Francis Bacon

How Was He Possible?

Anthony Quinton
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
As a figure in the history of philosophy Francis Bacon is doubly problematic. In the first place, he seems in most accounts to emerge from nowhere, to be without intellectual ancestors and intellectual debts. Secondly, although a recognized member of the general empirical tradition in British philosophy, and not without a long series of admirers for whom he fills an essentially symbolic role, he has no true followers and disciples. This chapter argues that the appearance of absolute originality in Bacon is an illusion. It results from confining attention to purely British sources for his ideas. But, despite his own practice, at least in his earlier years, Latin was the universal language of learning and Bacon, of course, could read and write it. If the net is cast a little wider in the sea of European thought than the small and somewhat stagnant creek occupied by Bacon's immediate British predecessors, a large array of lines of thinking can be hauled up which correspond to nearly all the main themes of Bacon's philosophy.

Keywords:   history of philosophy, British philosophy, originality, Latin

1. Francis Bacon in the History of Philosophy
As a figure in the history of philosophy Francis Bacon is doubly problematic. In the first place, he seems in most accounts to emerge from nowhere, to be without intellectual ancestors and intellectual debts. Secondly, although a recognized member of the general empirical tradition in British philosophy, and not without a long series of admirers for whom he fills an essentially symbolic role, he has no true followers and disciples.

The first of these problems will be my principal topic in this essay. It assumes its starkest form in histories of British philosophy considered on its own. There, two and a half centuries of almost complete inactivity seem to separate the Black Death from the publication of The Advancement of Learning in 1605. The Black Death is significant in the history of British philosophy for causing the deaths of William of Ockham, sheltering from papal wrath in Munich, and of Thomas Bradwardine, leader of the Mertonians and Ockham’s passionate opponent. The only important British thinker in the later fourteenth century was John Wyclif. Earlier in his career he abandoned abstract philosophy for political and ecclesiastical controversy. The determination of the authorities to stamp out his subversive doctrines, continuing long after his death in 1384, had a generally repressive effect which must explain the intellectual infertility of fifteenth-century Britain.

In the early sixteenth century intellectual life in Britain revived in the circle of humanists whose chief ornament was Thomas More. These friends of Erasmus shared his indifference to philosophy strictly so called. More died for his refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s decision to make himself supreme head of the English church. The religious disturbances that persisted well into the reign of Elizabeth continued to stifle original thought. The philosophy taught in the universities was conservative and Aristotelian.

Bacon exploded into this scene at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the most violent imaginable contrast to its stagnant repetition of past ways of thinking. The Advancement of Learning was his first properly philosophical publication. Unlike nearly all previous philosophical writing, it was written in English, in the same glittering, concretely imaginative style as his Essays whose first edition had come out eight years (p.4) earlier. It surveyed the entire range of actual, and also possible, intellectual activity, suggesting new disciplines as well as finding a place for existing ones. On the negative side, it attacked the three prevailing styles of philosophy which he picked out as worthy of condemnation. Positively, it consisted of an unprecedentedly systematic outline of the kinds of knowledge and of the kinds of practice that could arise from that knowledge. These were all to be corrected, advanced, and, in some cases, inaugurated by the application of the method set out in detail in the Novum Organum fifteen years later. That method is conventionally taken to be Bacon’s greatest original contribution to philosophy.

I shall suggest that this appearance of absolute originality in Bacon is an illusion. It results from confining attention to purely British sources for his ideas. But, despite his own practice, at least in his earlier years, Latin was the universal language of learning and Bacon, of course, could read and write it. If the net is cast a little wider in the sea of European thought than the small and somewhat stagnant creek occupied by Bacon’s immediate British predecessors, a large array of lines of thinking can be hauled up which correspond to nearly all the main themes of Bacon’s philosophy.

To do that is not, of course, to deny Bacon’s very considerable originality. But his, like most other, works of human creation largely consist in the arrangement and emphatic deployment of materials fashioned by other hands. He himself insisted that, at its best, the advancement of learning, the growth of knowledge, is a cooperative undertaking. That cooperation is not exclusively synchronous. It extends also in the historical dimension. All original thinkers are engaged in intellectual commerce with their predecessors. Even in repudiating them they stage their refutations on a platform of common assumptions.

To show that it is not gratuitous to find the appearance of Bacon’s absolute originality problematic, it may be helpful to follow a more or less Baconian or inductive procedure. There are several philosophers of the post-medieval period—a period in which individuality has always been valued and applauded—whose responsibility for giving a substantially new direction to the course of thought is in no way undermined by tracing the connections between their ideas and those of previous thinkers.

It would, I imagine, be a matter of common consent that the largest original contribution made to philosophy since Plato and Aristotle is that of Kant. But there is no doubt or obscurity about the nature, and the very large extent, of his philosophical affiliations. Brought up in the neatly systematized version of the philosophy of Leibniz that had been developed by Wolff, Kant was propelled in the construction of his Critical Philosophy by reading Hume. He was fully aware of this himself, describing Hume as the one who woke him from his dogmatic slumbers. To bring philosophers as disparate as Leibniz and Hume together—one for whom reason could do everything and one for whom reason could do very little indeed—was inevitably to generate an explosion of inconsistencies which could be reduced to the calm of coherence only by massive exclusions and adjustments. An entirely original conception of the powers of (p.5) reason was arrived at, in between Leibniz’s omnipotent penetrator of all truth and Hume’s formal registrar of evident contradictions.

Kant’s combination of the highest originality with dependence on previous thinkers has never been questioned. Descartes adopts a more Baconian posture, both by making little or no allusion to any sources of his thinking outside himself and by a congruously elegant and unacademic style of writing. Nevertheless his ‘cogito ergo sum’ is barely distinguishable from Augustine’s ‘si fallor sum’, and Descartes’s existence-proving definition of God as the possessor of all perfections is only a weaker version of Anselm’s account of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Descartes was right to believe that no one before him had so emphatically asserted the ‘real distinction of mind and body’. The extremity of his dualism was evident in an intellectual atmosphere that was still to a large extent Aristotelian. All the same it had Platonic precedents which had been reanimated by a long line of Renaissance philosophers.

Locke—perhaps the most publicly influential thinker since Aristotle—owed a great deal of his fundamental thinking about the role of sense-impressions in knowledge to Gassendi. He owed some of it, as well as the framework of his political theory, to Hobbes, despite his embarrassed disavowals. He derived his moderate, rationalistic theology from Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists. In every history of philosophy Hegel is seen to emerge smoothly from Fichte and Schelling. Nietzsche rightly acknowledged Schopenhauer as an educator. Even the most flagrantly innovative of philosophers has an ancestry. Wittgenstein, for example, was initially inspired by Schopenhauer. His thinking acquired its characteristic initial direction from Frege and Bertrand Russell. An admiration for William James, human and literary rather than strictly philosophical, prepared him for receptiveness to the ideas of C. S. Peirce. That led on, in his later philosophy, to a conception of mind and language as essentially public and social which he shared with a legitimate intellectual descendant of Peirce, John Dewey. The convergence of their opinions, concealed under a total difference of style and, so to speak, social status, has been frequently pointed out, with gentle malice, by W. V. Quine.

The evidence of these particular examples, which could be augmented indefinitely, can be strengthened by a general argument. Wittgenstein somewhere remarked that if a lion were to speak to us we could not understand it. That is not because the lion, for geographical reasons, would speak Swahili. It is because the lion’s mode of access and form of response to the world must be utterly different from our own.

Analogously a philosopher who came out with doctrines of which there had been no previous intimation would appear to be, and almost certainly would be, a charlatan. There have always been plenty of such desperately autonomous thinkers and we are right to pay them little attention. An idea will first appear in a tentative, parenthetical fashion before anyone envisages it as a serious possibility. Only when it has survived a measure of critical handling will it have established its claim to serious, systematic development. A philosopher is not a Zeus from whose head can spring a fully grown Athena of theory. Philosophy, as much as any other intellectual discipline, is a socially (p.6) conducted tradition of discourse, a scene of gradual development, not a sequence of explosive novelties.

2. Bacon’s Negative Criticism: False Philosophies and the Other Idols
The usual conception of Bacon’s philosophy is derived from the two great works he published in his lifetime that are at once of straightforward intention and of articulate organization: The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum. The De Sapientia Veterum, a series of far-fetched, but intrinsically interesting, interpretations of classical fables, was much read in Bacon’s own time but afterwards neglected. Recently Paolo Rossi has pointed out that it can be seen as a curiously, but not gratuitously, encoded way of expressing his views about a number of fundamental topics. The most important of these concern the nature of the physical world, but there are also opinions about the necessity of separating science and religion, about the need for method in the pursuit of knowledge and about realism in politics. Other smaller and equally neglected works, such as his early Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, written in 1607, convey the same, broadly atomistic, account of the underlying nature of the physical world. The extensive albums of purportedly factual materials, such as his Sylva Sylvarum and his books on the winds, on life and death, and on the dense and the rare, are only historical curiosities.

The two major works are both composed of critical and of constructive material. In the Advancement of Learning there is criticism of prevailing false philosophies. In the Novum Organum this reappears, with some adjustments, as part of his doctrine of the idols of the mind, along with causes of error in the general nature of the human mind, in individual propensities, and in language. On the constructive side the Advancement of Learning provides a systematic classification of the sciences; the Novum Organum a detailed account of the new method of eliminative induction.

The refutation of false philosophies, in each of the versions in which it is given, identifies three mistaken bodies of doctrine. That of the Advancement of Learning consists of the disputatious learning, in other words Aristotelian scholasticism; the delicate learning, rhetorical and dilettantish humanism, together with the kind of comprehensive scepticism to which it typically led; and the fantastic learning of cabbalists, alchemists and astrologers, students of magic and mystical correspondences. That of the Novum Organum associates the disputatious, or, as he now calls it, sophistic learning with two differently demarcated styles of thought. These are the empiric philosophy of Gilbert and the alchemists, and the superstitious philosophy which confuses religion and science so as to corrupt the first and to destroy the second.

In criticizing Aristotle Bacon is, of course, very far from being unique in his age. The philosophy of the Renaissance can be taken to begin with Gemistus Pletho. His comparison of Plato and Aristotle, very much to the advantage of the former, prepared the way for the Florentine Academy. More to the present point is the criticism (p.7) of Aristotelian logic. That had been inaugurated by Laurentius Valla, continued by Nizolius, and had culminated in the work of Ramus. Ramus’s dissertation for the degree of master of arts had defended the thesis that everything written by Aristotle is false. He went on, in writings of a less ritualized nature, to maintain that the logic of Aristotle is unnatural and pointlessly complicated.

In the works of the less cursory historians of philosophy Bacon does not emerge absolutely ex nihilo. Høffding, Sorley, and Copleston, for example, all mention a controversy in Cambridge in the 1580s, not long after the time of Bacon’s residence there, between William Temple, an adherent of Ramus, and the orthodox Aristotelian, Everard Digby. All trace their knowledge of this fact to an article written in 1892 by a German scholar, J. Freudenthal. Bacon could have learnt about Ramus, although from a hostile point of view, through attendance at Digby’s popular lectures. He could have had a more direct contact with Temple, whose edition of Ramus’s Dialectica was the first book published by the university press at Cambridge, and who became a fellow of his college in 1576, shortly after Bacon left Cambridge. Bacon’s mature doctrine does not agree with that of either of the disputants. Ramus came from a humanist tradition which set Cicero and an ideal of gentlemanly cultivation against the crabbed professionalism of Aristotle. Digby contended, against the Ramist Temple, that knowledge required inductive ascent from the particular to the universal, so that the engines of deduction should have some raw material to work on, but his idea of induction was Aristotle’s not Bacon’s.

Probably the most that can be said with confidence is that the atmosphere in which Bacon grew up was propitious for the criticism of Aristotle. His own very far-reaching criticism of the disputatious learning remitted deduction to the subsidiary task of organizing knowledge for expository purposes, not for acquiring it in the first place. His reason for that conviction was, consistently enough, inductive. Centuries of Aristotelian deduction had yielded no real fruit, no usable knowledge. It had simply reared a mountain of verbal distinctions on top of a handful of common-sense truths. Congruous with this way of criticizing mere disputation is Bacon’s call, in the Advancement of Learning, for a history of the sciences, to supply a factual record from which conclusions about the conditions of its success could be inductively derived.

In Bacon’s view, the knowledge that had transformed the circumstances of human life was embodied in the inventions of craftsmen, based on the observation and handling of material things, notable among them being Cardano’s familiar trio: gunpowder, printing, and the navigator’s compass. The repetitious frivolities of the schools were revealed in all their emptiness by the direct physical involvement of men with the material world. For him that was all the refutation that scholasticism required. To dispute dialectically with its exponents would be to concede the central point at issue. The validity of a mode of enquiry can be established only by its success in practice, not by logical reasoning alone. Rossi observes that very much this point of view is to be found in the writings of George Agricola, the founder of metallurgy, in the early sixteenth century. Agricola argues for close observation in person, rather than reliance (p.8) on often fable-bearing testimony, and for clarity of language in recording it. Against the classical tradition of contempt for manual work as suitable only for slaves and mechanics, he defends it, in the active form of experiment and technology, as essential to science.

It is the same spirit of distrust of linguistic refinement for its own sake and of the uncritical reception of striking items of testimony that underlies Bacon’s rejection of the delicate learning of the humanists and the fantastic learning of the occultists. The empirical and superstitious attitudes objected to in the Novum Organum raise some points of interest. The empirics and alchemists are associated in Bacon’s critique with Gilbert, the theorist of magnetism. That fact, along with his rejection of Copernicus and his failure to mention Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often mentioned to his discredit. The self-proclaimed champion of natural science, it is said, failed to appreciate the major natural scientists of his own time.

Urbach has replied convincingly to these objections. So far as Gilbert is concerned, his De Magnete contains in its sixth and final chapter a long and ill-considered argument for the perfectly sound conclusion that the earth has a diurnal motion. Included in it is the thesis that the earth, since it is a magnet, has therefore been equipped by God with a purpose and a soul. That is directly opposed to Bacon’s materialistic account of nature and his connected repudiation of final causes as a topic for science. Like the alchemists, in Bacon’s view, Gilbert has leapt too precipitately to a very large conclusion from very limited investigations. In what he says about the earth’s soul and purpose he has committed the further intellectual crime of mixing science and religion. It is this again which is the main fault in his eyes of those he describes as the superstitious, those who ‘have with extreme levity indulged so far (in this vanity) as to attempt to found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, or the book of Job and other parts of the sacred writings’ (Nov. Org. aphorism 1xv).

The confusion of science and religion might seem to be something inflicted on Aristotle by the incorporation of his thought in a Christian philosophy in need of a theory of nature, rather than to be something practised by him. But Aristotle’s God, as the prime mover, the final cause of all motion and, indeed, all change, is a clear instance of it. Bacon may have had his opposition to Aristotle fostered by much in the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and, in particular, by being exposed to Ramus while a young student at Cambridge. His insistence that science and religion must be kept absolutely distinct from each other, however, can most plausibly be accounted for by derivation, direct or indirect, from Ockham.

Human reason, for Ockham, including its intuitive power of apprehending individual things, is competent only to explore the realm of nature. The supernatural world, the realm of grace, is impenetrable to us as active enquirers. Our knowledge of it is provided by the divine gift of revelation. That and his view that abstract entities are constructions of the mind and have no real existence outside it are Ockham’s fundamental doctrines. Ockham’s school of productive followers did not last long in England. Roger Holcot died in 1349, as did Ockham himself; Adam Wodham in 1358. Only William Heytesbury the logician survived to become chancellor of Oxford (p.9) in 1371. Ockham’s ideas were most actively influential in Paris: first in the work of those premature Humeans, Jean de Mirecourt and Nicolas d’Autrecourt, then in the natural philosophy of Buridan and Oresme.

But there is reason to suppose that his doctrines were accessible to students long after his death. Oxford college libraries contain handsome printed editions of his works of the late fifteenth century. There are also interesting relics in the writings of English philosophers later than Bacon, in particular in Locke. At the beginning of the discussion of abstract ideas in his Essay on Human Understanding he asserts, as if it were beyond question and in defiance of by far the greater part of tradition, ‘everything that exists is particular’. Also it has always been puzzling that Locke should have denied the independent reality of relations. They are not, he says, ‘contained in the real existence of things, but [are] something extraneous and superinduced’. Because of that view he tries to analyse all relations into qualities of their terms. He takes causation, for example, to reduce to an active power in the cause and a passive power, or susceptibility, in the effect. This comes directly from an argument of Ockham’s that if relations were real features of the world it would absurdly follow that every time I move my little finger the infinite number of spatial relationships between that finger and everything else in the world would change and so I should bring about an infinite number of changes in reality. The persistence of Ockham’s ideas is even more evident in Hobbes. So it is reasonable to suppose that Bacon was aware of a precedent for his principle of the separation of science and religion. It is not necessary to go on to suppose that Ockham’s and Bacon’s purposes were the same. Ockham anticipated Kant in limiting reason to make room for faith. Bacon seems to be engaged in the complementary opposite of that: sequestering faith in order to set reason free.

The other important, negatively critical part of Bacon’s thought is the theory of idols. The refutation of false philosophies is the fourth and final element of the theory. Labelled the idols of the theatre, it follows the idols of the tribe, the cave, and the marketplace. His account of the idols of the tribe, of the tendency of the human mind in general to error, has some affinity to the kind of scepticism that prevailed in Bacon’s age. It had been encouraged by the recovery of the works of Sextus Empiricus. Having been virtually unknown in the Middle Ages, these had been published in Latin, in part in 1562, the year after Bacon’s birth, and in full seven years later.

Bacon was not a sceptic, at least in any radical sense. He regarded thoroughgoing scepticism as exaggerated and frivolous. But he thought scepticism therapeutically valuable in moderate doses. He was fully aware that the senses are unreliable. But he thought that could be remedied by cautiously attentive observation and with the assistance of instruments. Greek scepticism had been essentially objective. The senses mislead us because of unsatisfactory conditions of observation. Reason misleads us because of its need for premises it cannot itself supply and because of the inescapable circularity of deduction. Bacon’s idols of the tribe are of a more emotional, subjective sort: a desire for order and regularity that leads us to suppose that there is more of it than there actually is, a parental fondness for our own theories that leads us to ignore (p.10) disconfirmations and to protect them from criticism by various questionable devices. The idols of the cave, the personal biases of particular individuals, are, naturally, even more subjective.

In his account of the emotional and subjective sources of error, then, Bacon gives an original slant to the widespread scepticism of the age. His Essays, both in their content and their title, show his dependence on Montaigne and, at a further remove, on Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae.

Finally, there are the idols of the marketplace. These are the errors generated by language, by the unconscious acceptance of theories that is caused by words. Some words, such as ‘fortune’ or ‘prime mover’, are simply fictional and refer to nothing real. Others, arrived at by ‘unskilful abstraction’, classify things on the basis of superficial and unimportant likenesses. In doing so they fail to take account of important underlying differences. A familiar example is the use of the word ‘fish’ to cover all creatures that mainly live in the water, which mistakenly runs together herrings and whales.

Bacon’s view here falls in with a persisting English tradition. It stretches back beyond Ockham, its most distinguished member, to Bacon’s namesake, Roger Bacon. He listed four ‘hindrances to the understanding of truth’ which have more than their number in common with Francis Bacon’s idols. It continues after him through Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham to the linguistic philosophy of recent times. It may owe something to the peculiar qualities of the English language, an inextricable mixture of Teutonic and Romance ingredients and notable for its absence of inflection and its richness of idiom.

3. Bacon’s Theory of Natural Knowledge
Bacon’s theory of natural knowledge is his distinctive contribution to philosophy according to convention. It is not a judgement I should dispute, although I think that his theory has been too much identified with one of its parts: the formal procedure of eliminative induction by the use of his celebrated tables. I suspect that this excess of attention is due to the fact that the doctrine of the tables is much more pedagogically usable than most of Bacon’s writing. It approximates to the ideal of a textbook and provides material for exercises. It is thus unlike most of his writing, which is rhetorical and suggestive, any underlying skeleton of argument being concealed by literary ornamentation.

His account of natural knowledge can be distilled into eight main theses, themselves falling into two groups. Five of them concern the intellectual core of the scientific process. The three that remain concern its social, external aspects.

1. Knowledge of nature must be based on observation by the senses.
2. The senses must be assisted and corrected by instruments and the use of experiment.
(p.11) 3. The laws of nature must be derived from extensive and varied records of critically sifted observation by the procedure of eliminative induction.
4. Induction must proceed by gradual ascent from the directly apparent surface of nature, to the forms.
5. Firmly separated from religion, science must search for efficient and, in the sense of the fourth thesis, formal causes, but not for final causes.
The theses about the social and external aspects of science are

6. that it must be conducted cooperatively,
7. that it is cumulative and progressive, and
8. that it is for use, for ‘the relief of man’s estate’, and not for merely contemplative enjoyment.
The first thesis, that science must be founded on careful and extensive observation, is implicit in Ockham’s theory of our knowledge of individual things. Called intuition, it must precede any reasoning about general ideas, which have to be derived from our acquaintance with individuals. But observationalism is much more explicit in the work of Telesio. Bacon was familiar with his writings, and in some respects critical of them. Nevertheless he described Telesio as ‘the first of the moderns’.

Against the Aristotelian doctrine that matter is merely potential, Telesio maintained that it is a concrete actuality, although passive and inert. It can be perceived by the senses from which all knowledge must be derived. Observations are stored in the memory and allow for the anticipation by analogy of what has not yet been observed. Vives had earlier stressed the importance of observation, but principally as applied to the life of the mind. In Telesio it is observation of the physical world that is taken to be fundamental.

Despite his laudatory label for Telesio and agreement with his observationalism, Bacon criticized him forcefully. He objected to Telesio’s amorphously speculative thesis that two large principles, of heat and of cold, are responsible for all that happens in nature. That is a conspicuous departure from the gradual ascent on which Bacon insisted. Also deficient, in Bacon’s view, was what he described as the pastoral character of Telesio’s philosophy, its indifference to the practical uses to which natural knowledge can be put. But a substantial area of agreement remains. No one before Bacon had given such a definitive form as Telesio had to Ockham’s doctrine of intuitive knowledge. One feature of Telesio’s philosophy Bacon would not approve is its instrumentalist conception of natural knowledge as providing, not an insight into the inner nature of physical things, but analogical anticipations of the course of future or possible experience.

Bacon’s second thesis is to be found clearly expressed in George Agricola. He held that only by the close observation, actual handling, and clear description of material things can reliable knowledge of nature be secured. Bacon had read Agricola, according to Paolo Rossi. But probably the main source for Bacon’s second thesis was his own induction from those investigations of his age which had actually borne fruit. Further back in time there is the influence of Roger Bacon to be taken into account. Although (p.12) he put forward the idea within a hermetic framework, he took natural knowledge as something to be acquired by experiment, by operations on and interaction with natural objects, and not by merely contemplative observation alone.

The third thesis, that the laws of nature must be arrived at by eliminative induction, using the tables of presence, absence, and degrees, is often seen by those well-disposed to Bacon as having something of the same status as Aristotle’s doctrine of the syllogism. In one swift movement, it appears, an array of unreflective practices was made explicit and ordered into a system. At any rate it has remained authoritative since its creation. It was given renewed life through its rather exact transcription by Mill, and has subsequently formed part of comprehensive logic textbooks of an old-fashioned kind. The common practice of calling Bacon’s tables ‘Mill’s methods’ abets Mill’s historically misleading concealment of his debt to Bacon.

But if Mill is indebted to Bacon, Bacon is also an inheritor. There are the first intimations of the need for methodical comparison of instances as far back as Robert Grosseteste. In Duns Scotus there is a first, but definite, sketch of the method of agreement (Bacon’s table of presence) and in Ockham a similar sketch of the method of difference (Bacon’s table of absence). As British philosophers Scotus and Ockham may have been accessible and have appealed to Bacon. Both were critical of the Thomist project of incorporating the largely secular philosophy of Aristotle into Christian theology. That did not make them anti-Aristotelians in natural philosophy. But it led them to oppose the followers of Aristotle who ignored the admittedly modest attention he had accorded to induction. Aristotle himself at least affirmed some connection between the first principles of science and experience. His disciples in the High Middle Ages tended to take them on trust, either as self-evident or as items of traditional common knowledge. The formal rigour with which Scotus and Ockham had become familiar through their logical studies, applied to the inductive aspect of the search for knowledge, may well have supplied Bacon with an example.

Bacon’s support of eliminative against enumerative induction was also anticipated by Grosseteste, in a particular argument about the sun’s propagation of heat, and by Buridan, in an argument about the motion of a projectile. Both were aware of the distinctiveness and importance of falsification, but no one before Bacon made the ‘major force of the negative instance’ such a central and explicitly general principle. It is ironical that Popper should have regarded Bacon, who is close to him in many ways, as the paladin of simple enumeration.

Bacon’s fourth thesis, the doctrine of gradual ascent, seems original to him. But an indirect source for it can be found in his high opinion of the achievements of craftsmen, mechanics, and inventors, as compared with cloistered and over-precipitate speculators. The doctrine of gradual ascent, like other aspects of his method, is based on an inductive generalization about the necessary conditions for the successful pursuit of natural knowledge. Its primary target is the tendency of theorists to generalize too comprehensively on too narrow a basis of evidence. It also draws strength from his realistic, or anti-instrumentalist, insistence on the insufficiency of laws that concern (p.13) only the straightforwardly observable surface features of the world. These need to be supplemented by laws about the fine structure of matter, the forms, or simple natures, of the particles of which ordinary things are composed.

The study of superficial causes, material and efficient, Bacon calls physics. The corresponding practice or art that it makes possible he calls mechanics, in effect craftsmanship. Metaphysics as he understands it, distinguishing it from philosophia prima and, of course, from theology, makes possible what he calls natural magic. This choice of phrase has misled Bacon’s interpreters into supposing him to be some kind of occultist. What he actually had in mind is the kind of technology which uses an understanding of the fine structure of physical things to bring about really radical changes in them. It was on this, and not on a surface empiricism, that he rested his hopes for a far-reaching improvement of the human condition. It was a reasonable anticipation of nineteenth-century chemistry. He arrived at it by combining his own version of the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus with his conviction of the empirical basis and technical utility of natural knowledge.

I can move on to the three social and external theses, as I have called them, since the fifth thesis about the essential distinctness of science and religion has already been considered. These are much the more original part of Bacon’s contribution to the philosophy of science. But they have precedents. George Agricola and, as Rossi points out, the potter Bernard Palissy firmly agreed with his final thesis about the utility of science, as, among philosophers proper, did Cardano. His sixth thesis, that it should be cooperative, imaginatively embodied in the New Atlantis, had been advanced with some elaboration in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon. His seventh thesis, that it is cumulative and progressive, not just a recycling of established truths, has no very obvious earlier exponent. It is significant that the historian of progress, J. B. Bury, begins his story with Bacon (and also, in a different dimension, Jean Bodin).

That is not surprising so far as the post-classical world is concerned. Even if only the earliest Christians seriously expected the end of the world in their own lifetime, the notion that the entire terrestrial drama will eventually be wound up by its divine impresario has always been an integral part of Christian belief. Together with the doctrine of the fall of man it is hardly encouraging to the theory of progress. Bacon’s uncomplicated enthusiasm for progress, conceived in exclusively earthly terms, may throw some light on the depth of his professed commitment to the religion he was so anxious to wall off from science. It should, however, be added that the indisputably devout Pascal, writing twenty years after Bacon’s death, was quite unequivocal about the cumulative and progressive nature of science, contrasting it in this respect with theology as ardently as Bacon.

The classification of the sciences, which is the main topic of the Advancement of Learning, and its enlarged version, the De Augmentis, is an important procedural supplement to the substantive account Bacon gives of natural knowledge. It falls within a long tradition which began with the example of Aristotle’s encyclopedic range of writings and with his explicit distinction, and further subdivision, of theoretical, (p.14) practical, and productive sciences. A remark in his Topics, distinguishing propositions as ethical, physical, and logical, was made the basis of a division of sciences under these heads by Stoics and Epicureans. In the Middle Ages the system of seven liberal arts and three philosophies (natural, metaphysical, and moral) prevailed. Certainly with Bacon a new era in the history of this kind of classification begins. Reflecting the enthusiasm and initiative of the liberated enquirers of his time, he devised a system incomparably more detailed and penetrating than anything that had preceded it. The particular stimulus was his lively sense of what was actually going on and his lack of respect for established intellectual authority.

4. Bacon’s Theories of Nature and Mind
The conventional view of Bacon sees him as essentially a methodologist and, more generally, as a prophet or propagandist of natural science. Critics have seized on his own admission that he had established only the preliminaries of his ‘Great Instauration’. Its sixth and final part, ‘the new philosophy or active science’, the application of his method to the data, much in need of augmentation, which he had assembled, remained to be carried out by others. The critics’ position is strengthened by Bacon’s apparent incomprehension of the genuine scientific progress of his own age. But Bacon’s faults in this respect are, as I mentioned earlier, less culpable than they are supposed to be. In particular, I drew attention to Urbach’s point that Bacon praised Gilbert’s work on magnetism, and attacked only his concluding speculations about the soul and purpose with which God had endowed the world by making it into a magnet. Bacon opposed Copernicus because of the interpretation of his heliocentrism as a calculating device. And he was, chronologically, in no position to know of Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood: it was not published until after Bacon’s death.

Bacon’s illustrative application of his method to the example of heat shows him to have been too modest in his estimate of his own achievements. In taking heat to be a type of motion he rightly rejected the ancient theory of fire atoms which persisted long after his own time in the form of the theory of heat as caloric, a fire-constituting fluid. Bacon’s conclusion was substantially correct, but it was not generally recognized to be so until some two centuries after his death.

The distinction Bacon draws between physics and metaphysics, between comparatively superficial explanations in terms of what can be directly observed and more fundamental explanations in terms of underlying structure, presupposes the truth of theoretical realism, the doctrine that there is more to nature than meets the unassisted eye. In Bacon’s version theoretical realism assumed its most familiar form: atomism. To reject the idea that what ultimately constitutes nature is a continuous, relatively fluid stuff is not to embrace a particular view of the nature of the atoms: whether they are all identical or whether they differ in shape or size or other intrinsic properties. Nor is it necessarily to conclude that the atoms are, or are not, separated from each other by empty space. Bacon, always ill at ease with the vacuum, thought that the expansion and (p.15) contraction of matter could be accounted for by the incorporation in or the extrusion from bodies of relatively fine atoms.

Perhaps as early as 1604, in his Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, Bacon had praised Democritus in general terms for his atomism. But he dissented from Democritus’s view that the variety of nature is to be explained by reference to the different shapes of atoms. Always doubtful about the vacuum, late in life he came down definitely against it. Nevertheless he always remained some kind of atomist. In the examination of the myth of Cupid, in his De Sapientia Veterum, he reaffirms it as the hidden content of a piece of ancient wisdom.

More important than his difference with Democritus about the shape of atoms is his account of the cause of motion. Democritus left the origin of motion unexplained. Epicurus ascribed a natural downward motion to atoms, modified by his celebrated swerve. Bacon maintained that motion is intrinsic to matter. It was not imparted to the physical world either by an Aristotelian God, drawing all things towards it teleologically, or by a Newtonian God, setting the whole machine going with an initial push. That idea is so clearly expressed in Telesio as to make it exceedingly likely that Bacon got it from him. It is entirely appropriate to his doctrine of the separation of science from religion.

I suggested earlier that Bacon was influenced by Telesio in combining empiricism with materialism. Telesio had held that matter is not an Aristotelian potentiality, but an actual, even if passive, constituent of the real world. Aristotle’s metaphysically extreme, quasi-atomist doctrine of minima represented them as merely potential, that is to say, as the limits of the furthest theoretically possible process of division. In Averroës atoms are conceived as actually and physically indivisible entities and it is to that kind of atomism to which Bacon subscribed. It had been affirmed earlier in Renaissance by the Averroist Agostino Nifo and, at a greater remove from Averroës, by Scaliger.

Bacon gave little attention to the philosophy of mind. It is accommodated rather perfunctorily in its place in his classification of the sciences. He distinguishes two broad natural sciences of mind, logic and ethics, both very broadly conceived. They deal with the two great fields of mental activity, the exercises of the intellect and of the will. But in addition to these faculties there is the soul itself to be considered. Bacon’s view is that the soul itself is not part of nature since it is literally inspired or breathed into human beings by God. It is thus not subject to the laws of nature and not a proper object of inductive study.

That is not a very coherent position. If the soul is not part of nature then its operations must be understood to have a supernatural cause and so they too are beyond the reach of inductive enquiry. Bacon’s view may be a somewhat confused relic of another doctrine of Telesio’s. He had held that, as well as spirit, present in both men and animals, of a material, even if very refined, composition, and responsible for sensation and for the reasoning that it based on it, human beings have also a forma or mens superaddita, which is wholly immaterial and immortal. Spirit is motivated by the instinct of self-preservation; the higher forma superaddita is pointed towards God. This (p.16) theory satisfies the requirements of orthodoxy while keeping science and religion apart. By turning Telesio’s two souls into the soul considered in itself and the soul’s operations Bacon tried to pursue the same ends, but less successfully.

In this survey of the possible sources of Bacon’s leading ideas the chief contributors I have identified are William of Ockham and Bernardino Telesio. It is clear that Bacon had read Telesio. The criticisms he advances of Telesio are forceful but limited in scope, specifically to Telesio’s over-speculative reliance on his principles of heat and cold. But Bacon followed Telesio closely in his empiricism and his materialism and also in his account of the soul.

The main problem with the idea that Bacon was influenced by Ockham is to trace the connection. The fact that there are some very close affinities of doctrine, and even of wording, between Ockham and Locke, who was born several years after Bacon’s death, suggests that Ockham’s ideas survived as part of the normal university course of instruction.

Ockham and Telesio are also very notably echoed in Hobbes, whose account of motivation is very much like Telesio’s. But after Hobbes, with Locke and his successors, empiricism in Britain abandoned the materialism with which it had been originally associated for conceptions of nature which enforced the assumption that all we know directly is our own sense-impressions. That was an inheritance from the kind of radical scepticism Bacon rejected, and also from Descartes. Locke still thought that there really are material things and speculated that God might have chosen to attach the power of thinking to a material substance. But the assumption that the only certain knowledge is self-knowledge led inexorably to the subjectivist extravagances of Berkeley, Hume, and Mill and, in our own time, of Russell and Ayer. In connecting Bacon to Ockham I mean to do him honour, by affiliating him legitimately to the philosopher I suspect of being the greatest of British empiricists.