Francis Bacon’s Vision of Old Idols and New Dominions
If we are awed by the powers of man, the learned animal, we must also be appalled that he has been such a slow learner. And there has been no greater obstacle to his learning than the stock of accumulated learning that he has made for himself with his illusions of knowledge. How else to explain that two thousand years passed after Socrates’ martyrdom for his discovery of ignorance before Western thinkers looked around them and turned to experience for their avenues to the purpose of their lives?
The appearance of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) on the English scene signaled a dramatic transformation in the role of “philosophers” and the expectations of philosophy—from crusades to convert the pagan to voyages of discovery into the unknown. The vastly enlarged world of the Renaissance overwhelmed literate Europeans. Now aware of being part of the whole continental experience of “Europe,” they glimpsed other continental experiences—Asia, Africa, and America. The travels of Marco Polo and the voyages of Columbus (newly interpreted by Vespucci and Magellan) had broadened the dimensions of earthly experience as never before. López de Gomera in his History of the Indies (1552) saw the discovery of the “new” continent as “the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the incarnation and death of Him who created it.”
Before Bacon, great philosophers had been teachers who could claim the dignity of their profession for what they taught. But Bacon was a man of affairs, active in politics, member of Parliament, counselor of sovereigns. He set a new style in philosophers, who would put their ideas to the public tests of their times. Yet they were seldom saints. Saint Thomas More was an exception.
Bacon’s life story was a relentless push for position. Born in London, he was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal and Chancellor, the highest legal post in the realm. On his father’s death in 1579, receiving only the “narrow portion” of a younger son, he had to make his way in the world. Naturally choosing to go to the bar, he studied at Gray’s Inn and then was admitted to practice in 1582. From then ambition drove him to seek the highest legal positions. When James I succeeded to the throne in 1603, Bacon’s skill at letter-writing and at sycophancy and his adeptness at intrigue soon brought him appointments as solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), and finally Lord Chancellor (1618). Advancing by a barrage of self-serving letters and shameless flattery, he incidentally became the uncompromising champion of the powers of his royal master.
Soon after his appointment as Lord Chancellor, Bacon was surprised by charges of bribery. Gifts to judges by parties appearing were common at the time. And judges were expected to show character by not being influenced by the gifts. Bacon admitted twenty-eight charges and was pronounced guilty by the High Court of Parliament. King James could not interfere; Bacon was disabled from holding future public office and forbidden to come “within the verge of the court.” Finally, Bacon secured relief from the worst penalties of his conviction for bribery by bribing a court favorite with a gift of York House, his mansion by the Thames.
None of these events would diminish the appeal to future generations of his Essays, which were cogent exhortations to honesty and prudence. And the generations would further profit from his being forced to abandon public life, for Bacon would spend his remaining five years writing important books.
After following Bacon’s breathless public career, we must wonder how he found time for reflection, for experiment, or to write the books that changed the course of thinking about science. While Bacon’s great works—The Great Instauration, The Advancement of Learning, the Novum organum, The New Atlantis—would be forward-looking, positive, and constructive, he appears to have been led to his vision by reaction against the “learning” into which he had been inducted.
What he had seen of conventional knowledge during his precocious years at Cambridge had a cathartic effect on his own view of the world. Sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, at thirteen, he had completed the undergraduate program in less than three years with a reputation for diligence. The Cambridge curriculum was still not substantially different from that of the great medieval universities. The way of disputation ruled. Dialectica—grammar, rhetoric, and logic based on the texts of Aristotle—was the heart of the undergraduate education. A series of public disputations, beginning with “sophisms” and culminating in “demonstrations of truth” (the propositions of Aristotle) by syllogism, marked the student’s career. Mathematics, though traditional in the quadrivium, was not offered, as there were no tutors who knew the subject. At the age of sixteen, Bacon told his early biographer, “he fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy . . . only strong for disputation and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day.”
“Being convinced that the human intellect makes its own difficulties,” Bacon offered his vivid catalog of the illusions of knowledge—“idols which beset men’s minds.” And even now it is hard to find a better catalog of menaces to thought than his short list of four “Idols” in his Novum organum in 1620. “The Idols of the Tribe (italics added) have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. . . . And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.” “The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone . . . has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others. . . . Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.”
“There are also idols formed by the association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market-place. . . . For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. . . . Lastly there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.” All these betray the same universal weakness. “The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.”
How is man to dissolve these illusions and advance to a grasp on the real world? Bacon declared this his lifelong object—“The Great Instauration” (“Great Renovation”)—“a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.” When he called the first part of his project “The Advancement of Learning,” he signaled his object to be not the capture of empyrean truth but the processes of increasing knowledge. So he deplores those who pursued knowledge “as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself up upon; or a fort or commanding storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” His aim is not once and for all to find salvation. Rather he hopes to renew that “dominion over creatures” once forfeit at the Fall of Man, and forfeit a second time by “admiring and applauding the false powers of the mind.” “Dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature,” Bacon sees that knowledge is power.
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When in the next century Bacon came to write his own Utopia, he saw a different, strikingly modern path to the ideal society. His New Atlantis (published posthumous
ly in 1627) was, like More’s Utopia, an island off the coast of Peru in the New World. But his fable was not focused on the classical problems of justice and distribution of property. His whole story was a frame for “Salomon’s House; the noblest foundation . . . that ever was upon the earth.” Here was a prototype of the modern research and development laboratory, but without limits of geography or subject matter. The members of this college were dedicated to the “interpreting of Nature and the producing of great and marvelous works” for the benefit of mankind. There was a mathematical house with astronomical instruments, botanical and zoological gardens for research, an aquarium, a theater for anatomical dissections, and numerous other laboratories, together with instruments to measure sounds and earthquakes, and for making optical instruments, and for boats to travel underwater or in the air, along with every imaginable facility for the fabrication of textiles and the concoction of chemicals.
Fellows of Salomon’s House sailed out to collect knowledge and materials everywhere. “But thus you see we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God’s first creature, which was light: to have light, I say, of the growth of all parts of the world . . . The end of our foundation [of Salomon’s House] 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.” This fantastic research college included “Merchants of Light,” who collected information; “Mystery-men,” who collected experiments of the mechanical arts; “Pioneers or Miners,” who try their own new experiments; “Compilers,” who collect data for drawings and tables; “Benefactors,” who seek ways to apply knowledge for human benefit; “Lamps,” for suggesting new experiments; “Inoculators,” who pursue these new experiments; and, finally, “Interpreters of Nature,” who find ways to generalize from the works of all these others. Two long galleries offered “patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions; in the other we place the statues of all principal inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the inventor of ships . . . the inventor of printing . . . and many others.”
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Salomon’s House was no romantic figment. It became real in England when royal charters were issued (1662-63) for the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (better known as the Royal Society). Its founding and early members were a galaxy that included Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Sir Christopher Wren. When theology and metaphysics were excluded from their transactions, the Society became a shining symbol of the new turn to experience. It also became an attractive target for know-nothings and theological diehards, who even attacked its language, which defenders celebrated as a “close, naked, natural way.”
The New Atlantis was not published till after Bacon’s death. During his lifetime he offered his guide for future generations of Seekers into the paths of fruitful experience. The ambitious Bacon, seeing that “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge” and that “the monuments of wit survive the monuments of power,” proposed a grand scheme of works to come. The Great Instauration was “to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge.” And his “monuments of wit” would outlive and overshadow his fall from positions of power. He was not troubled by excessive modesty. “I have as vast contemplative ends,” he boasted at the age of thirty-one, “as I have moderate civil ends, for I have taken all knowledge for my province.” In the Proemium to his projected great work, he soberly listed his qualifications:
For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point) and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates any kind of imposture.
Bacon was not hasty in offering his epochal renewal. He was in his sixtieth year before he borrowed the title of Aristotle’s treatise on logic for his New Organon, or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature. He had been thinking about the project ever since his dissatisfaction as a boy of sixteen at Cambridge with the “unfruitfulness of the way” of Aristotle and had been surveying the realms of “sciences, arts, and all human knowledge” ever since. With his Advancement of Learning (1605), dedicated to King James I, he offered the first part of his Great Instauration—a defense of the Dignity of Learning followed by his Survey of Learning. “The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of man’s understanding, which is the seat of learning: history to his memory, poesy to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason.” For Bacon, the realm of reason (scientia) included all the sciences. And for their Encyclopédie, Diderot and d’Alembert would adopt Bacon’s scheme. When Thomas Jefferson arranged his large personal library (which became the core of the Library of Congress) he too chose Bacon’s threefold division.
When Bacon was ready to publish his New Organon, in 1620, he published his Plan for the whole of his Great Instauration. The foundation of the whole would be “laid in natural history.” The first part, a survey of the state of knowledge, described the sciences still unknown and to be cultivated. The second part, or New Organon, would describe Bacon’s new inductive method—not seeking agreement with principles and definitions already assumed, but discovering axioms drawn from actual observations of nature. Then a collection of natural history prepared by the methods of the second part. Followed by striking examples of results of the new inductive method, and a fifth part (for temporary use) offering tentative conclusions from still-incomplete observation—resting places on the way to fuller experiments. And finally the New Philosophy based on the inductive interpretation of natural history.
Significantly the New Organon begins, not with a dogmatic statement of “first principles” but with discrete “Aphorisms concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man.” His first Aphorism declares, “Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.” Bacon’s four “Idols” were offered here as a list of Aphorisms. In the second part of the New Organon he illustrates his inductive method by a study of the forms of heat, of which he offers twenty-seven instances, with more to be added, dramatizing his departure from the Aristotelian Peripatetic philosophers. Bacon’s search for the “forms” of nature is quite different from a search for elements. “To inquire the form of a lion, or of an oak, of gold, nay, even of water or air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the form of dense, rare, hot, cold, heavy, light, tangible, pneumatic, volatile, fixed, and the like . . . which (like the letters of the alphabet) are not many and yet make up and sustain the essences and forms of all substances:—this, I say, it is which I am attempting. . . . And inquiries into nature have the best result when they begin with physics and end in mathematics.”
Although Bacon would be widely recognized as the pioneer of the modern scientific method, he was not in the vanguard of the sciences in his age. Despite his occasional good words for mathematics he underestimated the importance of mathematics for the future of science. Himself an inveterate Seeker, he still failed to recognize the epochal advances made by others of his time. He did not note the invention of logarithms by the Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550-1616). He seems not to have known Vesalius’ anatomy, or Gilbert’s works on magnetism. The great Sir William Harvey attended him as a physician, but Bacon had no knowledge of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood (published after Bacon’s death).
Still, Bacon showed a remarkable clairvoyance. He approved rejection of the t
radition that the planets moved in perfect circles and he applauded Galileo’s improvements and uses of the telescope for astronomy. He also anticipated Newton by suggesting that the earth and the heavens consisted of common matter with “common passions and desires.” And so he foresaw a new alliance between astronomy and physics. He favored an empirical approach to medicine and belief in the kinship of man with all nature.
Before the end of the seventeenth century, Bacon’s campaign against the syllogism was overwhelming Aristotle in English universities, and so helped bring to an end what has been called “the longest tyranny ever exercised.” But Aristotelian texts continued to be used as exercises in definition. Only gradually did Bacon’s ideas for the curriculum overcome the stigma of “mechanics.” Descartes’s teachings would lack that stigma. But Bacon had turned Seekers from the way to salvation toward ways to increase man’s sovereignty over nature. And within a century, John Evelyn (1620-1706), the polymath diarist who became secretary of the Royal Society, when surveying the society’s work, was gratified to observe that “Salomon’s House . . . however lofty, and to appearance Romantic, hath yet in it nothing impossible to be effected.”
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From the Soul to the Self: Descartes’s Island Within
The travail of the Seeker is nowhere better revealed than in the life of the father of modern philosophy. A versatile scientist, obsessed by the wonders of the world out there, René Descartes (1596-1650) was also creator of the modern idea of the self. At home and well drilled in the dogmas of Aristotle and the scholastics, he made a career of dissolving them. It was in a mysterious dream that he had his call to produce a universal science built by reason. Making doubt the fertile beginning of his philosophy, he made certainty the first principle of his method. His life showed the power, the temptations, and the tribulations of a seeking spirit. And he marked a new era of the sovereign self, when philosophers now were scientists—not retailers of conventional doctrine but explorers on the frontier. His background gave no clue to his revolutionary role.
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