The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  Finding that “in what is now done in the matter of science there is only a whirling round about, and perpetual agitation, ending where it begins,” he concluded that

  there was but one course left … to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, [practical] arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundation; … Moreover, because he knew not how long it might be before these things would occur to any one else … he resolved to publish at once so much as he had been able to complete … that in case of his death there might remain some outline and project of that which he had conceived … All other ambition seemed poor in his eyes compared with the work which he had in hand.35

  He dedicated the entire project to James I, with apologies for “having stolen from your affairs so much time as was required for this work,” but hoping that the result would “go to the memory of your name and the honor of your age”—and it did. James was a man of considerable learning and good will; if he could be persuaded to finance the plan, what progress might not be made? As Roger Bacon, far back in 1268, had sent to Pope Clement IV his Opus majus seeking aid for a proposed expansion of knowledge, so now his namesake appealed to his sovereign to undertake, as a “royal work,” the organization of scientific research and the philosophical unification of the results for the material and moral benefit of mankind. He reminded James of the “philosopher kings”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—who had given good government to the Roman Empire for a century (A.D. 96–180). Was it because of his need and hope for state funds that he had consistently and ruinously supported the King?

  A further preface asked the reader to look upon current science as porous with error and shamefully stagnant, for

  the greatest wits in each successive age have been forced out of their own course; men of capacity and intellect above the vulgar had been fain, for reputation’s sake, to bow to the judgment of the time and the multitude; and thus, if any contemplations of a higher order took light anywhere, they were presently blown out by the winds of vulgar opinions.36

  And to pacify the theologians, who were powerful with the people or the King, he cautioned his readers to “confine the sense” of his undertaking “within the limits of duty in respect of things divine.” He disclaimed any intention to deal with religious beliefs or affairs; “the business in hand … is not an opinion to be held, but a work to be done … I am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.”37 He urged others to come forward and join him in the work, and trusted that successive generations would carry it on.

  In an imperial prospectus, Distributio operis, he offered a plan of the enterprise. First, he would attempt a new classification of existing or desirable sciences, and would allot to them their problems and fields of research; this he accomplished in The Advancement of Learning, which he translated and expanded in De augmentis scientiarum (1623) to reach a Continental audience. Second, he would examine the shortcomings of contemporary logic, and seek a “more perfect use of human reason” than that which Aristotle had formulated in his logical treatises collectively known as the Organon; this Bacon did in his Novum Organum (1620). Third, he would begin a “natural history” of the “phenomena of the universe”—astronomy, physics, biology. Fourth, he would exhibit, in a “Ladder of the Intellect” (Scala intellectus), examples of scientific inquiry according to his new method. Fifth, as “Forerunners” (Prodromi), he would describe “such things as I myself have discovered.” And sixth, he would begin to expound that philosophy which, from sciences so pursued, would be developed and certified. “The completion, however, of this last part is … both above my strength and beyond my hope.” To us who now flounder and gasp in the ocean of knowledge and specialties, Bacon’s program seems majestically vain; but knowledge was not then so immense and minute; and the brilliance of the parts performed forgives the presumption of the whole. When he told Cecil, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” he did not mean that he could embrace all sciences in detail, but only that he purposed to survey the sciences “as from a rock,” with a view to their co-ordination and encouragement. William Harvey said of Bacon that he “wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor”;38 yes, and planned it like an imperial general.

  We feel the range and sharpness of Bacon’s mind as we follow him in The Advancement of Learning. He offers his ideas with unwonted modesty, as “not much better than that noise … which musicians make while they are tuning their instruments”;39 but he strikes here nearly all his characteristic notes. He calls for the multiplication and support of colleges, libraries, laboratories, biological gardens, museums of science and industry; for the better payment of teachers and researchers; for ampler funds to finance scientific experiments; for better intercommunication, co-operation, and division of labor among the universities of Europe.40 He does not lose his perspective in the worship of science; he defends a general and liberal education, including literature and philosophy, as promoting a wise judgment of ends to accompany the scientific improvement of means.41 He tries to classify the sciences in a logical order, to determine their fields and bounds, and to direct each to major problems awaiting inquiry and solution. Many of his demands have been met by the sciences—for better clinical records, for the prolongation of life by preventive medicine, for the careful examination of “psychical phenomena,” and for the development of social psychology. He even anticipated our contemporary studies in the technique of success.42

  The second and boldest part of the Great Renewal was an attempt to formulate a new method of science. Aristotle had recognized, and occasionally preached, induction, but the predominant mode of his logic was deduction, and its ideal was the syllogism. Bacon felt that the old Organon had kept science stagnant by its stress on theoretical thought rather than practical observation. His Novum Organum proposed a new organ and system of thought—the inductive study of nature itself through experience and experiment. Though this book too was left incomplete, it is, with all its imperfections, the most brilliant production in English philosophy, the first clear call for an Age of Reason. It was written in Latin, but in such lucid, pithy sentences that half of it radiates epigrams. The very first lines compacted a philosophy, announcing the inductive revolution, foreshadowing the Industrial Revolution, and giving the empirical key to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Spencer.

  Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much, and so much only, as he had observed, in fact or in thought, of the course of Nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything … Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the course is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.I

  And as Descartes seventeen years later, in the Discourse on Method, would propose to begin philosophy by doubting everything, so Bacon here demands an “expurgation of the intellect” as the first step in the Renewal. “Human knowledge as we have it is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which are at first imbibed.”44 Therefore we must, at the start, clear our minds, so far as we can, of all preconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, and theories; we must turn away even from Plato and Aristotle; we must sweep out of our thought the “idols,” or time-honored illusions and fallacies, born of our personal idiosyncrasies of judgment or the traditional beliefs and dogmas of our group; we must banish all logical tricks of wishful thinking, all verbal absurdities of obscure thought. We must put behind us all those majestic deductive systems of philosophy which proposed to draw a thousand eternal verities out of a few axioms and principles. There is no magic hat in science; everything taken from the hat in works must first be put into it by observation or experiment. And not by mere casual observation, nor by “simple enumeration” of data, but by “experience … sought for, experiment.” Thereupon Bacon, so often belittled as ignoring the true method o
f science, proceeds to describe the actual method of modern science:

  The true method of experience first lights the candle [by hypothesis], and then by means of the candle shows the way, commencing as it does with experience duly ordered … and from it educing axioms [“first fruits,” provisional conclusions], and from established axioms again new experiments … Experiment itself shall judge.45

  However, Bacon was wary of hypotheses; they were too often suggested by tradition, prejudice, or desire—i.e., again by “idols”; he distrusted any procedure in which hypothesis, consciously or not, would select from experience confirmatory data and gloss over, or be blind to, contrary evidence. To avoid this pitfall, he proposed a laborious induction by accumulation of all facts pertinent to a problem, their analysis, comparison, classification, and correlation, and, “by a due process of exclusion and rejection,” the progressive elimination of one hypothesis after another, until the “form” or underlying law and essence of a phenomenon should be revealed.46 Knowledge of the “form” would give increasing control of the event, and science would gradually remake the environment and possibly man himself.

  For this, Bacon felt, is the ultimate aim—that the method of science shall be applied to the rigorous analysis and resolute remolding of human character. He urges a study of the instincts and emotions, which bear the same relation to the mind as winds to the sea.47 But here especially the fault lies not merely in the seeking of knowledge but in its transmission. Man could be remade by an enlightened education, if we were willing to draw first-rate minds into pedagogy by giving them adequate remuneration and honor.48 Bacon admires the Jesuits as educators and wishes they were “on our side.”49 He condemns compendiums, approves college dramatics, and pleads for more science in the curriculum. Science and education so conceived would be (as in The New Atlantis) not the tool and handmaid, but the guide and goal, of government. And the confident Chancellor concludes, “I stake all on the victory of art over Nature in the race.”

  V. A STATESMAN’S PHILOSOPHY

  Here, we feel, is a powerful mind—a man, one in a century, at home equally in philosophy and politics. It would be interesting to know what this philosopher thought in politics, and what this politician thought in philosophy.

  Not that he had any system in philosophy, or left any orderly exposition of his thought, except in logic. The trend of his ideas is clear, but their form is that of a man who had to rush repeatedly out of the calm of philosophy to try a case in law, to fight an opposition in Parliament, or to counsel an unteachable King. We must gather his views from incidental remarks and literary fragments, including his Essays (1597, 1612, 1625). With the vanity inherent in authorship, Bacon wrote, in dedicating these to Buckingham, “I do conceive … [the] volume may last as long as books last.” In his letters his style is labored and involved, so that his wife confessed, “I do not understand his enigmatical folded writing”;50 in the Essays he concealed still intenser labor, disciplined his pen to clarity, and achieved such compact force of expression that very few pages in English prose can match them for significant matter pressed with luminous similes into perfect form. It is as if Tacitus had taken to philosophy, and had condescended to be clear.

  Bacon’s wisdom is worldly. He leaves metaphysics to the mystical or the rash; even his vaulting ambition rarely leaped from the fragment to the whole. Sometimes, however, he seems to plunge into a determinist materialism: “In nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies performing pure individual acts according to a fixed law”;51 and “inquiries into nature have the best result when they begin with physics and end in mathematics”;52 but “nature” here may mean only the external world. He preferred the skeptical pre-Socratic philosophers to Plato and Aristotle, and he praised the materialistic Democritus.53 But then he accepts a sharp distinction between body and soul,54 and anticipates Bergson’s chiding of the intellect as a “constitutional materialist”: “The human understanding is infected by the sight of what takes place in the mechanical arts … and so imagines that something similar goes on in the universal nature of things.”55 He rejects in advance the mechanistic biology of Descartes.

  With careful ambivalence he “seasons” his philosophy “with religion as with salt.”56 “I had rather believe all the fables in the [Golden] Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.”57 He puts atheism in its place in a famous passage twice repeated.58 His analysis of the causes of atheism illuminates the theme of this volume:

  The causes of atheism are divisions in religion, if they be many; for any one main division addeth zeal to both sides, but many divisions introduce atheism. Another is scandal of priests. And lastly, learned times, specially with peace and prosperity; for troubles and adversities do more bow men’s minds to religion.59

  He lays it down as a rule that “all knowledge is to be limited by religion.”60 According to his chaplain, Rawley, he “repaired frequently, when his health would permit him, to the services of the church … and died in the true faith established in the Church of England.”61 Nevertheless, like his great predecessor William of Ockham, he availed himself of the distinction between theological and philosophical truth: faith might hold to beliefs for which science and philosophy could find no evidence, but philosophy should depend only on reason, and science should seek purely secular explanations in terms of physical cause and effect.62

  Despite his zest for knowledge, Bacon subordinates it to morality; there would be no gain to humanity if the extension of knowledge brought no gain in benevolence. “Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest.”63 However, his usual enthusiasm subsides when he speaks of the Christian virtues. Virtue should be practiced in moderation, for the wicked may take advantage of the indiscreetly good.64 A little dissimulation is necessary to success, if not to civilization. Love is a madness, and marriage is a noose. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises … The best works, and of the greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.” Like Elizabeth and Hildebrand, Bacon approved of clerical celibacy. “A single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground when it must first fill a pool.”65 (Note his flair for metaphor and Anglo-Saxon brevity.) Friendship is better than love, and married men make unsteady friends. Bacon talks of love and marriage in the strain of a man who has sacrificed the tender emotions to ambition, and who could rule a kingdom better than his home.

  His political philosophy faced conditions rather than theories. He had the courage to say a good word for Machiavelli, and candidly accepted the principle that states are not bound by the moral code taught to their citizens. He felt, like Nietzsche, that a good war halloweth any cause. “Neither is the opinion of some of the Schoolmen to be received, that a war cannot be justly made but upon a precedent injury or provocation … A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.” In any event, “a just and honorable war is the true exercise” to keep a nation in trim.66 “For empire and greatness it is of most importance that a nation profess arms as their principal honor, study, and occupation.” A powerful navy is a guarantee of neighborly respect; “to be master of the sea is the very epitome of monarchy.”67 “In the youth of a state arms do flourish; in the middle age of a state, learning; and then both of them together for a time; in the declining age of a state, mercantile acts and merchants.”68 Townsmen make poor warriors, peasants better, yeomen best. Hence Bacon, like More, condemned enclosures, as reducing the proportion of landowners in the population. He deprecated the concentration of wealth as a chief cause of sedition and revolt. Of these

  the first remedy or prevention is to remove by all means possible that material cause … which is want and poverty…. To which purpose serveth the opening and well-balancing of trade; the cherishing of manufactures; the banishing of idleness; the repression of waste and excess by sumptua
ry laws; the improvement and husbanding of the soil; the regulating of prices of things vendible; the moderation of taxes … Above all things good policy is to be used that the treasures and monies in a state be not gathered into a few hands … Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.69

  Bacon distrusted Parliament as composed of uneducated and intolerant landowners and merchants or their agents; he thought James I by comparison informed and humane; even the King’s theoretical absolutism seemed benevolent as the alternative to greedy factions and violent creeds. Like his contemporary Richelieu, he considered the centralization of authority in the king, and the royal subordination of the great landlords, a necessary step in the evolution of orderly government; and like Voltaire, he thought it easier to educate one man than a multitude. His own great wealth did not disturb him, and James proved obdurately wedded to extravagance, taxes, and peace.

  Bacon had smiled at “the philosophers” who “make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths; their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.” But in his tired age he yielded to the temptation to picture the kind of society in which he would have men live. He had doubtless read More’s Utopia (1516); Campanella had just published his City of the Sun (1623); now (1624) Bacon wrote The New Atlantis. “We sailed from Peru (where we had continued for the space of one whole year) for China and Japan by the South Sea.” A long calm, failing rations, a providential isle, a people living happily under laws made for them by a late King Salomon. Instead of a parliament, a Salomon’s House—an aggregation of observatories, laboratories, libraries, zoological and botanical gardens—manned by scientists, economists, technicians, physicians, psychologists, and philosophers, chosen (as in Plato’s Republic) by equal tests after equal educational opportunity, and then (without elections) governing the state, or, rather, ruling nature in the interest of man. “The end of our Foundation,” one of these rulers explains to the barbarians from Europe, “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.”70 Already, in this South Pacific enchantment, the Salomonic wizards have invented microscopes, telescopes, self-winding clocks, submarines, automobiles, and airplanes; they have discovered anesthetics, hypnosis, and ways of preserving health and lengthening life; they have found ways of grafting plants, generating new species, transmuting metals, and transmitting music to distant places. In Salomon’s House government and science are bound together, and all the tools and organization of research that Bacon had begged James to provide are there part of the equipment of the state. The island is economically independent; it avoids foreign trade as a snare to war; it imports knowledge, but not goods. So the humbled philosopher replaces the proud statesman, and the same man who had advised an occasional war as a social tonic now in his closing years dreams of a paradise of peace.