Sir Frances Bacon

Francis Bacon is generally recognized as the first great writer of English philosophy although he had no great respect for the English language. It is a known fact that Bacon is influenced by Montaigne. Emerson is the one modern writer with whom Bacon may be fairly compared, for their method is much the same. They endeavour to reach the reader’s mind by a series of aphoristic attacks. In rhetorical power, musical cadence, quaint turns of speech, he is equalled by many of his contemporaries, excelled by a few, but for a clear, terse, easy writing, he has no peer save Ben Jonson, and even to-day his Essays are models of succinct, lucid prose. Material success and services to humanity were his objects in life. These aims were sometimes in conflict; though he did his best to blend them, and when the tussle came, personal considerations won the day.
Bacon’s essays are much more concentrated and concise in nature. His values lie more in psychology rather than in theology and ethics. His essays straightway touch the heart of mankind. It was his essays through which bacon proved himself a great writer of his own language. The essential merit of Bacon’s Essay lies in the density of the thought and expression, the frequent brilliance of the poetic images. Within these limits bacon’s essays have singular force and weight. His essays have become classics of the English language.
Another striking characteristic of bacon’s style is his constant use of figurative language. The language and style of his essays is largely filled with Latinisms, so that some knowledge of Latin language should be serviceable to the readers. His style of essays illustrates and reinforces his ideas and arguments with appropriate similes, metaphors and quotations. His essays are remarkable for its terseness. Condensation style is highly commendable.
England in the later Elizabethan and Jacobean period was less happy. It was racked by changes in ideas, politics, and society which were revolutionary in pace. But Bacon, unlike some of his contemporaries, did not succumb to the disease of melancholy which Robert Burton anatomized; nor did he whine about 'all coherence gone' or complain that new philosophy calls all in doubt'. Bacon was not ignorant of the economic and social defects of his time, the prevalence of corruptions in government and law, the rising tensions which ultimately led to the Civil War. But he also saw the fact that England and Scotland were essentially and potentially good.
A significant instance of this optimism is to be found in the essay Of Plantations. Other writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were prone to praise savages as noble and to use their reactions to European civilization as a vehicle for denouncing its weaknesses. In contrast, Bacon reverses this approach, urging that natives from overseas should be brought to England that they may see a better condition than their own and commend it when they return.
Bacon was one of the first thinkers to accept and popularize the idea of progress. Unlike many men of his period, he would not dismiss defects in society and knowledge as God's will or as the unavoidable results of human depravity and God's curse after the sin of Adam and Eve. Nor would he subscribe to the prevalent doctrine that nature was decaying. In the changing circumstances and ideas of his time, Bacon saw opportunity, not reason for despair. In his opinion there was need for an efficient and systematic appraisal of man's achievements and of the obstacles which stood in the way of further advances. Based on this appraisal, there should be a programme to promote learning and speed progress. Knowledge meant power, and power meant the empire of man over himself and nature. To these ends Bacon propounded his grand design: He thought all trial should be made, whether that commerce between the mind and the nature of things, which is more Precious than anything on earth, or at least anything that is of the earth, might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition, or, if that may not be, yet reduced to a better condition than that in which it now is. To this end Bacon would commence a total reconstruction of the sciences, arts, and all human knowledge raised upon the proper foundation.
The Great Instauration was to have six main parts. Some of the works which Bacon had already published could be fitted into it; others which he was yet to compose would complement them; the rest would have to be filled in by others: The first part exhibits a summary or general description of the knowledge which the human race at present possesses . . . not only things already invented and known, but likewise omitted which ought to be there.
In large measure Bacon accomplished these aims in The Advancement and its Latin redaction, De Augmentis. In them he defends learning against its detractors, urges rulers to patronize it, and divides it into two kinds, the divine and the human, warning men 'that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these Learnings together'.
This separation of natural science from divinity was one of Bacon's most important doctrines, for science had been subordinated to theology and partly stifled by it. The difficult problem of how spiritual things are related to natural ones was involved. In theology, what is called the Level of Nature includes everything which may be known to a pagan who lacks the revelations of the Hebrew-Christian God: thus More's Utopians, who are in a state of nature, have knowledge of natural law, natural philosophy, natural science, and natural theology. Though they lack revealed truths, they are aware that there is a God and that laws govern the universe, ethics, politics, etc. Unknown to them is the Level of Grace or Spirit, which includes sacred mysteries, theology, the divinely ordained institution of the Church, and the like.
Various theories have been offered about the relationship between the Levels of Grace and Nature. Utter Materialists deny the former; Idealists tend to deny the latter. Bishop Berkeley in the eighteenth century argued that the two areas were separate but that God's fiat made one corresponds to the other, so that spirit seemed to act on matter and vice versa. Some austerely pious men believed that the Level of Nature should be repudiated as far as possible and therefore condemned the pagan philosophies of the Ancient Greeks, the secular drama of Shakespeare, and the beauties of secular music. As a Christian Humanist, John Milton refrained from such repudiation and held that whatever is truly good on the Level of Nature conduces to truth on the Level of Grace, that the one merges into the other, that Platonic philosophy, for example, groped toward the higher truths of Christianity and conduced to them. But Bacon propounded what theologians call the Principle of Segregation, namely, that there are two quite distinct realms of truth which are irrelevant to each other and must be kept in separate compartments. Thus truth on the Level of Grace may state that the world was created by divine commands in six days and that the sun revolves around the earth. But the truth discovered on the Level of Nature may be that creation was evolutionary and that the earth revolves around the sun. By segregating such truths, Bacon helped to free science from the trammels of divinity; the examples given are not his, however. He did not deny that in the long run spiritual truth mattered most. But in the meantime, natural truth might be made practically valuable.
Bacon does not hold to the principle of segregation consistently throughout his works. At times he was closer to the Christian Humanist position. But it is folly to expect complete consistency in his teachings. In this respect they resemble the thought of Plato, who did not hesitate to assume different positions in different works, attacking poetry and music in his Republic but exalting them in some of his dialogues, for example. Bacon is consistent in his goals of seeking to advance knowledge and men's consequent empire over nature, but he willingly explores different approaches to truth and changes his mind or varies his programme to suit different times, audiences, and purposes. Most of his writings are subordinated to immediate persuasive efficacy. Thus when he wrote The Advancement, he formulated it in English for Protestant readers and took advantage of their anti-Romanism to convince them. But when he rewrote the work in Latin for a European audience, he expunged his censures of Roman Catholicism.
In The Advancement and De Augrnentis Bacon defends Learning as if she were a client on trial before the bar of public opinion—a technique which Sir Philip Sidney had used in apologizing for poetry. Bacon begins by clearing Learning's reputation from discrediting objections which rose, he said, 'all from ignorance'. The impugners of knowledge pointed to Solomon's warning that it increased anxiety and to St Paul's caveat against vain philosophy; and they alleged that lust for knowledge caused the Fall of Man and that learned times inclined to atheism and heresy. Bacon replied that these censures were inapplicable to 'the pure knowledge of nature and universality' and could be directed only against 'the proud knowledge of good and evil', that is, against man's efforts 'to give a law unto him-self, and to depend no more upon God's commandments'. Though science was to be pursued independently of theology, both were important. Moreover, the learning which Bacon advocated is mixed with the corrective spice of Charity: it is directed to the good of mankind and is subject to three limitations. We must not so place our felicity in knowledge, as to forget our mortality. we must apply our learning 'to give ourselves repose and contentment, not to make ourselves unhappy and restless; and we must not delude ourselves that by contemplating nature we may attain the mysteries of God.
Bacon similarly concludes this section of his argument by urging men to endeavour an endless progress or Proficiency in both divinity and science: only let men beware that they apply both to charity and not to swelling [pride], to use and not to ostentation; and that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these Learnings together.
Having coasted past the ancient arts in the first part of The Great Instauration, Bacon proceeded to his second point, 'to equip the intellect for passing beyond'. This task involved teaching men how to make 'better and more perfect use of human reason in the inquisition of things' and how to take advantage of the true helps of the understanding. By such means the intellect could be 'raised and exalted and made capable of overcoming the difficulties and obscurities of nature'. Bacon attempted to fulfil these aims in his greatest philosophical work, The New Organon, or Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature, which he wrote in Latin and revised twelve times before its publication in 1620. It was intended to replace Aristotle's Organon and to provide a new art of logic which would differ from Aristotle's 'in the end aimed at, in the order of demonstration, and in the starting point of the inquiry'. What the intellect needs, according to Bacon, is not the scholastic method of syllogisms, which only enables a man to win arguments, but a means to 'command nature in action', a form of induction which shall analyse experience and take it to pieces, and by due process of exclusion and rejection lead it to an inevitable conclusion .
The reasoning used to 'prove' that the heavenly bodies are composed of a fifth essence, an element different from the four sublunary elements of earth, air, fire, and water, exemplifies what Bacon opposed: The heavenly bodies move eternally in circles. But it is the nature of earth and water to move down, and of air and fire to move up. Therefore the eternally circling heavenly bodies are not composed of earth, air, fire, and water, but of a fifth essence.
Such reasoning is valid if the first two propositions are true; Bacon objected that all too often they were assumptions based not on facts but on authority, tradition, novelty, prejudice, false reasoning, faulty observation, or inadequate evidence. He also objected that if the propositions were true they included the final statement and therefore merely clarified knowledge by bringing it into the open.
In his earliest works Bacon went to extremes in trying to avoid such unrealistic assumptions. He would draw up tables of facts and would narrow them by excluding what was not relevant. For example, in collecting facts about heat, he would learn that both dense and tenuous things could be hot; thus both denseness and tenuousness could be excluded from the possible forms of heat. In time, by means of such exclusions, he would arrive at an understanding of the real nature of heat.
In practice Bacon seems to have realized that tabulating and excluding were insufficient, for he began to advocate that researchers should sort out prerogative instances, facts which would be especially useful for gaining information or for indicating how to proceed. In other words, 'prerogative instances' would conduce to hypotheses—hypotheses which would then be tested by experiments. Bacon used to be called the father of experimental science, but his claim to this title was denied because his method of tables and exclusions is not the procedure of modern science whereby an experimenter somehow formulates a guess, tentative theory, or hypothesis and then tests it in experiments. However, if one reads between the lines and interprets Bacon with common sense, it is clear that he realized the impossibility of reaching final truth by means of tables and exclusions or from the 'axioms' or hypotheses which emerged from them. Hypothesizing inevitably was involved in the classifying, in the selection of prerogative instances, and in the formulation of the axioms. Scientific truths would emerge when these were tested by systematic experiments.
Bacon's final method for research is given at the end of New Atlantis: first, all available information is gathered about experiments; to this is added what is discovered by men who 'try new experiments such as themselves think good'. The resulting information is then compiled and tabulated. Next, based on these collections and discussions about them, there are 'new experiments of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former'; and finally these latest discoveries by experiments are formulated 'into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms'. Although Bacon did not clearly or fully state the method of hypothesis and verifications, it was implicit in such a system. Certainly the experiment which caused his death, the stuffing of a chicken with snow to see if it would retard the spoiling, exemplifies the method of testing hypotheses by experiment.
The third part of the Great Instauration, a compendium of natural science entitled The Phenomena of the World, or Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of Philosophy or Science, was only partially fulfilled by Sylva Sylvarum, a largely derivative compilation of a thousand statements about science and related subjects. The latter included information about witches, keeping oranges fresh, silencers for guns, the diseases of corn, the possibility of what is now called extra-sensory perception, and the significance of dreams. Bacon also planned to write six histories for this third part of the Instauration and completed The History of Winds, The History of Life and Death, and part of The History of Rarety and Density.
The fourth part was realized only by an introduction, The Ladder of the Understanding, or The Key to the Labyrinth; in the main work Bacon intended to expose the workings of the mind from particular to general truths in the process of invention. The fifth part is represented only by Precursors, or Anticipations of the Coming Philosophy, in which he invites all men to record facts about nature and promises to show how much he had accomplished and how much others could accomplish by using common sense and ordinary proofs without employing his method. But conclusions so reached would be regarded as tentative. The last part of the Instauration, The New Philosophy, or Active Science, would replace such conclusions and would set forth the results of applying the new method to all the phenomena of the universe. Bacon left this section unwritten, as something beyond his powers.
Such was Bacon's Grand Design: most of it was left for posterity to realize, but some particular features of the works which he accomplished toward it deserve special comment. The genesis of his Essays is quite interesting. He jotted down in talking, any brilliant or suggestive thing he heard, or any illuminating thought that struck him. These he put together into a book—constantly augmenting his stock. In them we find a storehouse of worldly wisdom.