By: A.C. Grayling
Bacon was a statesman, lawyer, essayist and philosopher. He had a spectacular career between his admission to Cambridge University at the age of twelve and his fall from high office, probably as a result of political machinations, at the age of sixty in 1621. Despite being a busy and ambitious man he managed to devote time to his great love: the study of philosophy and science. But with the leisure enforced by his fall he set himself to finish an encyclopaedic work encapsulating everything known, together with his theories about how more knowledge can be acquired. It was called the Instauratio Magna – implying a great beginning for a new age of firmly based knowledge. He died before he could finish the project, but one of its influential legacies was a book called The New Atlantis, published posthumously in 1627. In it is set out his concept of a ‘Solomon’s House’, a research institute for collaborative scientific effort – the idea that directly inspired the founders, as they themselves acknowledged, of the Royal Society in London in 1662.
Bacon’s commitment to the promotion of serious science had the practical aim of improving humanity’s lot through increased understanding and control of nature. Contrary to the usual view that he was merely a theoretician of method rather than a practising scientist, he did indeed engage in hands-on science, constructing a physical system and attempting experiments. It was as the result of an experiment on refrigeration (stuffing a dead chicken with snow to see how long it would last) that he caught a chill and died. His system of physics, geocentric and still owing too much to Aristotle despite his rejection of Scholasticism, did not advance matters.
He did however make two major contributions. One was his advocacy of cooperation in science, as therefore requiring an institutional basis for shared experimentation and the exchange of ideas. The magicians and occultists of his day were secretive, keeping their knowledge to themselves because they did not want others to steal a march on them. Bacon saw that progress requires a collegial endeavour, and he advocated it strongly; science has proved him right.
His second contribution lay in the idea of scientific method itself. He had sketched these ideas in an earlier work, The Advancement of Learning of 1605, and developed them in work for the Instauratio Magna, one part of which, the Novum Organum Scientiarum, had been published in 1620, and was of particular significance.
As an empiricist Bacon argued that science must be based on observation of facts, which underpin the theories that organize and explain them. This view is often caricatured as saying that enquirers should gather observations at random, and then find a theory to explain them; but that is not what Bacon meant. The caricature was nevertheless widely believed – even Newton and Darwin subscribed to it, and indeed both approved of it. In the second edition of the Principia Newton wrote, ‘hypotheses … have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena and afterwards rendered general by induction.’ Likewise Darwin in his Autobiography wrote, ‘it appeared to me that … by collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature, some light might be thrown on the whole subject. My first notebook was opened in July 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale.’
What Bacon himself meant by his method is much closer to the now standard view that observations are gathered to test an antecedently formulated hypothesis that specifies which of those observations would be relevant to refuting or supporting it. This is set out in the Plan of the Instauratio Magna:
the greatest change I introduce is in the form itself of induction and the judgment made thereby. For the induction of which the logicians speak, which proceeds by simple enumeration, is a puerile thing; concludes at hazard; is always liable to be upset by a contradictory instance; takes into account only what is known and ordinary; and leads to no result. Now what the sciences stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyse experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion.
This method is explicitly empirical, with observation and experiment as the foundation. It somewhat anticipates what are now known as Mill’s Methods, after John Stuart Mill’s account of induction in his System of Logic (1843). Bacon was alert to sceptical challenges to reliance on senseexperience, but he had a reply: we are to ‘receive as conclusive the immediate informations of the sense, when well disposed … the information of the sense itself I sift and examine in many ways. For certain it is that the senses deceive; but then at the same time they supply the means of discovering their own errors … by experiments. For the subtlety of experiments is far greater than that of the sense itself, even when assisted by exquisite instruments; such experiments, I mean, as are skilfully and artificially devised for the express purpose of determining the point in question.’
A striking feature of Bacon’s thinking is that it should be guided by the practical knowledge acquired in crafts and trades, in the experience of builders, butchers, carpenters, farmers and sailors – of people who know their materials, who know nature itself; who have practical experience of how things work and what can be done with them. In this way, he said, we ensure that the foundation of enquiry is how things are, not how we imagine them to be:
Of this reconstruction the foundation must be laid in natural history, and that of a new kind and gathered on a new principle … For first, the object of the natural history which I propose is … to give light to the discovery of causes and supply a suckling philosophy with its first food … I mean it to be a history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way), – such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals, – but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.
In insisting on a collaborative empirical method Bacon was urging something revolutionary in contrast to the long dominance of religious doctrine and a priori reasoning that had governed thought for nearly a millennium before his time. But his approach was not new: it was a recovery of the attitude to enquiry that had inspired the first philosophers of antiquity, such as Thales, in relying on observation and reason instead of authority and tradition.
Bacon’s writings accordingly promoted a change of attitude to the nature of knowledge that helped to bring the modern mind to birth.fn2 The standard view had always been that the ancients were superior in wisdom to later generations, their time a Golden Age to which later people could only look back with wonder. Later people were right, for a time; much knowledge was lost in the ‘Dark Ages’ under the hegemony of the Church: witness how many centuries lay between the Byzantine engineers’ knowledge of how to raise the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (built 537 CE) and Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence (built 1418–34), hailed as an engineering marvel. A symptom of this looking-back with admiration is that Copernicus’ heliocentric model was dubbed ‘the Pythagorean system’, signifying that his theory was merely a restatement of something known in antiquity.
Bacon did not share the Golden Age view. His outlook typified that aspect of the Renaissance which saw itself not merely as rediscovery but as rebirth, in the real sense of starting afresh. It was of course essential, for new progress to be possible, that enquiry should be free. Because it was still not everywhere free from religious orthodoxy, Bacon found it necessary to argue that it should be, by seeking a way to disentangle philosophy from religion so that the latter would not hamper progress. Part of this task was to combat superstition, religion’s natural corollary. Bacon wrote, ‘it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods – “Aye,” asked he again, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”’ Bacon described ‘blind immoderate religious zeal’ as ‘a troublesome and intractable enemy’ to enquiry
