bacon's first attempts at reform were in the area of law rather than natural philosophy. The law offered guidance on three questions that would subsequently make it a model for his proposed reform of natural philosophy: the reliability of testimony, what should be concluded from particular testimonies, and how one decided the relevance of particular laws to the case. It was the third of these that he saw most in need of reform, and he set out to investigate how the law might be systematized, how regular records and reviews of legal decisions might be provided, and whether some firm foundations for legal practice might be discovered. What is at issue here is what was referred to as the "discovery" of law. It was a shared premise that the law was structured in accord with reason and that this structure enabled one, in cases where the laws did not give a clear indication of infringements, to appeal to the implicit message of the common law. On the assumption that the law covered every eventuality, the task was to find one's way through its rational structure. The questions to which Bacon directed himself particularly were whether there was an optimal procedure by which to discover that rational structure and what the ultimate source of authority was in the case of dispute.

Bacon's emphasis on the role for discovery in the legal thinking reflects a concern with rhetoric, which plays a crucial role in both his proposed reform of the law and that of natural philosophy. The task of rhetoric was the formulation, organization, and expression of one's ideas in a coherent and compelling way. It was designed to help one find one's way around the comprehensive body of learning built up from antiquity, to recognize where appropriate evidence and arguments might be found, and to provide models that were designed to give one a sense of what was needed if a particular question was to be investigated, or a particular position defended, models that would be shared with those to whom one was expounding or defending one's case. Rhetoric, in Bacon's view, should help to focus the mental powers, to organize one's thoughts in the most economical fashion, and even (in writers like Quintilian) to provide vivid images or representations of situations that enabled one to convince oneself of a case (important especially in acting and in legal argument). It was designed to provide models to show one how particular kinds of case were best defended, depending on such facts as the availability of and complexity of the evidence and the knowledge, opinions, or prejudices of the audience toward which one was directing one's arguments.

At a general level, rhetoric was deemed to be indifferent to subject matter because comprehensive procedures were recommended that would aid a case or investigation, scientific or a legal, although there would be similarities or analogies (as regards the standing of various kinds of evidence, for example) and dissimilarities (as regards the means of evidence collection, for example) between legal cases and those in natural philosophy. The law, taken in a broad sense, was seen as a paradigm case for rhetorical writers: Rhetorical treatises were often explicitly directed toward lawyers and legislators, and examples were geared to the kinds of problems that arose in law. In light of this, it is only to be expected that using a rhetorical model for knowledge—that is, a model that gives direction on how to collect and assess evidence for a view, how to make a judgment on the basis of that evidence, and how to establish the correctness of judgment, using precepts derived from the study of rhetoric—is in many respects using a legal model.

Rhetoric provided a theoretical foundation for the law, something which, at a practical level, worked with elaborate procedures for the gathering, assessing, and testing of evidence. This was exactly the kind of thing that Bacon had in mind for natural philosophy. What was unusual about his application of precepts learned from rhetoric and law to natural philosophy was that he used them to propose a fundamental reform of philosophy. While Bacon started from a consideration of the law, however, law did not act as a model in its own right. Its importance arose from the fact that (especially once it had been reformed along Baconian lines) it exemplified a rhetorically motivated account of discovery. This holds the key to Bacon's enterprise.

The best way to understand this reform is in terms of the pervasive Renaissance contrast, often drawn in classical terms, between the life of contemplation (otium ) and the life of practical, productive activity (negotium ). There had been a decisive shift in favor of the latter in sixteenth-century England. In particular, there was a stress on practical questions and the practical uses of learning; and philosophy—above all Scholastic philosophy—was widely regarded as a useless discipline that fostered argument for its own sake, never getting anywhere and never producing anything of value. Moreover, morality was widely seen as the key philosophical topic (following the Ciceronian model current in Renaissance Europe), and a number of Elizabethan thinkers, most notably the poet Sir Philip Sidney, were arguing that poetry was superior to philosophy because philosophy could only discourse on the nature of goodness, whereas poetry could actually move people to goodness, which was the point of the exercise.

Bacon did two things: He shifted philosophy from otium to negotium, and he made natural philosophy replace moral philosophy as the center of the philosophical enterprise. The combination of these two (and they are intimately connected) is a radical move that marks a decisive break not only with earlier conceptions of philosophy but also with earlier understandings of the task of the philosopher.

Natural philosophy existed in a number of forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and there were two extreme forms. The first was exemplified by alchemy, an esoteric but practical discipline that had little connection with traditional philosophical practice and that suffered, in Bacon's view, from a lack of structure that produced few results, with most of that paucity attributable to chance. At the other extreme was Scholastic natural philosophy, an intensely theoretical discipline that, in Bacon's view, produced nothing at all; despite its great sophistication, it turned out to be almost exclusively verbal.

Bacon wanted something that could deliver the advantages of each of these without any of the disadvantages. He wanted something that would provide a detailed theoretical overview of the natural realm such that natural processes could not only be understood but, more importantly, also transformed on the basis of this understanding; this is the context of his famous dictum "knowledge is power." The ultimate aim was to transform natural processes for the common good (to be decided by the sovereign, on Bacon's view), and it was this, rather than some contemplative understanding of nature, that provided the rationale for natural philosophy and, by extension, philosophy per se.

Bacon himself formulated his project in terms of a politico-religious restoration of human dominion over the natural world, something lost with Adam's expulsion from Eden. Natural philosophy thereby gained a religious imperative, albeit one with little connection with traditional theology.

The Doctrine of Idols

If rhetoric is the first ingredient in Bacon's account of method, the second is a distinctive understanding of why the need for method arises. Here Bacon's stress on a psychological dimension of knowledge is important: Questions of presentation of knowledge are not only recognized to be important but also have to be understood, where such an understanding is not supplementary to epistemology but actually part of it. At one level, there is nothing new in this, for it is simply part of a long tradition that begins in earnest with the Roman rhetoricians; but although it borrows from Greek writers, it is rather different from the approach to epistemological questions that we find in the classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophers. When one thinks of Bacon's general project in this context, it becomes clear that there is something novel here. For natural philosophy had generally been the preserve of Greek philosophy and had been pursued in a similar way by Scholastic philosophers. The Roman tradition, with the exception of Lucretius, had typically not concerned itself with speculative natural-philosophical questions, dealing instead with practical moral, political, and legal questions. In thinking of persuasion in terms of a psychological theory, of psychological theory as part of epistemology, and of epistemology as being directed primarily toward natural philosophy, Bacon was able to provide himself with some of the resources to recast natural philosophy not as a speculative but as a practical discipline.

This psychological dimension of epistemology is brought out fully in Bacon's doctrine of the "idols of the mind." These idols "do not deceive in particulars, as the others do, by clouding and snaring the judgment; but by a corrupt and ill-ordered predisposition of the mind, which as it were perverts and infects all the anticipations of the intellect." The second part of the "Great Instauration," which aims at the renewal of learning, is devoted to the "invention of knowledge" and has two components, one aiming to rid the mind of preconceptions, the other to guide the mind in a productive direction. These components are interconnected, for until we understand the nature of the mind's preconceptions, we do not know in what direction we need to lead its thinking. In other words, various natural inclinations of the mind must be purged before the new procedure can be set in place. Bacon's approach here is genuinely different from that of his predecessors, as he realizes. Logic or method in themselves cannot simply be introduced to replace bad habits of thought because it is not simply a question of replacement. The simple application of logic to one's mental processes is insufficient.

In his doctrine of the four idols of the mind, Bacon provides an account of the systematic forms of error to which the mind is subject, and this is a crucial part of his epistemology. It is in his treatment of internal impediments, the "idols," that the question is raised of what psychological or cognitive state we must be in to be able to pursue natural philosophy in the first place. Bacon believes an understanding of nature of a kind that had never been achieved since the Fall is possible in his own time because the distinctive obstacles that have held up all previous attempts have been identified, in what is in many respects a novel theory of what might traditionally have been treated under a theory of the passions, one directed specifically at natural-philosophical practice.

The "idols of the tribe" derive from human nature itself, above all from "the homogeneity of the substance of the human mind, or from its preoccupation, or from its narrowness, or from its restless motion, or from an infusion of the affections, or from the incompetence of the senses, or from the mode of impression." (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 58–59). The idols of the tribe affect everyone equally and are manifested in an eagerness to suppose that there is more order and regularity in nature than there actually is; in the tendency to neglect or ignore counterexamples to one's theories; in the tendency to extrapolate from striking cases with which one is familiar to all other cases; in the restlessness of the human mind, which means it is not satisfied with perfectly good fundamental explanations, mistakenly and constantly seeking some more fundamental cause ad infinitum; and in the tendency to believe true what one would like to be true.

The "idols of the cave," we are told, "take their rise in the peculiar constitution, mental or bodily, of each individual; and also in education, habit, and accident" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 59). They include fascination with a particular subject, which leads to overhasty generalization; the readiness of some minds to focus on differences, and some to focus on similarities and resemblances, while a balance is difficult to attain naturally; and the fact that some minds are overly attracted to antiquity and some to novelty. Finally, there are those who are concerned wholly with material constitution at the expense of structure (the ancient atomists) and those who are concerned wholly with structure at the expense of material constitution.

These examples bring to light a very significant difference between the idols of the tribe and idols of the cave. There seems to be a set of routine procedures one can go through to remedy the situation in the latter case, procedures provided by the positive part of Bacon's doctrine—eliminative induction—whereas the case of idols of the tribe is, in most cases, much more difficult to remedy.

The third kind of idols, those of the marketplace derive from the fact that we have to express and communicate our thoughts by means of language, which contains systematic deficiencies. One kind of problem with language lies in the fact that words "are commonly framed and applied according to the capacity of the vulgar, and follow those lines of division which are most obvious to the vulgar understanding. And whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or a more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true divisions of nature, words stand in the way and resist the change" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 61). This leads to two kinds of linguistically induced deficiencies. First, language provides names that refer to things that do not exist, such as "Fortune, Prime Mover, Planetary Orbits, Element of Fire, and like fictions that owe their origin to false and idle theories" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 61). The solution here is simply to get rid of the theories that give rise to these fictitious entities.

The second kind of case is not so straightforward. It arises because words have multiple and/or ill-defined meanings, and this is especially so in the case of terms such as humid that have been abstracted from observation. Bacon discerns a gradation in the "degrees of distortion and error" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 62) of terms, beginning with names of substances, where the degree of distortion is low, proceeding through the names of actions, and finally reaching the names of qualities—he gives the examples of "heavy, light, rare, dense" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 62)—where the degree of distortion is high.

Finally, the fourth kinds of impediment, the idols of the theater, are innate neither in the mind nor in language but are acquired from a corrupt philosophical culture and its perverse rules of demonstration. Here a general remedy is available, namely following Bacon's positive methodological prescriptions: "The course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level. For as in the drawing of a straight lines or a perfect circle, much depends on the steadiness and practice of the hand, but if with the aid of a rule or compass, little or nothing; so is it exactly with my plan" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 62–63).

One of the great values of Bacon's account of the idols is that it allows him to make the case for method in a particularly compelling way. Indeed, never has the need for method been set out more forcefully, for Bacon's advocacy of method is not simply an aid to discovery. He argues that we pursue natural philosophy with seriously deficient natural faculties, we operate with a severely inadequate means of communication, and we rely on a hopelessly corrupt philosophical culture. In many respects, these are beyond remedy. The practitioners of natural philosophy certainly need to reform their behavior, overcome their natural inclinations and passions, but not so that, in doing this, they might aspire to a natural, prelapsarian state in which they might know things as they are with an unmediated knowledge. This they will never achieve. Rather, the reform of behavior is a discipline to which they must subject themselves if they are to be able to follow a procedure which is, in many respects, quite contrary to their natural inclinations, which is at odds with traditional conceptions of the natural philosopher, and which is indeed subversive of their individuality.

Eliminative Induction

What Bacon is seeking from a method of discovery is something that modern philosophers would deem impossibly strong: the discovery of causes that are both necessary and sufficient for their effects. Why place such strong constraints on causation, so that we call something a cause only when the effect always occurs in the presence of this thing and never in its absence? What Bacon (like Aristotle before him) is after are the ultimate explanations of things, and it is natural to assume that ultimate explanations are unique. Bacon's method is designed to provide a route to such explanations, and the route takes us through a number of proposed causal accounts, which are refined at each stage. The procedure he elaborates, eliminative induction, is one in which various possibly contributory factors are isolated and examined in turn, to see whether they do in fact make a contribution to the effect. Those that do not are rejected, and the result is a convergence on those factors that are truly relevant. The kind of "relevance" that Bacon is after is, in effect, a set of necessary conditions: the procedure is supposed to enable us to weed out those factors that are not necessary for the production of the effect, so that we are left only with those that are necessary.

Bacon provides an example of how the method works in the case of color. We take, as our starting point, some combination of substances that produces whiteness—that is, we start with what are sufficient conditions for the production of whiteness, and then we remove from these anything not necessary for the color. First, we note that if air and water are mixed together in small portions, the result is white, as in snow or waves. Here we have the sufficient conditions for whiteness, but not the necessary conditions, so next we increase the scope, substituting any transparent uncolored substance for water, whence we find that glass or crystal, on being ground, become white, and albumen, which is initially a watery transparent substance, on having air beaten into it, becomes white. Third, we further increase the scope and ask what happens in the case of colored substances. Amber and sapphire become white on being ground, and wine and beer become white when brought to a froth.

The substances considered up to this stage have all been "more grossly transparent than air." Bacon next considers flame, which is less grossly transparent than air, and argues that the mixture of the fire and air makes the flame whiter. The upshot of this is that water is sufficient for whiteness but not necessary for it. He continues in the same vein, asking next whether air is necessary for whiteness. He notes that a mixture of water and oil is white, even when the air has been evaporated from it, so air is not necessary for whiteness; but is a transparent substance necessary? Bacon does not continue with the chain of questions after this point but sets out some conclusions, namely that bodies whose parts are unequal but in simple proportion are white, those whose parts are in equal proportions are transparent, those whose parts are proportionately unequal are colors, and those whose parts are absolutely unequal are black. In other words, this is the conclusion that might be expected of the method of sifting out what is necessary for the phenomenon and what is not, although Bacon himself does not provide the route to this conclusion here.

This being the case, one can ask what his confidence in his conclusion derives from if he has not been able to complete the "induction" himself. The answer is that it derives from the consequences he can draw from his account. There are two ways in which the justification for the conclusions can be assessed: by the procedure of eliminative induction that he has just set out and by the consequences of those conclusions generated by it. In other words, there is a two-way process, from empirical phenomena to first principles, and then from first principles to empirical phenomena. This is a classic Aristotelian procedure. Where Bacon's version of it differs is in how the first step is carried out, and the difference turns on the use of eliminative induction.

Bacon's treatment of heat in Novum Organum follows essentially the same route, albeit in a more elaborate way. The first thing to do, he tells us, is to list "instances agreeing in the nature of heat," that is, a list of those cases in which heat is present: the rays of the sun, reflected rays, meteors, thunderbolts, volcanic eruptions, flame, burning solids, natural warm-baths, boiling liquids, hot vapors and fumes, fine cloudless days, air confined underground, wool and down, bodies held near a fire, sparks, rubbed bodies, confined vegetable matter, quick lime sprinkled with water, metals dissolved in acids or alkalis, the insides of animals, horse dung, strong oil of sulfur and of vitriol (i.e. sulphuric acid), oil of marjoram, rectified spirit of wine, aromatic herbs (which are hot to the palate), strong vinegar and acids (which burn those parts of the body where there is no epidermis, such as the surface of the eye), and, finally, intense cold, which can produce a burning effect (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 127–129).

The list makes no claims to completeness, of course, but presumably it does aim to give us some idea of the range of phenomena we have to deal with. Because, on Bacon's view, a cause should not only be present when the effect is present but also absent when the effect is absent, the next step ideally would be to list those cases where the effect was absent, but this is clearly an impossible task, for the list would be infinite. So what Bacon does is to list, in some detail, counterinstances to the items of the first list: cases when heat is absent or at least where there is some doubt. So, for example, the rays of the sun are hot, but those of the moon and the stars are not; the reflections of the sun's rays are usually hot but not in the polar regions; the presence of comets (counting these as a type of meteor) does not result in warmer weather; and so on. The point of this exercise is not simply to record known counterinstances, however, but also to suggest experiments that need to be carried out to discover whether there are counterinstances—for example, in the case of lenses and "burning mirrors," in connection with which he makes several suggestions.

Instances and counterinstances of heat are absolute questions, but we can also discover something of the nature of heat by comparative means, by making a comparison either of its increase and decrease in the same subject, or of its amount in different subjects, as compared one with another. For since the Form of a thing is the very thing itself, and the thing does not differ from the Form except in the way that 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, it necessarily follows that no nature can be taken as the true Form unless it always decreases when the nature in question decreases, and in like manner always increases when the nature in question increases. (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 137)

This procedure for discovery requires the compilation of a "table of degrees or comparison," in which the instances previously listed are examined in respect of changes in heat. Putrefaction always "contains" heat, for example; inanimate things are not hot to the touch; the heat of lower animals such as insects is barely perceptible, but higher animals are hot to the touch; the heat in animals increases as a result of motion; the heat of celestial bodies is never sufficient to set fire to things on Earth; the sun and the planets give more heat in perigee than in apogee; and so on.

It is at this point that induction comes into play. The various instances must be reviewed with a view to eliminating those natures that can be absent while heat is still found, those natures that are present even though heat is absent, and those where the heat increases or decreases without a corresponding increase or decrease in the nature. Examples of the exclusions are as follows: Because the rays of the sun sometimes warm and sometimes do not, reject the nature of the elements as the explanation for heat; because of ordinary fire and subterranean fires, reject the nature of celestial bodies; because of boiling water, reject light or brightness; and so on. This process is less reliable than it might seem, for the exclusion of some simple natures and the narrowing down to others presupposes that we know what simple natures are, whereas in fact we do not know this; but the procedures followed this far, Bacon believes, do allow us to advance finally to the interpretation of nature, or at least to the first version of that interpretation, which he refers to as "the first vintage."

It is a premise of Bacon's account that the Form that causes an effect must be present in every instance and absent in every counterinstance, but he also points out that it is more evident in some instances than in others. This is particularly so in the case of heat: The tables show that hot things—such as flames and boiling water—are characteristically in rapid motion and that compression puts out a fire. The tables of results show, moreover, that bodies are destroyed or changed radically by heat, indicating that heat causes a change in the internal parts of the body and perceptibly causes its dissolution. Bacon concludes that heat is a species of the general genus of motion, but before examining what marks it out from other species of motion, he removes some ambiguities from the idea of heat. Sensible heat, for example, which is relative to individuals, not to the universe, is not heat properly speaking but the effect of heat upon the animal spirits. Moreover, the communication of heat from one body to another is not to be confused with the Form of heat, for heat itself and the action of heating are two different things. Nor is fire to be confused with the Form of heat, for fire is a combination of heat and brightness.

Having removed these ambiguities, Bacon turns to heat proper. A number of things mark it out as a distinctive species of motion. First, heat is a motion that causes bodies to expand or dilate "towards the circumference"—that is, in all directions—as is evident in the case of vapors or air, liquids such as boiling water, and metals such as iron, which expand when heated. Cold has the opposite effect in all cases. The second distinctive feature is that heat, aside from being a motion to the circumference, is also a motion upward. To determine whether the contrary holds in the case of cold, Bacon proposes an experiment in which a sponge soaked with cold water is placed at the bottom of one heated rod and at the top of another to determine whether one cools faster than the other. He further suggests that the one with the sponge at the top will cool the other end of the rod more quickly.

The third characteristic is that heat comprises a variety of nonuniform motion, whereby small parts of a body are moved in different ways, some motions being checked and others proceeding freely, with the result that the body experiences a constantly subsiding quivering and swelling motion. This third characteristic is evident in flames and in boiling water. Moreover, where the motion is of the whole, such as a gas escaping from confinement at great pressure, we find no heat. Bacon maintains that cooling proceeds like heating, in a nonuniform way, although the absence of great cold on the Earth makes this phenomenon less evident. Finally, the fourth characteristic of heat as a species of motion is that it acts rapidly, for comparison with the effects of age or time on the corruption of bodies shows a similar result, corruption or dissolution of bodies, and the difference must lie in the rate at which the parts of the body are penetrated. The case of cold is not mentioned here, and, unlike the first three characteristics, it is not clear just what Bacon would want to establish in the case of cold. He sums up by drawing two kinds of conclusions from this "first vintage:"

The Form or true definition of heat … [is that] heat is a motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife upon the smaller particles of bodies. But the expansion is thus modified; while it expands all ways, it has at the same time an inclination upwards. And the struggle in the particles is modified also; it is not sluggish, but hurried and with violence. Viewed with reference to operation it is the same thing. For the direction is this: If in any natural body you can excite a dilating or expanding motion, and can so repress this motion and turn it back upon itself, so that the dilation does not proceed equably, but can have its way in one part and is counteracted in another, you will undoubtedly generate heat. (Works 1857–1874, vol. 4, p. 155)

This process is only the first stage in induction for Bacon, but it is the one that is both most novel and most problematic. In particular, it is appropriate to ask just how far the process of eliminative induction gets us. After all, to go back to the case of color, it is giant leap, indeed a qualitative leap, from noting that a mixture of oil and water is white to the conclusion that Bacon seeks, namely that those bodies whose parts are in simple proportion are white. Is it plausible to suppose that the continuation of the procedure would in fact get us to the conclusion? More particularly, the "directions" that have been followed to this stage remain wholly at the macroscopic level, yet their continued application is supposed to guide us to the particular microcorpuscular internal structure of a body that makes that body white. This issue prompts two questions: whether eliminative induction generates explanations and whether it genuinely involves a process that converges to a single cause or explanation.

On the first question Aristotelians would have resisted the demand that, in seeking an explanation for a physical phenomenon, they sift through all the possibilities until they have found the cause. The question turns on the relation between explanations and causes. Although the Greeks generally did not separate questions of causality and explanation, disputes did arise about which should be given priority. Cause would be given priority if one were seeking to determine or ascribe responsibility for something. Explanation would be given priority if one were trying to provide an account of all the relevant factors concerning how something came about, without necessarily wishing to apportion blame or responsibility. It makes a considerable difference which of these views we take. The Stoics, for example, maintained that the most important thing was to determine responsibility and, as a consequence, they viewed causes as being necessarily active. This view was supported by an analogy with the law, where the person deemed responsible for an offense is the person who had done whatever it was that resulted in the offense being committed.

The physical analogue here is a body: a cause is a body that does something to affect another body in some way. On this construal, an explanation is simply a statement of a cause: cause is prior to explanation. The alternative is to make explanation prior to cause, in which case we might say that a cause is whatever figures in the explanation of an event. Take the legal analogy: if we were seeking an explanation of why an offense occurred rather than simply trying to find out who was to blame, we might look at all kinds of factors, such as the conditions under which offenses of this kind usually occur, whether preventive measures had been taken, what kinds of things motivated people to commit offenses of this kind, and so on. In natural philosophy, Aristotle makes explanations prior to causes. His famous "four causes" are, in fact, four kinds of explanation, the combination of which is designed to yield a complete understanding of the phenomenon. If we know what something is, what it is made from, how it was made, and for what end it was made, we have a complete understanding of the phenomenon. To restrict oneself effectively to efficient causes, as Bacon does, will not yield such an understanding. So Aristotelians might well resist the notion that Bacon's procedure is going to lead to explanations.

Someone who is committed to making explanations prior to causes will argue that there are as many causes of something as there are explanations of that thing, for what will count as a cause will be determined by the kind of explanation one is seeking. Bacon has little in reply to this kind of move. In Valerius Terminus, he sets out the error of seeking the causes of particular things, which are "infinite and transitory," as opposed to "abstract natures, which are few and pertinent." Such criticism seems most appropriately leveled against alchemists and others, whom Bacon criticizes for their piecemeal approach, rather than Scholastic natural philosophers, who would agree with his stricture here. But, in fact, Bacon has the Scholastics in mind, telling us that, despite appearances, on closer examination they do not seek abstract natures. This somewhat surprising criticism is possible only because of the very restrictive interpretation he places on "abstract natures," which he compares to "the alphabet or simple letters, whereof the variety of things consisteth; or as the colors mingled in the painter's shell, wherewith he is able to make infinite variety of faces or shapes" (Works 1857–1874, vol. 3, p. 243). Clearly, what he really wants is an atomist account of the "abstract natures" of things, something that can be only defended on substantive natural-philosophical grounds. The kind of explanation he is seeking, namely an atomist/corpuscularian one, is without doubt guiding what is going to count as a satisfactory argument here.

This issue brings us to the second question. Is eliminative induction suitable as a method of discovering efficient causes? It is hard to see how it could not help in such a process, but it is far from clear that in itself it could generate an account of such causes. Indeed, it is impossible to see how Bacon's examples of whiteness and heat can be pursued further by eliminative induction to generate a conclusion of the kind he wants. One might admit some degree of convergence, but there is nothing like convergence to a point: things become squared off well before that stage.

Truth

Closely tied up with Bacon's account of method is his treatment of the question of truth. Bacon goes through a number of what he considers to be inadequate criteria that have been used to establish truth. He rejects criteria depending on antiquity or authority, those deriving from commonly held views, and those relying upon the internal consistency or the capacity for internal reduction of theories, presumably on the grounds that such criteria do not bear on the question of whether there is any correspondence between the theory and reality. He also rejects "inductions without instances contradictory" that is, inductions that restrict themselves to confirming a theory, as well as "the report of the senses." None of these, he tells us, are "absolute and infallible evidence of truth, and bring no security sufficient for effects and operations." That he ties in evidence for the truth of a theory and its usefulness here is no accident, for these are intimately connected, telling us in Valerius Terminus that

That the discovery of new works and active directions not known before, is the only trial to be accepted of; and yet not that neither, in case where one particular giveth light to another; but where particulars induce an axiom or observation, which axiom found out discovereth and designeth new particulars. That the nature of this trial is not only upon the point, whether the knowledge be profitable or no; not because you may always conclude that the Axiom which discovereth new instances be true, but contrariwise you may safely conclude that if it discover not any new instance it is in vain and untrue. (Works, vol. 3, p. 242)

It is unclear here whether Bacon is providing a gloss on truth, maintaining that it has been misconstrued, or saying that something is true, in the ordinary accepted sense, only if it is useful. Whichever, it is a very strong claim on Bacon's part. For there are certainly useless truths, just as there are falsehoods that have practical applications. It is not simply that false premises may lead to true conclusions, but there are cases where approximations, although false, may have more practical value than the truths of which they are the approximation.

The solution becomes clear when we consider that, since antiquity, debates on methods of generating truths had hinged on the question of generating informative truths, the aim being to discover something we did not already know. In particular, there was a concern among Aristotle and his Renaissance followers to show that formal modes of reasoning such as the syllogism were not trivial or circular because, at the start of the inferential process, we have knowledge that something is the case, whereas at the end of it we have knowledge why it is the case. In particular what they sought to show was that the kind of knowledge of an observed phenomenon we have through sensation is qualitatively different from and inferior to the kind of knowledge we have of that phenomenon when we grasp it in terms of its causes.

This latter kind of knowledge is also what Bacon was seeking. If we think in terms of "informative truths," Bacon's position makes more sense. He is saying that the only way in which we can judge whether something is informatively true is to determine whether it is productive, whether it yields something tangible and useful. And if something does consistently yield something tangible and useful, then it is informatively true. The case of approximations can perhaps be dealt with by saying that these derive their usefulness not from their falsity but from their proximity to the truth, although the cases where the approximation is more useful than the true account cannot be handled so easily.

The question of the practicality of truth turns on how informative it is, but there is another dimension to this question that, although not explicitly mentioned by Bacon, is of importance in understanding his general orientation. In the humanist thought that makes up the source from which Bacon derives much of his inspiration, moral philosophy figures prominently. Now in this philosophy, being virtuous and acting virtuously are the same thing: There is no separate practical dimension to morality. This is all the more interesting because moral philosophy is a cognitive enterprise, one in which the practical outcome is constitutive of the discipline, a point Bacon stresses the Advancement of Learning. If moral philosophy is the model for natural philosophy, a natural enough conclusion for a humanist and one that is reinforced in the shift from otium to negotium, then we may be able to make a little more sense of the idea that truth is not truth unless it is informative and productive.

If we think of Bacon's project as transforming moral philosophers into natural philosophers, then we might expect some carryover from conceptions of the moral philosopher. Notions that were quite appropriate in moral philosophy but not (at least outside Epicureanism) in natural philosophy remain in the transformation process. And this is exactly what we do find, most strikingly in the idea of truth as productive and informative. For Bacon, the truth of natural philosophy hinges as much on its being informative and productive of works as does the truth of moral philosophy in its way. "In religion," he tells us in Redargutio Philosophiarum, "we are warned that faith is to be shown by works" (Works, vol. 3, p. 576). And he proposes that the same test that is applied in religion be applied in philosophy: if it produces nothing at all, or, worse, if, "instead of the fruits of the grape or olive, it bear the thistles and thorns of disputes and contentions," then we can reject it.

Bacon's Legacy

In the early modern era, there emerged in the West a style of doing natural philosophy, a way of thinking about the place of natural philosophy in culture generally, and a way of thinking about oneself as a natural philosopher. Bacon played a key role in this development. He inaugurated the transformation of philosophy into science, for even though the ideas of "science" and "scientist" in their modern sense were only really established in the nineteenth century, their genealogy goes back to Bacon's attempt to effect a fundamental reform of philosophy from a contemplative discipline, exemplified in the individual persona of the moral philosopher, to a communal, if centrally directed, enterprise exemplified in the persona of the experimental natural philosopher. Thanks in large measure to Bacon's exertions, observation and experiment were lifted out of the purview of the arcane and the esoteric and planted firmly in the public realm. As a result, science was transformed: Its tradition of irregular fits of progress alternating with long periods of stagnation gave way to the uninterrupted and cumulative growth that has characterized Western science since then.

In defending natural philosophy, Bacon reshaped it; his establishment of its autonomy, legitimacy, and central cultural role are on a par with Plato's defense of the autonomy and centrality of the "quiet" virtues, such as justice and moderation. Both irreversibly changed the cultures in which they lived and those that followed—above all our own.

See also Aristotelianism; Aristotle; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Epicureanism and the Epicurean School; Ethics, History of; History and Historiography of Philosophy; Induction; Logic, History of; Lucretius; Naturalized Philosophy of Science; Newton, Isaac; Philosophy of Law, History of; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Science, History of; Philosophy of Science, Problems of; Plato; Psychology; Renaissance; Scientific Method; Semantics, History of; Stoicism.

Bibliography

works by bacon

The Oxford Francis Bacon, edited by Graham Rees and Lisa Jardine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 onwards. This will eventually replace the Spedding and Ellis edition, as the volumes appear.

The Works of Francis Bacon. 14 vols, edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. London: Longmans, 1857–1874.

works about bacon

Anderson, Fulton H. The Philosophy of Francis Bacon. New York: Octogan Books, 1971. A comprehensive treatment of Bacon's natural philosophy.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Looks at the connection between Bacon's natural philosophy and his account of method, and at his account of the shaping of the natural philosopher.

Jardine, Lisa. Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Deals with those issues in theories of rhetoric and logic that were the key ones in Bacon's formative years and shows their influence on his thinking.

Jardine, Lisa, and Alan Stewart. Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, 1561–1626. London: Victor Gollancz, 1998. The most comprehensive and up-to-date biography.

Martin, Julian. Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The best available treatment of Bacon's thought on legal questions.

Peltonen, Markku, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bacon. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. General collection of articles on all aspects of Bacon's thought.

Pérez-Ramos, Antonio. Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Concentrates on the role of rhetoric in Bacon's work.

Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Deals with Bacon's natural philosophy.

Urbach, Peter. Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science: An Account and Reappraisal. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987. Provides a comprehensive discussion of Bacon's account of method, with regular comparisons with Popper.

Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660. London: Duckworth, 1975. The best available treatment of the influence of Bacon between the time of his death and the founding of the Royal Society.

Zagorin, Perez. Francis Bacon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. A general overview of Bacon's thought.

Stephen Gaukroger (2005)