Douglas Walton - Informal Logic

6.4 NON-FALLACIOUS AD HOMINEM ARGUMENTS

The previous examples have indicated that there are many ways in which criticism directed against the person can go wrong and be fallacious. However, the last examples have suggested that in some cases, and to some extent, a personal attack against an opponent’s circumstances or position may be not altogether unreasonable. Does this mean that in some cases arguments against the person could be reasonable? In section 6.1, it has already been suggested that this is indeed the case. And if it is true, it means that we must not reject an argument against the person without giving good reasons.

We saw that example 6.4, from one point of view, could be interpreted as a weak but basically reasonable criticism to raise. Another example will serve to illustrate a reasonable use of the circumstantial argument against the person as a move in argument. Consider the following dialogue.

Example 6.10

George: The notorious problems we have been having with postal strikes means that there is no longer reliable mail service provided by the government.

I think we ought to allow private, for-profit mail-delivery companies to compete on an equal footing with the Post Office.

Bob: But George, you are a communist.

Let us suppose that in this case George is an avowed communist, and has based his previous arguments on many standard communist principles and positions. Now in many cases, calling your opponent in an argument a communist could be a fallacious type of ad hominem attack. However, in this instance, Bob seems to have a reasonable point. If George is an avowed communist, and communists are for state control and against private enterprise, then how can George consistently argue for a for-profit mail service run by private enterprise? It seems like a legitimate question. Of course, George may be able to resolve the ostensible inconsistency in subsequent dialogue. Surely Bob is justified in challenging the consistency of George’s position at this point in the dialogue. If so, then in this case, Bob’s circumstantial argument is not fallacious. It is a reasonable use of the ad hominem argument to challenge George’s position.

If arguments against the person can sometimes be reasonable, we must carefully analyze this type of argument to set out criteria that will enable us to distinguish between the incorrect (fallacious) and reasonable instances of ad hominem argumentation. First, let us address the reasonable type of person-directed criticism in argument.

A personal attack can be a reasonable criticism of an arguer’s position by showing that the concessions or commitments of that arguer are inconsistent with the propositions asserted in his argument. Some might say that such an attack is, or can be, specious because it misses the real point of looking to the external evidence and instead, concentrates on the internal relationships within the arguer’s position. For instance, in example 6.10, some commentators might say that Bob would be better off to evaluate George’s proposal of private mail service on its own merits, rather than raising the internal question of whether the proposal is internally consistent with George’s own political position. What does George’s own internal position matter to anyone else, compared with the very important issue of whether mail service should be public or private?

This point of view has some justification. For external evidence should very often have priority, and ifwe are distracted from that external evidence by purely personal (internal) considerations, that is the very climate in which the personal attack creates the most mischief in argument.

However, internal matters of an arguer’s position can sometimes be important too. If George really is inconsistent in his position and confused -a communist who advocates free enterprise — then it is very important to George to sort out his own position. For one thing, if George’s position does truly contain a logical inconsistency, then it cannot be right. Second, there may be many other readers or listeners affected by George’s argument who may be somewhat sympathetic to some forms of communism, and who may be very irritated and concerned about postal strikes and reliable mail services. For these people, it may be very important to think through the whole issue in much the same way that George is trying to think it through. Even those who strongly reject any communistic political ideals may be concerned to see how a communist could deal with the problems posed by mail strikes. So the internal question ofthe consistency of George’s position on this issue may be very important for George and many others as well.

A third factor is that internal evidence can be enough to swing the balance of acceptance to one side of an argument or the other where external evidence is lacking or cannot be brought to bear on an issue. On a complex and controversial moral or political issue like state control of services, there may be no clear external, factual, or scientific evidence that would definitely resolve the controversy one way or the other. Although internal evidence derived from an arguer’s position may always be weaker than external evidence, sometimes, where it is hard to decide on a controversial topic, weak evidence may be enough to shift the burden of proof.

In such a case, if an arguer adopts a position that is open to a criticism of inconsistency, that may be enough to shift the burden of proof against his case. Such an arguer will be put on the defensive, and his credibility as an advocate of his side of the argument may then be questioned.

A fourth factor is that in some cases a successful argument against the person can render an arguer’s impartiality, sincerity, or trustworthiness open to question. This may be a weak form of argument, but it may be enough to alter the burden ofproofon a controversial issue. And therefore it can be a reasonable criticism.

On controversial issues, hard evidence that can be directly brought to bear on a disputed proposition may be lacking. In such a case, reasonable dialogue may be the only available way of deciding to accept a conclusion or not, short ofdeciding by random choice, or by following one’s dogmatic inclinations. Here, understanding the arguer’s positions both pro and con may help one to arrive at a more intelligent or reasoned decision on how to make a commitment, if a decision must be made. If an arguer’s position is open to fair criticism of internal inconsistency, that could be a good reason for anyone to withhold acceptance of the arguer’s conclusion.

In short, sometimes arguing against an opponent in argument by using his own concessions against his argument can be fair and reasonable, within limits. Such an argument may show that the arguer’s position is inconsistent, and may thereby show that the arguer is not a credible advocate of the conclusion he purports to advance. However, an argument against the person does not show that his conclusion is necessarily false, in itself. At best, it shows that the position backing up the argument is open to challenge. In example 6.10, George’s conclusion that private companies should be allowed to compete with the Post Office might, for all we know, be true. George may even be able to give some good reasons for it that anyone, even an anti-communist, would wish to take into account. Even so, Bob’s criticism is a reasonable argument against the person in reply if it shows that this conclusion does not square with George’s own political philosophy. That may be a good criticism, but of course it does not necessarily imply that George’s conclusion is false. To so argue would be an incorrect use of the argument against the person. In short then, an argument against the person can sometimes be a reasonable criticism, but only within carefully drawn limits.

Traditionally, the argument against the person, or so-called ad hominem argument has been called a fallacy in many textbooks.1 However, it is more useful to make the following distinctions which allow for the argument against the person to be a reasonable criticism in some cases and an inadequately reasoned or supported criticism in other cases.2 A personal attack (personal allegation) is said to have been advanced in argument where one arguer uses some personal allegations relative to the motives, personal circumstances, personal actions, and so forth, as a basis to criticize an opponent’s argument. This form ofattack can have three forms, the direct (abusive) personal attack, the circumstantial personal attack, and the attack on an arguer’s impartiality. Such an attack becomes a personal criticism of an argument where evidence is given by the arguer to back up his personal attack on the argument criticized.

The evidence required for this criticism must fulfill various requirements if the criticism is to be reasonable in a given case. The more subtle and complex type of personal attack is the circumstantial type of instance, where care is needed to identify the nature of the alleged circumstantial inconsistency.

A circumstantial attack against the person occurs where an arguer questions the consistency of another arguer’s position. A circumstantial criticism is advanced where the questioning arguer (1) pins down a specific set of propositions and gives some evidence that the other arguer is committed to these propositions as part ofhis argument or position, and (2) gives some reason to show that there is a danger ofinconsistency, either circumstantial or logical, in these propositions. A circumstantial refutation occurs where a circumstantial criticism is successfully backed up by showing that the set of propositions in question is part of the other arguer’s set of commitments, and does imply a logical contradiction by valid arguments. Various forms of error occur in a personal attack when the direct personal attack or circumstantial criticism is inadequately supported, and therefore fails either as a reasonable criticism or as a successful refutation of the argument in question. There are several specific types of failures, and we turn to these different types of error and shortcoming in the next section.

As a form of criticism, argument against the person has the effect of challenging an arguer’s position and thereby putting that arguer’s case on the defensive. All controversial argument is really a dialogue, and there are always two sides to a dialogue. The effect of an ad hominem reply in dialogue is to bounce the ball back into your opponent’s court. However, the ultimate resolution ofan argument against the person as a criticism that is successful, or itself open to criticism, is often highly dependent on the subsequent dialogue that takes place between the critic and the defender of the argument. Thus a good personal criticism may be successful if it opens up the channels ofdialogue in articulating or exploring two opposed positions on a controversial issue.

Some arguments are more open to personal criticism than others. Consider the following argument.

Example 6.11

Skeptic: All arguments are relative to beliefs that can be challenged. Hence no argument is reliable.

This argument is open to the following personal, circumstantial reply to Skeptic: “What about your own argument (example 6.11) above, Skeptic? Is it reliable?” If Skeptic tries to insist that his argument is reliable, he is clearly in danger of personal inconsistency. For he has just maintained that no argument is reliable. How can he consistently make an exception for his own argument without being illogical? On the other hand, if Skeptic concedes that his own argument in example 6.11 is indeed unreliable, he is also in trouble on grounds of circumstantial inconsistency. For can he really be a sincere and competent participant in reasonable dialogue if he is advocating an argument which he knows to be unreliable? Either way, Skeptic is hoist by his own petard.

So some arguments, like example 6.11, are especially vulnerable to the circumstantial argument against the person as a form of criticism. In such cases, the argument against the person is the most reasonable and appropriate type ofcriticism to bring forward. In these cases, the argument against the person can successfully refute the argument. However, in many cases the argument against the person is inherently weaker. It is not a refutation in such cases, but nevertheless it can often be a reasonable form of challenge to an argument, and can successfully shift the burden of proof against it.

1

See Govier (1983) and Walton (1985b).

2

A deeply and carefully reasoned defence of the argument against the person as a kind of criticism that can be reasonable in some contexts of dialogue is given by Johnstone (1978).

Capítulo XXXVII

CAPÍTULO XXXVII

Spandrell insistiu muitíssimo para que eles fossem à sua casa sem demora. O Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart[88] simplesmente não podia deixar de ser ouvido.
— Não se pode compreender coisa alguma antes de o ter ouvido — declarou Maurice. — Ele prova todas as espécies de coisas; Deus, a alma, a bondade, e de maneira irrefutável. É a única prova verdadeira que existe; a única, porque Beethoven foi o único homem que soube dar expressão ao seu conhecimento. Vocês têm mesmo de ir.
— De muito boa vontade — disse Rampion —, mas...
Spandrell lhe cortou a palavra.
— Ouvi dizer ontem, por acaso, que o Quarteto em Lá Menor existia em gravação. Fui correndo comprar um aparelho e os discos, expressamente para você.
— Para mim? Mas por que essa generosidade?
— Não é generosidade — respondeu Spandrell rindo. — É egoísmo. Quero que vocês ouçam, e que confirmem a minha opinião.
— Mas porquê?
— Porque tenho confiança em vocês e, se vocês confirmarem, hei de ter confiança em mim mesmo.
— Que homem! — zombou Rampion. — Tu devias entrar na Igreja de Roma e tomar um confessor.
— Mas vocês não podem deixar de ir!
Spandrell falava com um ardor sério.
— Mas não agora — disse Mary.
— Não hoje — repetiu o marido, perguntando a si mesmo, enquanto falava, por que Spandrell mostrava uma insistência tão estranha. Que havia, pois? Aquela maneira de se mover e de falar, aquele olhar, aquela excitação... — Tenho inúmeras coisas a fazer esta tarde.
— Amanhã, então.
"Parece que está embriagado", pensava Rampion.
— Por que não depois de amanhã? — disse depois, em voz alta. — Seria muito mais fácil para mim. E a máquina não baterá asas até lá...
Spandrell emitiu o seu riso afónico.
— A máquina não... Mas eu sim... Talvez já me tenha ido depois de amanhã...
— Mas não nos disseste que ias viajar — estranhou Mary. — Aonde?
— Quem sabe? — respondeu Spandrell, rindo de novo. — Eu só sei que não estarei mais aqui...
— Está bem — disse Rampion, que o havia observado com curiosidade. — Eu vou amanhã. E continuou a pensar: "Por que estará ele tão teatral?"
Spandrell abalou.
— Que haver de anormal com ele? — perguntou Rampion quando o outro desapareceu.
— Não lhe notei nada de particularmente anormal — respondeu Mary.
Rampion teve um gesto de impaciência.
— Ora, tu... tu não darias nem pelo Juízo Final! Não viste que Spandrell estava excitado e fazia o possível para se conter? Como quem segura a tampa de uma panela de água em ebulição... E aquela maneira melodramática de rir! Tal qual o cínico consciente das peças de teatro...
— Mas ele estava representando? — inquiriu Mary. — Estava a fazer-se de bobo para nos divertir?
— Não, não. Fazia tudo aquilo com absoluta sinceridade. Mas, quando nos achamos na situação autêntica do vilão consciente dum melodrama, acabamos inevitavelmente por nos portar como vilões conscientes. Representamos um papel, a despeito de nós mesmos.
— Mas por que fazia ele esse papel?
— Como diabo queres tu que eu saiba? — disse Rampion com impaciência. Mary esperava sempre que o marido soubesse tudo, por alguma intuição misteriosa e mágica. Aquela fé que ela tinha em Mark o divertia e o lisonjeava por vezes, mas noutros momentos também o irritava. — Tu me tomas pelo padre confessor de Spandrell?
— Não há razão para te zangares...
— Pelo contrário, não há quase nada que não possa dar motivo à cólera. Se nos contemos é porque a metade do tempo vivemos de olhos fechados, meio adormecidos. Se estivéssemos sempre acordados, meu Deus! Não ficaria muita louça intata! — E, dizendo isso, se foi com dignidade para o seu estúdio.
Deixando Chelsea, Spandrell rumou a pé para o lado de leste, ao longo do Tâmisa, caminhando devagar e assobiando para si mesmo, de quando em quando, as primeiras frases da melodia lídia do Heilige Dankgesang. E continuava a assobiar mais e mais... O rio se estendia a perder de vista, fundindo-se, longe, na bruma seca. A música era como água numa terra ressequida. Depois de tantos dias de estiagem, uma fonte, uma vertente! Um carro de irrigação passou estrondeando, arrastando a cauda de seu aguaceiro artificial. Sentiu-se um cheiro de terra molhada. Aquela música era uma prova, como ele havia dito a Rampion. Na sarjeta, uma pequena torrente impelia rápido para o esgoto, um invólucro de cigarros todo amarrotado e um pedaço de casca de laranja. Spandrell parou de assobiar. O horror essencial... O mesmo que carregar lixo; era o que aquilo tinha sido. Uma coisa simplesmente suja e desagradável — como limpar uma latrina.
Uma coisa que não chegava a ser tão terrível quanto era estúpida, indescritivelmente estúpida. A música era uma prova, Deus existia. Mas somente enquanto os violinos estavam tocando. Uma vez suspensos os arcos das cordas — que acontecia?
O lixo, a estupidez, a aridez impiedosa!
Em Vauxhall Bridge Road Spandrell comprou por 1 xelim um maço de papéis de cartas e envelopes. Pelo preço duma taça de café e dum brioche, alugou uma mesa numa casa de chá. Escreveu com um toco de lápis: "Ao Secretário Geral da Confraria dos Ingleses Livres. — Senhor, amanhã, quarta-feira, às 5 horas da tarde, o assassino de Everard Webley se encontrar no número 37 da Catskill Street, S.W. 7. O apartamento fica no segundo andar. O homem provavelmente vir abrir a porta em pessoa. Estará armado e disposto a tudo".
Releu a carta; esta lhe lembrou as comunicações (escritas com tinta vermelha, para simular sangue, e sob a influência das histórias em séries dos semanários infantis, Chums e B.O.P.) com as quais, em colaboração com o Pokinghorne Caçula, ele esperara, à idade de nove anos, causar sobressalto e terror à Srta. Veal, a matrona da escola preparatória que ambos freqüentavam então. Tinham sido descobertos e denunciados ao diretor. O velho Nariguete deu em cada um deles três varadas nas nádegas. "Ele está armado e disposto a tudo." Aquilo era puro Pokinghorne. Mas, se ele não se expressasse assim, os homens de Webley não trariam revólveres. E, então, a coisa não aconteceria. Nada aconteceria. Que o bilhete fosse assim mesmo... Spandrell dobrou o papel e pô-lo dentro dum envelope. Havia uma tolice essencial, bem como uma vilania e uma estupidez essenciais. Rabiscou o endereço.

* * *

— Bem, cá estamos — disse Rampion, quando Spandrell abriu a porta para o casal na tarde do dia seguinte. — Onde está Beethoven? Onde está a famosa prova da existência de Deus e da superioridade da moral de Jesus?
— Por aqui... — Spandrell guiou-os até a sala de estar. O gramofone se achava sobre a mesa. Quatro ou cinco discos estavam espalhados ao lado dele. — Aqui está o início do movimento lento — continuou Spandrelt, apanhando um deles. — Não quero aborrecer vocês com o resto do quarteto. É magnífico. Mas o Heilige Dankgesang é a parte decisiva.. — Pôs a máquina em movimento, o disco girou; Spandrell abaixou a agulha sobre a superfície estriada. Um violino isolado emitiu uma nota longa, depois mais outra, uma sexta acima; caiu para a quinta (enquanto o segundo violino começava onde tinha partido o primeiro), depois saltou para a oitava, e ficou pendurado nela, suspenso durante dois longos compassos.
Mais de cem anos atrás, Beethoven, surdo como uma porta, tinha ouvido a música imaginária de instrumentos de corda que exprimiam os seus pensamentos e sentimentos mais íntimos. Traçara sinais com tinta em papel pautado. Um século mais tarde quatro húngaros haviam tocado, diante da reprodução impressa das garatujas de Beethoven, aquela música que Beethoven nunca ouvira a não ser em imaginação. Ranhuras em espiral sobre uma superficie de goma-laca se lembravam agora do que eles haviam tocado. Aquela memória artificial girava, uma agulha viajava pelas ranhuras e, por entre o chiado leve e os roncos abafados que imitavam os ruídos da surdez mesma de Beethoven, os símbolos perceptíveis das convicções e emoções de Beethoven vibravam no ar. Lentamente, lentamente, a melodia se desenrolou. As arcaicas harmonias lídias ficaram suspensas no ar. Era uma música sem paixão, transparente, pura e cristalina, como um mar tropical, como um lago alpino. Água sobre a água, calma — deslizando sobre calma; um acordo de horizontes unidos e de espaços sem ondulações; um contraponto de serenidade. E tudo era claro e brilhante; nada de brumas, nada de crepúsculos vagos. Era a calma da contemplação tranqüila e extática, e não do torpor e do sono. Era a serenidade do convalescente que acorda da sua febre e se descobre a renascer num reino de beleza. Mas a febre era "aquela febre que se chama vida", e o renascimento não ocorria dentro deste mundo; aquela beleza era extraterrena; a serenidade convalescente era a paz de Deus. O entrelaçamento de melodias lídias era o céu.
Trinta compassos lentos tinham construido o céu, quando o caráter da música se modificou de súbito. Depois de ter sido remotamente arcaica, tornou-se moderna. As harmonias lídias foram substituídas pelas do tom maior correspondente. O ritmo se fez mais rápido. Uma nova melodia pulou, saltou — mas por cima das montanhas terrestres, não no meio das montanhas do paraíso.
— "Neue Kraft fuehlend"[89] — cochichou Spandrell, lendo a partitura. — Ele está se sentindo mais forte; mas não é já tão celestial.
A nova melodia continuou a saltar durante uns cinqüenta compassos e expirou num chiado. Spandrell ergueu a agulha e fez parar o prato do aparelho.
— O motivo lídio começa de novo no outro lado — explicou ele, enquanto dava mais corda ao gramofone. — E depois há um retomo da maneira mais viva em lá maior. A partir daí, a coisa segue no modo lídio até o fim, e vai ficando cada vez mais e mais bonita. Não achas isto maravilhoso? — Spandrell voltou-separa Rampion. — Não é uma prova?
O outro meneou a cabeça.
— Maravilhoso. Mas a única coisa que isso prova, pelo menos segundo percebo, é que os doentes costumam ficar muito fracos. É a arte dum homem que perdeu o corpo.
— Mas que descobriu a alma.
— Oh! eu te garanto que os homens doentes são muito espiritualistas. Mas isso é porque eles não são integralmente homens. Os eunucos são amantes muito espirituais pela mesma razão.
— Mas Beethoven não era um eunuco.
— Eu sei. Mas por que então procurou ser eunuco? Por que fez da castração e da ausência do corpo o seu ideal? Que é esta música? Apenas um hino de louvor ao eunuquismo. Muito bela, reconheço. Mas ele não teria podido escolher alguma coisa mais humana do que a castração para celebrar no seu canto?
Spandrell suspirou.
— Para mim é a visão da beatitude, é o céu.
— Não é da terra. Eis precisamente de que me queixo.
— Mas um homem não pode então imaginar o céu, se isso lhe apraz? — perguntou Mary.
— Certamente, desde que não pretenda que sua imaginação seja a última palavra da verdade, da beleza, da sabedoria, da virtude e de todo o resto... Spandrell quer fazer-nos aceitar o eunuquismo incorpóreo como última palavra. Não vou nisso. Absolutamente, não vou nisso.
— Escuta então o movimento antes de julgar.
Spandrell fez girar o disco e abaixou a agulha. O céu claro da música lídia vibrou no ar.
— Lindo, lindo! — disse Rampion, quando o disco findou. — Tu tens razão. É realmente o céu; é bem a vida da alma. É a mais perfeita abstração da realidade que já encontrei. Mas por que quis ele fazer essa abstração? Por que não se contentou com ser um homem e não uma alma abstrata? Por que, por quê? — Pôs-se a caminhar dum lado para outro no quarto. — Essa maldita alma — continuou ele —, essa maldita alma abstrata, dir-se-ia uma espécie de cancro que devora a realidade verdadeira, humana, natural, um cancro que se alastra sempre e sempre à custa dela. Por que não se pôde contentar com a realidade, esse velho imbecil do teu Beethoven? Por que sentiu a necessidade de substituir a coisa verdadeira, quente, natural, por esse cancro abstrato da alma? Pode ser que o cancro tenha uma forma muito bonita, mas, no fim das contas, com mil demônios!, o corpo é mais belo! Não quero saber do teu cancro espiritual.
— Não discutirei contigo — disse Spandrell. Sentiu-se de repente extraordinariamente cansado e deprimido. Sua tentativa falhara. Rampion recusara deixar-se convencer. A prova não era então uma prova, no fim de contas? Aquela música não se referia então a nada, a nada que estivesse fora dela mesma e das idiossincrasias de seu inventor? Spandrell olhou para o relógio; eram quase 5 horas. — Escuta pelo menos o fim do movimento — pediu ele. — É a parte melhor. — Deu corda ao gramofone. "Mesmo que isto seja desprovido de significação", pensou ele. "é bonito enquanto dura. E talvez não seja destituído de sentido. No fim. De contas, Rampion não é infalível." — Escutem...
A música recomeçou. Mas qualquer coisa de novo e de maravilhoso se havia passado no céu lídio. Redobrara a rapidez da melodia lenta; os contornos se lhe tinham tornado mais nítidos e mais definidos; uma parte interna voltava a repisar com insistência uma frase palpitante. Dir-se-ia que o céu se tornara subitamente, impossivelmente mais celeste, passando da perfeição realizada para uma perfeição ainda mais profunda e mais absoluta. A paz inefável persistia; mas não era a paz da convalescença e da passividade. Ela vibrava, era viva, parecia crescer e intensificar-se, transformava-se numa calma ativa, numa serenidade quase apaixonada. O paradoxo milagroso da vida exterior e do repouso eterno estava musicalmente realizado.
Eles escutavam, retendo quase a respiração. Spandrell contemplou o seu convidado com um ar de triunfo. Suas dúvidas se haviam dissipado. Como se podia deixar de crer numa coisa que existia, que existia manifestamente? Mark Rampion inclinou a cabeça.
— Sim, quase chegas a me convencer — murmurou ele. — Mas isto é bom demais...
— Como pode uma coisa ser boa demais?
— Quando não é humana. Se ela durasse... cessaríamos de ser homens.
— Morreríamos.
Calaram-se de novo. A música continuava, levando dum céu para outro, da felicidade para a felicidade mais profunda. Spandrell suspirou e fechou os olhos.
Seu rosto estava grave e sereno, como se tivesse sido alisado pelo sono ou pela morte. "Sim, morto", pensou Rampion, olhando para ele. "Spandrell se recusa a ser homem. Não é um homem, mas sim um demônio ou um anjo morto. Agora está morto." Uma suspeita de dissonância nas harmonias lídias deu à beatitude uma nota pungente, quase insuportável. Spandrell suspirou de novo. Bateram à porta.
Ele ergueu os olhos. As rugas de escárnio lhe voltaram ao rosto, as comissuras de seus lábios mais uma vez se tornaram irônicas.
"Pronto, voltou o demônio", pensou Rampion. "Spandrell voltou à vida, e é o demônio."
— Aí estão eles! — exclamou Maurice; e, sem responder à pergunta de Mary, "Quem?", saiu do compartimento.
Rampion e a mulher ficaram ao lado do gramofone, escutando a revelação do céu... Uma explosão ensurdecedora, um grito, outra explosão e mais outra fizeram subitamente em pedaços o paraíso de som. Ambos se ergueram num pincho e se precipitaram para a porta. No corredor, três homens vestidos com o uniforme verde dos Ingleses Livres contemplavam o corpo de Spandrell que jazia por terra. Cada um deles tinha um revólver na mão. Um quarto revólver se achava sobre o soalho, ao lado do moribundo. Via-se um buraco no lado do crânio de Spandrell e uma mancha de sangue na camisa. Suas mãos abriam-se e fechavam-se, abriam-se e fechavam-se de novo, arranhando as tábuas do soalho.
— Que foi que... — começou Rampion.
— Foi ele que atirou primeiro — interrompeu-o um dos homens.
Houve um pequeno silêncio. Pela porta aberta chegava o som da música. A paixão tinha começado a se evaporar da melodia celestial. O céu, naquelas notas prolongadas e puras, voltou a ser o lugar do repouso absoluto, da convalescença calma e feliz. Notas longas, um acorde, repetido, prolongado, brilhante e puro, suspenso, flutuante, voando sem esforço, alto, muito alto, infinitamente... Depois, de súbito, se acabou a música; ficou apenas o arranhar da agulha sobre o disco que girava.

Ayer’s Place in the History of Philosophy

Anthony Quinton
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694556.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines A. J. Ayer's place in the history of philosophy. Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. In the first post-war decades, philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.

Keywords:   A. J. Ayer, philosophers, philosophy, empirical tradition, rational discourse

When A. J. Ayer arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1929 he had no thought of becoming a professional philosopher. He intended to go to the Bar, but, in the manner of an Etonian, by way of Literae Humaniores rather than the study of law. He had read a couple of philosophical books. The first of them was Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which he bought on its first appearance in 1928. The other was Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), to which he had been led by a reverent aside in Clive Bell’s Art (1914). These choices were significant. Ayer always thought of himself as Russell’s successor. He modelled his thought on that of Russell, both in its content and in its unguarded expression, and also, to some extent, his manner of life, both political and amorous. What he got from Moore is less obvious, although his respect for Moore is evident, as is shown by the preface to Language, Truth and Logic and by his devoting a book to a close examination of his ideas, along with those of Russell. An important likeness is that both Moore and Ayer were provoked to philosophize by the assertions of other philosophers, not by problems arising outside philosophy in mathematics or the sciences, in history or everyday life.

Ayer avoided the full rigour of an Oxford training in the classics, devoting one term only to the acquisition of a minimal requirement in them. So, at the beginning of 1930, he started on the formal study of philosophy. The philosophical scene in Oxford at that moment was, for the most part, drab and wintry. Adherents of Cook Wilson, who had died in 1915, exercised a fairly oppressive intellectual authority: H. A. Prichard from the chair of moral philosophy, H. W. B. Joseph as an overwhelmingly energetic college tutor. (For what it is worth, at least as an index of their subsequent reputations, neither is honoured with an article in Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) and Joseph does not even secure a mention.) British Hegelianism, in opposition to which the school of Cook Wilson originally defined itself, was represented by H. H. Joachim. He, like most Oxford philosophers of that time, had given himself over to the historical study of the subject. There was also the wayward and defiantly isolated R. G. Collingwood. The only notable books published by Oxford philosophers in the 1920s were Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, of which nobody took any notice, in 1924 and, in 1926, Statement and Inference, the posthumous compilation derived from the lectures of Cook Wilson and used by his followers as a kind of textbook.

(p.138) By the 1920s orthodox idealism was more or less extinct outside Scotland. The Cook Wilsonians had turned their antiquated artillery on to what they saw as the even worse errors of the Cambridge philosophers, who had done so much more than they had to undermine it. Prichard had vehemently criticized Russell’s theory of knowledge in an article in Mind in 1915 and he and Joseph were persistently hostile to Russell’s logic. Moore, as an ethical consequentialist, was one of those who, in Prichard’s view, had committed a fundamental mistake in moral philosophy. The only book Prichard published in his lifetime, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, had come out in 1909: Joseph’s main work, his Introduction to Logic, as long ago as 1906.

There were, however, signs of renewed life. H. H. Price, Prichard’s favourite pupil, in a disconcerting betrayal, had been converted to the theory of sense-data advanced by Russell and Moore. Ayer, as an undergraduate, attended the lectures that were to be published by Price in 1932 as Perception. The more influential of Ayer’s philosophy tutors was Gilbert Ryle. After an early interest in the phenomenological movement, revealed in a respectful, if finally suspicious, review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1929), Ryle was, by the beginning of the 1930s, showing marked Russellian tendencies. ‘Are there Propositions?’ of 1930 presents a reductionist account of propositions that was to be echoed in the second chapter of Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge ten years later and in his London inaugural of 1946: Thinking and Meaning. Ryle then laid out a comprehensive programme of analysis on Russellian lines in 1932 in his ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.

Cambridge was unquestionably livelier as a philosophical centre, in spite of its comparatively minute population of philosophers. From 1922 it had Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to discuss and, until 1927, Ramsey to discuss it with. Also in 1922, Moore’s Philosophical Studies had brought together a number of influential essays. C. D. Broad published his Scientific Thought a year later and in 1925 The Mind and its Place in Nature. At a geographical distance, but not at a very large spiritual one, Russell brought out his Analysis of Mind in 1921 and Analysis of Matter in 1926.

Not much was going on in other British philosophy departments. The most imposing product came from Manchester: Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity in 1920. Exported fruitfully to Australia by John Anderson, it was respectfully ignored in its country of origin. Kemp Smith’s Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (1924) and some elegantly written works by Laird were all that Scotland had to offer. The United States supplied little in the way of exact or minute philosophy in the 1920s. It was an era of massive constructions: Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929), and The Quest for Certainty, the first volume of Santayana’s Realms of Being (1928).

The disparaging tone of these judgements of the philosophy of the English-speaking world in the 1920s calls for justification. The decade surely does look weak when it is compared with the effectively preceding period from 1900 to 1914. That roughly Edwardian epoch had contained the early and best works of Russell and Moore. Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge and electrified it. McTaggart’s Hegelian Cosmology (p.139) (1901) and Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) had provided exemplary displays of argumentative rigour. In Oxford idealism was still quite lively with Joachim’s The Nature of Truth in 1906 and Bradley’s Essays on Truth and Reality in 1914. Prichard and Joseph, as has been mentioned, published their most substantial work at that time. In the United States William James was copiously productive up to his death in 1910. The early, less amorphous, Dewey was at work. Santayana’s five-volume Life of Reason (1905) belongs to this period, as do Royce’s The World and the Individual (1900) and the collective volume The New Realism.

The large and altogether more adventurous philosophical activity of the Edwardian age as compared with the 1920s is to be explained—to the extent that it can be or needs to be explained—by the general spiritual devastation of the First World War. That suggestion is confirmed if one looks further afield to continental Europe. It was in the Edwardian era that the main and characteristic works of Croce and Bergson were published, as were the earlier and better works of Husserl, Vaihinger’s Als-Ob (1911), Cohen’s System der Philosophie (1915), and Cassirer’s Erkenntnisproblem (1906). By the 1920s Croce and Bergson had moved to the margins of the subject and the orthodox academic philosophers of importance were Husserl, Cassirer, and, perhaps, Nicolai Hartmann. Only near the end of the decade did Heidegger sound a new, arresting note.

From an Anglo-Saxon point of view a more promising publication than Sein und Zeit came a year later in 1928 with Carnap’s Logische Aufbau der Welt. In the United States a sign of a livelier period to come was C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order in 1929. These two books coincide approximately with the return of Wittgenstein to philosophy, and Cambridge, and the emergence of Price and Ryle in Oxford. Ayer’s philosophical career, then, began after a period of comparative sterility, but at a moment when, in Britain, the United States, and Europe, the first indications of renewal are to be discerned.

It might also be said that not only had the recent philosophical past been comparatively sterile, but the immediate philosophical present was, to vary the image, a bit of a vacuum. Russell’s best work was behind him and, so far as philosophy is concerned, he was a spent force. Readers of Raymond Chandler will remember Big Willie Magoon, head of the vice squad of the Bay City police. He failed to come across with something for which he had been paid and was seriously worked over by some heavies. As a result he was never much use afterwards. Something of the same kind happened to Russell when Wittgenstein demolished the ideas in his large and ambitious manuscript of 1913 on the theory of knowledge, in the course of a series of painful conversations in May and June of that year. ‘I saw’, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell three years later, ‘that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.’ Moore had little new to say, however emphatically and persuasively he said it, as was shown by the publication in 1953 of lectures he had given as far back as 1910 and 1911. Broad confined himself to elaboration and criticism of the ideas of Russell, Moore, and, in the 1930s, McTaggart. Wittgenstein had been invisible for more than a decade. Ramsey was dead. The Vienna Circle had only just come into being. The field was wide open.

(p.140) Ayer’s account of his philosophical education in the first volume of his autobiography is rather sketchy. He recalls being introduced to the Tractatus by Ryle. He read Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). The origins can be discerned in these three books of his later central doctrines about necessity, perception, and the mind. He also read Ramsey and Broad, James’s Pragmatism (1907), Poincaré and Nicod. He does not say what problems preoccupied him. Nor does he say anything much about the development of his thinking up to the point in 1936 of its first, strikingly finished and comprehensive expression.

There is little echo in his writings of any influence of the thought of Prichard and Joseph, apart from two negative reactions. The first of these is his repeated insistence that, as he puts it in The Problem of Knowledge (p. 15), ‘from the fact that someone is convinced that something is true, however firm his conviction may be, it never follows logically that it is true’. That is hardly consistent with his conclusion in the following chapter that statements in the present tense about one’s own immediate experience are incorrigible. For that is to say that, if I genuinely believe I am in pain or aware of a red patch, it follows that I am. The original thesis seems to be aimed at the Cook Wilsonian doctrine that knowledge is something unique and indefinable and such that we must know when we have it. Another echo is to be heard in Ayer’s treatment of the doctrine of internal relations. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge it is examined in connection with an argument quoted from Joseph (pp. 200–2).

In November 1932 Ayer went to Vienna and was courteously invited to attend meetings of the Vienna Circle. It was what he learnt there and from the pages of Erkenntnis, which had started publication, under the editorship of Carnap and Reichenbach, in 1930, that he was inspired to the extraordinary tour de force of Language, Truth and Logic. A good way of bringing out the depth of Ayer’s involvement is to compare the impact of a similar visit by an American contemporary at much the same time.1 Ernest Nagel, a few years older than Ayer, spent the academic year 1934–5 in Europe, his principal stops being Cambridge, Vienna, and Warsaw. News of the existence of logical positivism had already been brought to American philosophers by an article about it in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931 by Albert Blumberg and Herbert Feigl. Nagel’s report of his intellectual expedition is, as one might expect, thorough, serious, and reliable. He became a recognized associate of the Circle, but more as a fellow-traveller than as a fully committed zealot. He had contributed a boiled-down version of his doctoral thesis on the logic of measurement to Erkenntnis three years earlier and also an article on reduction in the sciences around the time of his European trip. Perhaps he was already, in his mid-thirties, too much involved with American naturalism to undergo a major conversion.

Ayer, on the other hand, completely ingested the four main doctrines subscribed to by the Vienna Circle: the identification of meaning with verifiability; the reductionism (p.141) which that implies if subjective experience is taken to be the basis of knowledge; the theory that necessity is analytic, a matter of linguistic convention; and a radically non-cognitive account of judgements of value. In taking on these views he was not content simply to report them. He had even in his mid-twenties an established intellectual allegiance to the philosophical analysis of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey. The special achievement of Language, Truth and Logic was the remarkable, almost seamless unification of his initial philosophical inheritance with the whole range of the main ideas of the Vienna Circle. Where he differed with the orthodoxy of Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel, rejecting what he labelled as its ‘formalism’, it was with ideas developed by Schlick. Where Carnap and his allies denied that statements can be compared with extra-linguistic fact and so took basic statements to be adopted by convention, Schlick saw them as direct reports of the facts of experience.

A survey of the contents of Language, Truth and Logic will show how comprehensive Ayer’s reliance was on the doctrines of the Vienna Circle. The title of the first chapter is ‘the elimination of metaphysics’. That phrase is a translation of the first words of an article by Carnap in Erkenntnis: Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache (1932). There Carnap identifies the meaning of a sentence, first, following Wittgenstein, with its truth-conditions, and then with its method of verification or, in the case of a word, with the criteria of its application. He goes on to say ‘in the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless’.2 That and a few other references to value in Carnap were developed, with the aid of some apparatus from Moore, into the notorious sixth chapter of Language, Truth and Logic: ‘Critique of Ethics and Theology’.

In his Überwindung Carnap admits that the problem of the given, of the empirical basis of knowledge or, as he would prefer to put it, of the nature of protocol statements, is not yet solved. He soon went on to opt for the conventionalist view that they are statements about what is observed that are agreed upon by that shadowy, but quite cosy-sounding group, the ‘scientists of our culture-circle’. In 1934 in ‘Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis’, Schlick effectively criticized that position.

Although Ayer agreed with Schlick that basic statements are to be verified by the experiences to which they demonstratively refer, he denied that they are absolutely certain and incorrigible. His reason was ‘that a sentence cannot merely name a situation, it must say something about it. And in describing a situation one is not merely “registering” a sense-content: one is classifying it in some way or other, and this means going beyond what is immediately given.’ He goes on to say that to apply a word such as ‘white’ to an element of one’s experience is to say that it is similar to other contents of experience: ‘those which I should call, or actually have called white’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 126, 128–9). He did not support this view for very long. In ‘Verification and Experience’, (p.142) within a year of Language, Truth and Logic, he was expressing doubts about it and in the second chapter of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940 and in the introduction to the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic in 1946 he explicitly rejected it.

In claiming that all necessity is analytic Ayer depends as much on the Tractatus as on the Vienna Circle. But like Carnap, and unlike Wittgenstein, he took the truths of mathematics as well as those of logic to be tautologies. He wisely did not follow Carnap in defining ‘tautology’ in a narrowly truth-tabular way. The idea that logic and mathematics are useful because we, as finite intelligences, cannot trace all the implications of our thoughts was, as a footnote shows, derived from Hans Hahn’s Logik, Mathematik and Naturerkennen of 1933. Ayer’s refutation of Mill’s account of mathematical truths as empirical generalizations of the widest possible scope was not dependent on Frege, whom, by 1936, he does not appear to have encountered. He unfortunately ascribes to Mill the view that the truths of logic, as well as those of mathematics, are empirical, fixing that mistake firmly in the heads of several generations of students. Mill, in fact, acknowledged what he called ‘propositions merely verbal’; held that all essential propositions are identical propositions; and that deduction gives no new knowledge, says no more in its conclusions than is already contained in its premisses.

Ayer’s fifth chapter, on truth and probability, follows Ramsey on truth. It advances the theory about the corrigibility of all empirical statements whatever which he soon came to doubt and eventually to drop altogether. In a few concluding pages he had some suggestive things to say about probability. He defines it as the degree of confidence with which it is rational to entertain a hypothesis. He does not specify criteria of rationality, but says they are conventional and vary through time. That is to embrace the kind of conventionalism he rejected in the case of basic statements. Our old friends, the scientists of our culture circle, whose practice determines for Ayer what rationality currently is, are called back from epistemological retirement. The conception of probability as an intrinsic property of a hypothesis and Keynes’s view of it as an unanalysable logical relation between hypothesis and the evidence for it are dismissed without argument. The frequency theory is not mentioned.

The significance of his brisk aside about probability is that it sustains the only solution he admits to the problem of induction. It is rational, he says, to be guided by the past in forming expectations about the future because that is what rationality is, by definition. No doubt the current practice of those we should ordinarily describe as scientists is rational in that sense. But (as Ayer would surely have insisted) we can guarantee their rationality only by defining ‘scientist’ so that no one who deviates from being guided by the past counts as one.

His dealings with God and the immortal soul in chapter 6 derive fairly directly from Carnap’s Überwindung. But the insistence that neither metaphysical sentences nor their negations can be asserted since both are equally devoid of sense is Ayer’s own. It has, as he saw, the consequence that neither atheism nor even agnosticism is any better off than theism, a concession that was not much appreciated by its adherents.

(p.143) The main business of chapter 6 is the thesis that judgements of value are expressions of feeling and not statements of fact, natural or non-natural. Ayer relies heavily on Moore to dismiss naturalism, although he rephrases Moore’s argument. The intuitive non-contradictoriness of ‘this is pleasant but not good’ is appealed to instead of the intuitive substantiality of the question ‘is this pleasant thing good?’ The verification principle is invoked to deal with Moore’s positive view about the nature of goodness.

Ayer’s own positive account of the matter is a sharper edged version of Carnap’s Überwindung (1932) contention that metaphysics (including value judgements) ‘serves for the general expression of the attitude of a person towards life’.3 In his Philosophy and Logical Syntax of 1934 Carnap interprets moral affirmations as imperatives, a more plausible view than Ayer’s, as subsequent developments in moral philosophy have shown. It seems probable that the main source here was the celebrated distinction of scientific from emotive language in The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards of 1923. They say, in terms Ayer takes over almost word for word, ‘ “(this) is good” serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to action of one kind or another’ (p. 125). Ayer’s account of moral disagreement is taken from W. H. F. Barnes’s ‘Suggestion about Value’ of 1933.

In the four chapters so far considered the main borrowings have been from the Vienna Circle. The balance tilts towards Ayer’s British, predominantly Cambridge predecessors, in chapters 2 and 3, where a conception of the nature of philosophy is set out, and in the two final chapters which are about mind, matter, and the self and three ‘outstanding philosophical disputes’.

The idea that philosophy should be a business of analysis was affirmed at some length in the last chapter of Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and it was consistently practised as analysis, with a slightly different inflection, in the writings of Moore. In his neutral monist period from about 1918 onwards, Russell tried to analyse material objects and minds into what he called ‘events’. He took material objects to be constructions out of sensations and sensibilia, these being gently reified equivalents of Mill’s ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’. Minds and their states were seen as constructions out of sensations and images, eked out with bodily behaviour where that seemed desirable.

Ayer drew on Price’s Perception (1950) in his firmly phenomenalist account of our knowledge of material objects in chapter 3. But he restates Price’s theory of objects as ‘families’ of actual and possible sense-data in linguistic form: sentences about objects are translatable into sets of sentences, categorical and hypothetical, about sense-data. No place is found for Price’s ‘physical occupant’, that ghostly vestige of the substratum of Locke.

(p.144) He follows Russell in holding that sense-data are neither physical nor mental, these being properties of logical constructions. But for the detail of his account of mind he draws, not on Russell, but on Carnap and Hume. In his Aufbau Carnap had distinguished the eigenpsychisch from the fremdpsychisch, the mental states I experience directly from those I ascribe to others on the basis of their bodily behaviour. Ayer was driven to this by his belief that the argument from analogy is unacceptably metaphysical. He was to question that four years later in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge and abandon it altogether in 1953. The argument from analogy was rehabilitated by the consideration that, since it is only a contingent fact that I have the experiences I do, there is no logical or necessary obstacle to the possibility that the experiences of others might have been mine. The way out he followed was suggested to him by Ryle’s article of 1936 ‘Unverifiability by me’.

Ayer’s Humean view of the self as a series of experiences contained one wholly original element. Hume had been baffled in his attempt to find a relation which could connect a series of experiences into a self. Ayer’s suggestion was that the experience of oneself must all ‘contain organic sense-contents which are elements of the same body’ (Language, Truth and Logic, 194). That, as he saw, rules out the possibility of the survival by the self of bodily dissolution. It also ensures that no experience can belong to more than oneself, which the resemblance and continuity which Hume was inclined to favour failed to do. It makes my identification of my body (under some other description, of course) prior to my identification of myself, which is not too bad. But it also requires that every total momentary experience of mine should contain a veridical organic sensation of my body. That is a very questionable proposal, but I shall not pursue the matter here. It may be noted that later theorists of personal identity—Bernard Williams and Sidney Shoemaker, for example—who have claimed that it entails bodily identity have not done so in Ayer’s way.

A final thesis of Language, Truth and Logic which was soon dropped was also borrowed. From C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order Ayer took the thesis that statements about the past are really hypotheses about future experience, on which we shall have to rely on in order to verify them. It implies, I suppose, that our memories are really thoughts about the future. It can be circumvented by the consideration that it is a contingent fact that my experiences occur at the time that they do.

Language, Truth and Logic, then, is almost wholly composed of pre-existing material. It was brilliantly presented, with astounding concision, and its content fitted very well together, despite the geographical remoteness of its two main sources. That is not surprising when one reflects that the philosophers of Cambridge and Vienna continuously interacted. Russell and Wittgenstein were, in a turbulent way, teachers and pupils of each other. The Vienna Circle studied them both and as intently as they studied anyone.

A special virtue of the book, over and above its excellences of style, its force, lucidity, and euphony, is its intellectual order. The elements may be borrowed but they are admirably arranged. After Our Knowledge of the External World Russell’s books became (p.145) increasingly loose and casual in construction. That can presumably be attributed to the loss of self-confidence caused by Wittgenstein’s ruthless criticism. Moore’s laborious repetitiveness and his confinement to a minute range of topics, however strategically important, was unsatisfying in a different way. The Tractatus, with pretty well all the argument left out, hovers about on either side of the frontier of intelligibility. Ramsey’s small, brilliant Nachlass was, in its more philosophically interesting parts, largely rough notes. Broad and Price were admirably lucid and thorough and Price’s writing had a particular kind of charm. But they were not, as Ayer unquestionably was, exciting.

Presenting the ideas of Vienna Circle in British costume he extricated them from the lavish use of symbolism, the off-putting technical terms, and the computer-like detachment of Carnap’s writing. More in the manner of Schlick he conceived the philosopher to be, however doctrinally subversive, a citizen of the republic of letters. Also like Schlick, who wrote an article on the Vienna Circle and traditional philosophy, he drew attention to the many anticipations in the philosophy of the past of the ideas he was expounding. Berkeley was invoked for his phenomenalism, so long as its theistic attachments were removed. Ayer was also in sympathy with his slogan: ‘Mem, To be eternally … recalling men to Common Sense’ (Life and Letters of George Berkeley, Clarendon, 1871, p. 455). The task of philosophy is not to justify our beliefs but to analyse them. In fact, Ayer probably absorbed that idea from Moore. He saw Hume as right in what he said about meaning, the two kinds of significant proposition, causation and, broadly speaking, the self, even if his thoughts were couched in too psychologistic an idiom. But Ayer’s attention to the philosophy of the past faltered when he came to consider examples of metaphysical illusion. Carnap in his Überwindung had illustrated his thesis with a short passage from Heidegger and a single sentence from Hegel. Ayer made do with a single sentence from Bradley.

It was the fact that Ayer’s revolutionary message was expressed in the literary form of a discursive essay and not in the manner of a scientific textbook, together with its elegance and brevity, that gave it such an impact. It was addressed to intelligent readers in general, from the then radical publishing house of Gollancz, and in an attractively up-to-date physical form: dumpy in shape with wide margins and a wholly non-Victorian typeface: Aufbau by Bauhaus. (The move to Macmillan for his next book in 1940—they were to be his publishers for the next thirty-two years—was a turn towards academic respectability and exclusiveness.) Many of the intelligent readers aimed at took it up. No British philosophical book since Russell’s Problem of Philosophy (1912) a quarter of a century earlier can have been as widely read.

Ayer’s later books—Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Problems of Philosophy, and Central Questions of Philosophy—and his five essay collections are, by and large, confined to the topics treated in Language, Truth and Logic. That is as much a tribute to the superb economy with which they were treated there as a criticism. The book’s philosophical agenda covered a wide enough range for anyone’s philosophical career. And there are new thoughts presented and new fields explored in the later works. But he did not move far from his starting point.

(p.146) The main novelty of Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, apart from the limited changes of mind about incorrigibility and the argument from analogy already mentioned, is the contention that theories of perception are not competing substantive doctrines but, rather, proposals of ‘alternative languages’. It is not very clear what that amounts to. Does someone who rejects the sense-datum language have to say that some material objects exist only for one person, or intermittently, or have different properties for different people? The arguments used to show that only sense-data are directly perceived could then be mobilized to show that all direct perception is of private material objects and that public material objects, spatiotemporally and causally interconnected in a common world, must somehow be constructed out of them. In that case the alternative offered is of the most trivial, merely typographical kind. What is clear is that nobody seems to have paid much attention to it until J. L. Austin criticized it in Sense and Sensibilia (1962). By that time Ayer had explicitly, if quietly, dropped the whole idea. In his essay of 1945 on the terminology of sense-data he accepts the criticism of it by H. H. Price.4

Thinking and Meaning, Ayer’s London inaugural of 1947, is very properly dedicated to Ryle. For it is a thoroughgoing exercise in dereification, in which the thinking self, the instrument with which it thinks, the process of its thought, conceived as a sequence of mental acts, and the object of thought, its reference or meaning, are all resolved into the expression of thought in significant sentences. Particularly Rylean is the insistence that what have usually been conceived to be mental acts, such as believing and doubting, are really dispositions to come out with certain sentences or to act in certain ways. There is also a distinct echo of Ryle’s ‘systematically misleading expressions’ in the assertion that for an expression to have a meaning there does not have to exist a thing which is its meaning.

Ayer’s remarks about meaning in this lecture indicate a much closer attention on his part to philosophical logic. In his Philosophical Essays of 1954 it is the topic of the first three items: on individuals, the identity of indiscernibles, and negation. Then four epistemological items rehearse, with minor modifications, the familiar topics of sense-data, basic propositions, phenomenalism, and our knowledge of other minds. Finally Quine’s ontology is considered, Ayer’s ethical theory is presented with greater suavity but without substantial alteration, Bentham’s principle of utility is sympathetically explored, and the view that freedom and determinism are compatible, affirmed in pellet form in the footnote of Language, Truth and Logic, is defended and modified. In its 1946 version, as reprinted in Philosophical Essays, freedom is defined as absence of constraint, not as having no cause at all. A group of factors is brought together as constraining causes and thus as cancelling responsibility, but no account is given of what principle links them together and distinguishes them from other, non-exculpating causes of action.

The essay on individuals tentatively puts forward arguments for the eliminability of singular terms and the possibility of a purely predicative language implied by Quine’s (p.147) extension of the theory of descriptions to all referring expressions. The issue is taken up again in an essay on names and descriptions in The Concept of a Person, but now what was earlier suggested is categorically affirmed.

Quine’s use of his regimented language, in which all reference is carried out by quantifiers, to reinstate ontology in a new, logically respectable form, set Ayer thinking generally about what there is. In his study of William James ( in The Origins of Pragmatism) and again in an essay ‘What there Must Be’ in his Metaphysics and Common Sense of 1969, Ayer turns to the question. Against Quine and Russell he concludes that reducibility does not imply some kind of inferior existential status, as ‘mere constructions’ or fictions, in the items to which it applies as contrasted with the unassailably real existence of the elements from which they are constructed. Analysis may eliminate singular terms. It does not fictionalize material things. Here again I think there is a distinct echo of the Vienna Circle, particularly of Carnap’s Scheinprobleme (1928) and Schlick’s ‘Positivismus und Realismus’ (1933).

They had maintained that the reducibility of material things to sense-experiences casts no shadow whatever on the reality of the material world. It simply makes clear what the empirical reality of material things consists in. For such things to exist the course of sense-experience must exhibit certain kinds of regularity. If it does there is no further question about the real existence of the material things defined in terms of these regularities. To infer that, as Schlick puts it, ‘only the given exists’ (Es gibt nur das Gegebene) is to fall into unacceptable metaphysics.

In his positive views about ontology Ayer takes an exactly opposite position to Russell. Sense-experiences are not ontologically prior to material things since their occurrence is absorbed into a comprehensive theory of a material world. There they occupy a very modest place, as parts of the histories of sentient organic bodies. Priority for knowledge is one thing: priority of existence another. Ayer takes ordinary material things and the theoretical entities of sciences as competing for the status of being the real components of the material world. He vacillates between the two claimants—intellect urging electrons, sentiment pressing for tables—and concludes that it is a matter for choice and not very important anyway.

The Problem of Knowledge of 1956 has an excellent chapter on memory. It dispels the influence of a radically misguided chapter of Russell’s Analysis of Mind (1921) on the subject. Memory is having beliefs about the past that do not depend on inference or testimony. It is not images accompanied by feelings of familiarity and pastness, whatever they may be. Some interesting points are raised in the final chapter on myself and others. If a person is simply a contingently related series of experiences, why should an experience not occur on its own, unrelated in a person-constituting way to other experiences? Why, in other words, should there not be unowned experiences? Personal identity is addressed once more, in a guarded, hesitant way. Perhaps Hume’s accusation of a circularity in the definition of personal identity in terms of memory can be circumvented. Survival of bodily dissolution seems conceivable. Yet purely psychological criteria of identity seem insufficient.

(p.148) There are three substantial novelties in the book. First, there is the neat account of what is needed to turn true belief into knowledge as the ‘right to be sure’. The question has not been pressed as to why Ayer does not take the ethics of belief to be as non-cognitive as the ethics of conduct, as he did by implication in his account of rationality in Language, Truth and Logic.

Secondly, there is the helpful schematization of problems in the theory of knowledge, about perception, other minds, the past, induction and so on as arising from the scepticism generated by a gap between certain kinds of belief—about material things, past events, the minds of others, the laws of nature—and the only evidence that is available for them—sense-data, memories and traces, behaviour and observed regularities. That was not new. It was present in the pre-war writings of John Wisdom and set out clearly in an article about Wisdom by Douglas Gasking in 1954. Something along the same lines had also been worked out by Friedrich Waismann. These sources make one wonder if it was not something casually let fall in conversation by Wittgenstein.

Ayer, like the other exponents of the scheme, recognized four standard ways of dealing with the gaps. First, intuition, which claimed direct access to the other side of it. Secondly, the theory of a general principle which could serve as a bridge across it. Thirdly, reductionism, which closed the gap by defining the things concluded to in terms of the evidence for them. Fourthly, the melancholy option of scepticism. Ayer conjured up a fifth contender, grandly called ‘the method of descriptive analysis’, which seemed to be a matter of admitting the gap and then blithely doing nothing about it.

In fact, once more confronting the question of our knowledge of material objects, he does something rather different, and offers a kind of watered down reductionism. Our beliefs about the material world are not translatable into statements about sense-data. They should be understood as a theory which draws all its support from the evidence of sense-data. There is an air here of trying to settle an overdraft with a cheque drawn on the same account. It shifts the problem to that of the relation of a theory to the evidence for it: is it like the detective’s theory that the injury to the deceased was caused by a blunt instrument (later found in the shrubbery) or like Newton’s theory that the fall of apples and the orbiting of the sun by the planets are manifestations of the same gravitational force? For better or worse, Ayer stuck to this position until his final treatment of the topic in Central Questions of Philosophy in 1973.

By carrying out the ungracious task of tracing most of Ayer’s original ideas, and many of those he came to express later, to external sources, I am not suggesting that there is no more to his achievement than the communication of these borrowings. He wrote some lively pieces of philosophical polemic: defending the sense-datum theory against Austin’s often captious objections, setting ferociously about Malcolm’s view that dreams are stories we are disposed to tell when we wake up, and arguing against Wittgenstein’s view that a private language is impossible. He expounded Peirce and James, Russell and Moore, with thoroughness and distinction. His special kind of clear-headedness proved valuable in his work on probability, a subject often liable to be swamped by fruitless technicalities.

(p.149) An unstated assumption behind this excavation of Ayer’s intellectual borrowings is that a thinker’s place in the history of philosophy is determined by the originality of the interesting or influential things that he says. I do, indeed, believe that assumption to be broadly correct. No doubt the more one learns of the history of philosophy the more one realizes that what one had supposed to be the proprietary great thoughts of those commonly reckoned to be great philosophers had often been thought by someone else first. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, one learns, is an echo of Augustine’s si fallor sum. Locke drew heavily on Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. Nevertheless Descartes put his cognito to uses of which Augustine had no conception and, although there are identifiable fragments of other men’s ideas in Locke’s encyclopedic Essay (1690), the plan and basis of the whole great undertaking were his own. The special greatness of Kant is surely for the most part due to the novelty of his ideas.

Rather than considering the question in general terms it will be better to try to fix Ayer’s place in the scheme of things by comparing his achievements with those of his contemporaries who qualify for such a comparison. Broad and Price were lucid and persevering exponents of ideas put into circulation in the first years of the century by Russell and Broad. Broad had the advantage of knowing a good deal about natural science and about the history of philosophy. Price’s great merit was his cautious deliberation, his extremely high standard of what the clear understanding of a problem and its proposed solutions consists in. Their main service was to domesticate the inchoate innovations of others. That is something that Ayer accomplished with greater force and comparable distinction.

Two more obviously appropriate comparisons are with Ryle, ten years his senior, and Austin, his near-contemporary. Ryle, too, was an extensive borrower. His philosophical logic derives from Russell and the Tractatus, his philosophy of mind from intimations that had come to him of the thinking of the later Wittgenstein. But he put his own stamp very markedly on what he took. That is in part a matter of his breezy, epigrammatic, resolutely non-technical style. That style was in tune with a mode of proceeding that relied heavily on analogy and, in general, avoided the laborious protection of these from all possible objections. Oddly, in the light of their respective ways of life—collegiate in Ryle’s case, metropolitan in Ayer’s—it is Ryle who is the less academically respectable and conformist. He steered clear of all the standard etiquette of philosophical writing: the identification of aims, the footnotes, the polite references to Professor This and Doctor That. In the end I think I should accord him a larger place on the philosophical map than Broad, Price, or Ayer, but I admit that it is a close-run thing.

The main reason for it is that, whether by accident or design, his own versions of late Wittgensteinian doctrine are really very different from the original. The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that was an insight of great value, however easy it is to take it for granted once it has been pointed out. The boldness with which he dismissed Cartesian dualism, by interpreting all mental life in terms of dispositions to behaviour, has the merit of providing something definite to discuss, rather than endlessly puzzle over.

(p.150) Austin was the critic who got furthest under Ayer’s skin as is clear from the indignant tone of Ayer’s response to his criticism of the sense-datum theory. Like Prichard and Moore he was a rigorously minute philosopher whose scrupulous pursuit of exactness gave him an extraordinary personal command over his contemporaries. He went further in that direction than his acknowledged master, Prichard, because of his greater intelligence and general mental agility. But his reputation has not survived him. A later generation finds it difficult to understand. Apart from ‘speech acts’ his innovations in the philosophical vocabulary are seldom heard.

The two philosophers with whom Ayer is most appropriately to be compared are Quine and Popper. Both, like Ayer, are intellectual by-products of the Vienna Circle; in Quine’s case gratefully (Word and Object (1960), after all, is dedicated to Carnap), in Popper’s with a constant determination to emphasize his differences from it. I think it is fair to say that there is no new idea in Ayer that deserves to receive or has received the kind of attention that has been given to the innovations of Quine and Popper.

Quine’s multifarious assaults on the notion of meaning as the chief instrument of philosophical explanation, on the analytic–synthetic distinction, on modal and intentional discourse, on assumptions about translatability, his revival of ontology, and his naturalistic account of the theory of knowledge, add up to a major change of direction in philosophy. Not all that many have chosen to follow him very far down the path he has pointed out but his ideas have proved to be inexhaustibly discussable.

Popper’s fundamental idea that science progresses by adventurous conjectures, controlled by attempts to overthrow them, is not without forerunners. Something like it is crucial in the philosophy of science of Whewell and it plays a part, if not such a commanding one as for Popper, in the brilliant chaos of the writings of Peirce. But there is no reason to suppose that Popper had the least familiarity with either of them at the time in the early 1930s when he was writing his Logik der Forschung (1935). Whewell had been obliterated by Mill in the English-speaking world and was quite unknown anywhere else. As for Peirce, M. R. Cohen’s pioneering selection, Chance, Love and Logic had come out in 1923 but it did not contain any of Peirce’s more Popperian pieces and was anyhow almost certainly unknown to him.

Secondly, and more to the point, Popper’s very various developments of his fundamental thought go in directions altogether unexplored by Whewell and only partially by Peirce. Peirce, like Popper, adopts a comprehensively fallibilistic theory of knowledge and rejects determinism. Of Popper’s own invention are his attack on the view that there are general laws of historical change, his account of probability as objective propensity, his defence of science as an account of the real nature of things against instrumentalism and essentialism, his application of evolutionary ideas to the theory of knowledge, and the connected doctrine of ‘World 3’, over and above the realms of matter and consciousness.

Quine and Popper arrived at their main new ideas early on: Quine by 1936 in ‘Truth by Convention’ and 1939 in ‘Designation and Existence’, Popper by the date of his first book, 1935. Holding firmly on to them ever since, they have established their fertility by (p.151) the substantial and interesting body of extensions and applications they have made of them. Ayer, on the other hand, tended to circle round a number of topics, varying his attitude towards them, sometimes opting for one view or another, sometimes concluding that it is a matter for decision, sometimes simply confessing doubt as to what the right answer is. The one thing he never questioned is the primacy of sense-experience, even if, with his later replacement of sense-data by ‘qualia’, he tried to mitigate the subjectivity of his preferred foundations for knowledge. For all the bold iconoclasm of Language, Truth and Logic the abiding impression is one of doctrinal indefiniteness. (It is interesting that he never responded to Quine’s rejection of analyticity except in a couple of non-combative pages of Central Questions of Philosophy.)

It is that, I think, that must explain the fact that his influence has been so much less than that of the two major contemporaries with whom I have been comparing him. I speak here of influence on philosophers, since Quine is unknown to the part of the general reading public which thinks it would like to know something about philosophy. As every teacher of the subject knows, Ayer has enormously influenced beginning students of philosophy. Since most of them do not go far with the subject, that influence must be, with many, a persisting one. As a paradigm of a philosopher for educated people he is surely exemplary for his unswerving dedication to argument, to explicit reasoning concisely expressed in the clearest language.

It is noticeable that his influence has been comparatively small in the United States. In the post-war years when this country was a net importer of visiting philosophers they crossed the Atlantic to learn about Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin. That must be partly due to the fact that, from the late 1930s on, the Americans did not need an intermediary to convey the message of the Vienna Circle, since most of its leading exponents were coming to be installed there in university posts. Furthermore Ayer’s ideas about necessary truth and phenomenalism had been anticipated in the United States, seven years before Language, Truth and Logic, in C. I. Lewis’s more substantial, if less exciting, Mind and the World-Order.

Another possible factor is that philosophers in the United States, as in Cambridge in its greatest days, typically know more mathematics and natural science than philosophers in Oxford. Ayer was always an enthusiast for science, but the enthusiasm was of a generalized, rather ideological kind. I believe it was essentially secondary to his animus against religion. The sensationalism to which he always remained faithful was something he shared with the great generation of late nineteenth-century unbelieving philosophers of science: Mach, W. K. Clifford, Karl Pearson. Present-day philosophers of science—Popper, J. J. C. Smart, the Reichenbach of Experience and Prediction (1938), even Carnap after the mid-1930s—take for granted the objectivity of the basis of empirical knowledge. Ayer’s distaste for religion seems to be the central vision and object of emotional commitment which it is the office of the brilliantly deployed dialectical manoeuvres to protect, rather as a conviction of the immortality of human souls, related by spiritual love, is the soft centre in need of fascinating ingenuities of argumentative defence in the case of McTaggart.

(p.152) Ayer thought of himself as the main representative in his own time of the British empirical tradition, running from Hume through John Stuart Mill to Russell. It is a natural and intelligible point of view. His interpretation of the leading ideas of that tradition, in the sharpened form given to them by the Vienna Circle, undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life. But in its most vigorous form at the present time that tradition has moved beyond the doctrinal constraints he accepted from it about necessity, perception, and the nature of science.

Although I have come to think his place in the history of philosophy is not as large as I had thought before settling down to write this essay, I think I understand why I should have thought I did. In the first post-war decades philosophy in Britain was dominated by Wittgenstein and Austin, one a genius, the other enormously gifted, but both execrable examples in many ways. Confronted by dire imitations of their respective styles of writing and reasoning Ayer stood out as a marvellous champion of the best traditions of rational discourse.

Notes:
(1) Ernest Nagel, ‘Impressions and Appraisals of European Philosophy’ (first published 1936), in Nagel, Logic Without Metaphysics (1956).

(2) Translated in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 60–1.

(3) Carnap in Ayer, Logical Positivism, 78.

(4) A. J. Ayer, ‘The Terminology of Sense-Data’, in Philosophical Essays, 103–4.

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.