Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount St Alban (1561–1626), was an English philosopher, lawyer, and statesman who rose to Lord Chancellor under James I and is remembered above all as an early architect of the experimental method. He held that the learning of his age was barren because it argued from inherited authority rather than from things themselves, and he set out to replace it with a slow, collective program of observation and trial.

The diagnosis came first, and it was unsparing. Born in 1561 to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Anne Cooke, one of the most learned women of the Tudor court, Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at twelve and left it convinced that the curriculum on offer was a closed circle. The schools, he came to argue, did not gather knowledge so much as defend it: they took the works of Aristotle — or rather a scholastic Aristotle, refracted through commentary upon commentary — as a finished system, and spent their ingenuity spinning out its consequences instead of testing them against the world. The result, in his image, was learning grown luxuriant but sterile, like a plant that puts out leaves and never fruit. Knowledge had stopped growing because it had mistaken its sources. It looked backward to texts when it should have looked outward to nature, and inward to the distortions of the mind that does the looking.

The Great Instauration

That program had a name and a plan. Bacon called it the Instauratio Magna — the Great Instauration, or Great Renewal — and meant it as a wholesale rebuilding of human knowledge from the ground up. The word instauratio carried the sense of a restoration or refounding, as of a ruined building or a fallen estate; the title page of the 1620 volume showed a ship sailing out past the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient boundary of the known world, into open sea. Bacon laid the whole enterprise out in six parts, and finished only the first two. The first, the divisions of the sciences, surveyed the existing map of knowledge and marked its blank regions — published in English in 1605 as The Advancement of Learning and expanded into the Latin De Augmentis Scientiarum of 1623. The third was to be a vast natural and experimental history, the raw material on which the new method would work; Bacon managed only fragments of it, a history of the winds, a history of life and death, and the posthumous miscellany Sylva Sylvarum. The last three parts — a ladder of the intellect, a set of forerunning conclusions, and the new active philosophy itself — were sketched in prefaces and never written. The cathedral was designed entire and built only to its first courses.

Its centerpiece, the second part, was the Novum Organum of 1620, and here the design stands complete. The title is a deliberate challenge: a “new instrument” of reasoning set against the Organon, the collected logical works of Aristotle that had governed European thought for two thousand years. The old instrument, Bacon argued, was a machine for arranging what one already believed. From a few familiar cases it leapt at once to the broadest generalizations, then deduced particulars back down from them — a tidy syllogistic descent that could never correct itself, because it never returned to the things. The new instrument reversed the motion. It would begin in the particulars, gather instances by the hundred and the thousand, sort them into tables — where a quality is present, where it is absent, where it varies by degree — and ascend by careful, self-checking steps, rejecting and excluding as it climbed, toward the middle axioms and at last the general laws, what Bacon called the forms of things. This was induction, but not the loose induction of simple enumeration that any plausible counterexample could overturn; it was an induction disciplined by exclusion, slow on purpose, designed so that no single mind’s haste could spoil it.

Before any of this could begin, he argued, the mind had first to be cleared of its standing distortions — the idols, his term for the habits of thought that bend perception before it begins. He counted four kinds. The idols of the tribe are lodged in human nature itself: the mind’s tendency to find more order than is there, to be carried by what it wishes were true, to take the measure of things from itself. The idols of the cave are private — the biases each person forms from temperament, education, the books that happened to shape them, the narrow den, in Bacon’s borrowed Platonic figure, in which every individual sits. The idols of the marketplace are the most insidious, arising from words: language is fitted to common use, not to truth, and its loose and ill-defined terms drag the understanding after them, so that men dispute about names and think they are disputing about things. And the idols of the theater are the received philosophical systems themselves, each a stage-play of the world performed in its own invented scenery — Aristotelian, Platonic, and the rest, persuasive and unreal. The idols cannot be wholly destroyed, only known and held in check; the discipline of method is in large part the discipline of suspecting one’s own mind.

The famous slogan attached to his name, that knowledge is power, is a fair compression of the project. Bacon never quite wrote it in those words. The nearest sentence is in his Meditationes Sacrae of 1597 — nam et ipsa scientia potestas est, for knowledge too is itself power — set in a passage on the power of God, and the phrase’s modern crispness can be traced through the History of Information’s note on the line. The doctrine itself, though, is woven through the Novum Organum, whose third aphorism holds that human knowledge and human power meet in a single point: where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced, and nature is conquered only by being obeyed. Understanding and command are the same act seen from two sides. He wanted knowledge that could act on the world, not merely describe it — and he wanted it built, not by solitary geniuses, but by many hands working a shared method across generations, so that the work would outlast any worker. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Bacon sets this turn toward organized observation at the head of the tradition later called empiricism.

The fall

His public life ended in disgrace. Bacon’s rise had been long and patient — Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper in 1617, and in 1618 Lord Chancellor, the office his father had held the seal for; he was made Baron Verulam that same year and Viscount St Alban in 1621. Then, in the spring of 1621, a parliamentary committee charged him with taking bribes from suitors whose cases stood before his court — some two dozen counts in all. He did not contest them. The sentence was crushing on paper: a fine of forty thousand pounds, imprisonment in the Tower at the king’s pleasure, and permanent exclusion from office and from Parliament. In execution it was light — the imprisonment lasted only days, the fine was remitted by James I, and Bacon kept his titles. But the career was over. He defended himself with a strange, exact candor, conceding that he had taken the gifts while insisting they had never bent his judgment — that he had been, as he put it, the justest judge in England these fifty years, and the fairest censure that Parliament had passed in two hundred. He spent his last five years writing.

To those years belongs much of the surviving work: the expanded De Augmentis, the fragments of natural history, and the New Atlantis, an unfinished tale of an island kingdom called Bensalem governed in part by Salomon’s House, a state college of researchers who pool their findings and steward the realm’s knowledge. Bacon composed it around 1623 or 1624 and left it incomplete; his chaplain and literary executor William Rawley published it in 1627, the year after Bacon’s death, appended to the natural history Sylva Sylvarum. Rawley described it in his preface as a fable his lord had devised to exhibit a model of a college instituted for the interpretation of nature and the producing of great works for the benefit of man. The fellows of Salomon’s House, also styled the College of the Six Days’ Works, do not philosophize at one another; they keep gardens and furnaces and deep caves and high towers, breed plants and animals to new forms, brew medicines, and send out members called Merchants of Light to gather discoveries from abroad. It is the experimental program of the Novum Organum imagined as a working institution, a research state. The fragment is usually read as Bacon’s sketch of the organized science he hoped for, and it is credited as a distant inspiration behind the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 — whose early projectors, from the Hartlib circle to Robert Boyle, spoke openly of building a Salomon’s House for England, and whose motto, nullius in verba, take no one’s word for it, is Bacon’s anti-authority in three words. Through that channel the Baconian temper reached Isaac Newton and the experimental philosophy of the next century.

Bacon’s death in 1626 had a fittingly experimental character. On a cold April drive through Highgate he stopped, the old story runs, to test whether snow might preserve flesh, stuffing a fowl with it himself; he caught a chill, was laid up at Arundel House nearby, and died there on the ninth of the month. The tale may be embroidered, but it fixed his image: the philosopher killed by his own appetite for an experiment.

The esoteric afterlife

It is the New Atlantis, and the company it seemed to keep, that opened a second and stranger life for him. Bacon’s utopia of a hidden island brotherhood devoted to the secret works of nature arrived into the long European ferment over the Rosicrucian manifestos — the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), and the Chymische Hochzeit (1616), three anonymous tracts that announced an invisible fraternity of the Rose Cross possessed of a universal reformed wisdom, and set off a pamphlet war across the German lands and beyond. Those tracts came in fact from a Lutheran reading circle at Tübingen around Tobias Hess, Christoph Besold, and the young Johann Valentin Andreae, and they belong to a Paracelsian and apocalyptic world far from Bacon’s London. But the surface resonance — a secret college, an island, a brotherhood stewarding the deep knowledge of things for the good of mankind — was too strong for later readers to leave alone. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the currents of Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, Bacon was cast as a secret adept: the hidden hand behind the manifestos themselves, the unseen founder of a Rosicrucian order, even — in the parallel literary cult that grew up around his name — the true author of the plays of Shakespeare. Scholarship finds no evidence for any of it. The manifestos’ authorship is settled on the Tübingen circle by a century of philological work; the Shakespeare claim survives only as a fixed idea.

The irony is that the historical Bacon stood squarely against the cast of mind that later claimed him. He knew the world of the magus at first hand — the court of James I had recently been that of the magus-astronomer John Dee, and Robert Fludd’s printed defense of the Rosicrucians was appearing in his own years; on the Continent Giordano Bruno had carried the Hermetic enthusiasm to the stake in 1600. Bacon judged the magicians’ aim noble and their means worthless. Astrology, natural magic, alchemy as practiced he found credulous, secretive, and unmethodical — knowledge hoarded in ciphers and asserted on authority, the very vices he meant the new method to cure. He wished to discipline the magician’s ambition, not to inherit his mysteries: to take the desire to command nature and yoke it to the slow public labor of obeying her first. The Welsh alchemist and Rosicrucian apologist Thomas Vaughan, who would translate the Fama and Confessio into English in 1652, worked in precisely the register Bacon had set out to retire.

What specialists do trace is subtler than secret membership, and more interesting: a continuity of vocabulary and appetite running between the Renaissance magus, who sought to command nature, and the Baconian investigator, who sought to obey it in order to command it. The dream of operative knowledge — of a wisdom that does, that transmutes, that heals, that bends the world to human ends — passed from the magical tradition into the scientific one largely intact; what changed was the method by which it was to be had, and the demand that the result be public, repeatable, and shared. The magician’s ardor was not abolished but redirected, poured out of the secret cell and into the open college. This same redirection, in a colder key, runs through the systematic philosophies that followed — through René Descartes’ mechanism, the occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche, and the anxious faith of Blaise Pascal, all of them working in the space Bacon and Galileo Galilei had cleared. (The medieval Franciscan Roger Bacon, three centuries earlier, had voiced his own call for experiment; the two Bacons share a name and an instinct and nothing else.)

Bacon left no finished system. He left a direction of travel, an argument that truth is built rather than recalled, slowly and in company — and a vision of knowledge as a public works project that much of the modern world went on to adopt without always crediting its source.

→ Related: Rene Descartes · Galileo Galilei · Thomas Vaughan · James I · Aristotle · Empiricism · Royal Society · Isaac Newton · Rosicrucianism · Theosophy · Robert Fludd · John Dee · Giordano Bruno · Blaise Pascal · Nicolas Malebranche · Roger Bacon