Abstract
The epistemological project Francis Bacon outlines in his scientific treatises calls for no less than an entire renewal of all human learning. For Bacon, learning had failed to bring humanity any closer to the dominion over Nature once enjoyed in Eden. What Bacon finds in contemporary natural philosophy is unproductive scholastic arguments, a fetishizing of words, an unwarranted veneration of classical authors, and disdain for the sensual experience of the world.1 The path Bacon envisions to lead humanity out of its intellectual morass of frivolous philosophical disputations consisted of a new intellectual program, one that would privilege the experiential over the abstract, that would look to bring the mind in contact with things themselves, and that demanded the cleansing of the mind of all its fictions. Bacon subordinates intellectual endeavors to the amelioration of humanity’s physical existence. This chapter focuses on the narrative Bacon employs to present his scientific program as a form of restoration.
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Notes
See also Bacon’s discussion of scholastic contempt for experimentalism: “One evil that has grown to an extraordinary degree comes from a certain opinion … that it is beneath man’s dignity to spend much time and trouble on experiments and particulars that come under the senses and are materially bounded, especially since they are usually laborious to look into, too base for serious thought, awkward to explain, degrading to carry out, endless in number and minute in subtlety” Novum Organum—With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), bk. 1, lxxxiii.
Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 76–77.
Western epistemology up to the end of the sixteenth century, as Michel Foucault describes, was based on resemblance, the guiding principle that “made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 17. Foucault identifies four types of similitudes: convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathies. These similitudes look to negate any visible distinction or difference, always moving toward a unified universe. For example, aemulatio overcame perceived distance to bring things into reflective contact with each other: “There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another.” In this sense, reality acts as a mirror that allows the human observer to see himself reflected everywhere: “The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place allotted to it” (19). As opposed to modern scientific epistemology that effaces the observer in the world, the search for similitudes demanded recognition of one’s presence and relationship to, not distance from, the universe, which is composed of a “series of concentric circles reflecting and rivaling one another” ad infinitum (21). The demand placed on the knower was not to separate but to join with the thing to be known. Within this episteme of resemblance, the micromacrocosmic paradigm provided a foundational model. Foucault suggests precise ways that the micromacrocosmic paradigm functioned in this epistemology: first, by providing assurance of a connected, unified reality and second, by circumscribing the universe. Ultimately, contemplation of the external would lead the knower toward self-discovery, blurring the very lines between self and other that Bacon would work so hard to make clear. Instead of a distanced observer, the premodern natural philosopher would eventually discover the macrocosm within the self. It was the knowledge of these analogies that would enable the human imagination to provide order and unity to a chaotic universe. This epistemology incorporates the self into the world.
For further discussion of Bacon’s doctrine of idols see Foucault, Order of Things, 50–58; Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 62–68, 82–86; William A. Sessions, Francis Bacon Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), 126–29.
Julie Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 44–46, 133–36.
Stephen A. McKnight cautions against those critics who do not read Bacon’s use of the term idolum as denoting false idols of religious worship: “Bacon is arguing that humanity is guilty of focusing on its own creations or fantasies and that this prevents the study of God’s Creation.” The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 79.
Francis Bacon, The Masculine Birth of Time in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 66. For discussion of dating of The Masculine Birth, see Farrington’s introduction to his translation.
James Bono finds Bacon constantly insisting that the human knower acknowledge “the tendency of man’s mind to distort the world” as “a central legacy of the Fall.” The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 225.
Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 24.
Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1.
Martin Carrier analyzes the tension between two seemingly conflicting models of scientific progress, those of scientific realism and of unlimited progress. The former envisions an end point for the accumulation of scientific knowledge. If science’s purpose is to make available the “truth” of our universe, then eventually such knowledge will be achieved: “The issue rather is conceptual in nature: the view that science gets more and more things right entails—or appears to entail—the view that the endeavor of disclosing nature will be brought to completion at some time.” “How to Pile up Fundamental Truths Incessantly,” in Science at Century’s End: Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of Science, ed. Martin Carrier, Gerald Massey, and Laura Ruetsche (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 94. According to scientific realism, the scientific mind possesses the ability to completely map out Nature’s most minute, intricate workings and that a time will inevitably come when science’s work is done. Such a view does posit a stable, finite, knowable universe. It is interesting to note that Carrier finds scientific realism depicts a model of scientific progress as a “geographic picture”: “You chart the surface of the earth, and if you are successful you inevitably reach a point at which no pristine territories are left” (97). This metaphor for science is evinced by Bacon’s linking his instauration to Columbus’s exploration of the New World. Carrier contrasts scientific realism to the postmodern realization of science as a limitless project, espoused by Thomas Kuhn. As Carrier summarizes the view of science as unending task, science is no longer seen as building toward a final point, hence no longer teleological. Science as the steady accumulation of ever increasingly accurate pieces of data about Nature is supplanted by science as a series of conceptual models overthrown. However, by unhitching science from any teleological ambitions, Carrier argues that science becomes more concerned with propagating itself than with progress. I would add that the postmodern critique denies to science its ability to sustain myth, which is central to the Baconian conception of science.
Among Baconian scholars, there is discrepancy as to when Bacon actually wrote New Atlantis. Along with other major works, Rawley dates the composing of New Atlantis between 1621 and 1626. Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 476.
Rawley’s dating finds support in the fact that this is the period following Bacon’s impeachment and exclusion from court politics. However, twentieth-century scholars argue for a much earlier dating of the text’s composition. See Graham Rees, introduction to The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 6: Philosophical Writings 1611–1618 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 167.
For discussion of More’s use of irony in Utopia, see Clarence H. Miller, introduction to Utopia (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001).
Hannan Yoran, “More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ No-place,” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3–30.
Eric Nelson, “Utopia through Italian Eyes: Thomas More and the Critics of Civic Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2006), 1029–57.
Thomas S. Engeman, “Hythloday’s Utopia and More’s England: An Interpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia,” The Journal of Politics 44, no. 1 (February 1982): 131–49.
Scholarship contrasting Utopia and New Atlantis has explored the significance of Bacon’s rejection of More’s Utopian custom of a bride and bridegroom being permitted to see each other naked prior to marriage. In contrast to this custom, the Bensalemites have the institution of the Adam and Eve’s pools: in place of the engaged couple viewing each other naked, a surrogate for each party examines the bride and bridegroom naked separately. Moreover, while the Utopian practice is meant to ensure sexual compatibility, the Bensalemites look to confirm either person’s fertility, to reveal any “hidden defects in men and women’s bodies.” Bacon, New Atlantis, 44. Through this comparison, critics of New Atlantis identify the urgency for Bacon to contain personal desire that jeopardizes the state’s co-opting of the domestic realm. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 173.
Sessions, Francis Bacon, 157; Solomon, Objectivity, 98; Susan Bruce, “Virgins of the World and Feasts of the Family” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 125–46; and Whitney, Francis Bacon, 199–201.
Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 49.
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (London: Dodo Press, 2006), 34.
Bacon, according to Steven Matthews, cites this passage as the “most prominent Scriptural support” for his belief that God had sanctioned his Instauration. Matthews quotes a passage from the Valerius Terminus in which Bacon interprets Daniel 12:4 as prophesying his own age when navigation and science will flourish together: “so to interpret that place in prophecy of Daniel where speaking of the latter time it is said, Many shall pass to and fro, and science shall be increased; as if the opening of the world by navigation and commerce and the further discovery of knowledge should meet in one time or age.” Quoted in Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (London: Ashgate, 2008), 90.
Francis Bacon, “Of Innovation,” in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 388.
Christopher Kendrick, “The Imperial Laboratory: Discovering Forms in the New Atlantis,” English Literary History 70, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1033.
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 25.
For further discussion of the convergence of Baconianism and Puritan millenarianism and utopian projects, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 366–71.
Carola Scott-Luckens, “Providence, Earth’s ‘Treasury’ and Common Weal: Baconianism and Metaphysics in Millenarian Utopian Texts 1641–55” in The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 109–24.
Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of Traffike (London, 1641), 9, http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var _spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=13028924&ECCO=N&FILE=./session/1304700198_24476&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=1&ENTRIES=2&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed March 12, 2010).
Gabriel Plattes, dedicatory epistle to A Discovery of Infinite Treasure, Hidden Since the World’s Beginning (London, 1639), http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var _spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=99850059&ECCO=N&FILE=./session/1304700512_25984&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=4&ENTRIES=10&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed March 12, 2010).
Peter Harrison, “Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (April 2002): 240.
Joseph Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica (London, 1667), http://eebo.chadwyck.com.ezproxy.lib.lehigh.edu/search/full_rec?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=11839211&ECCO=N&FILE=./session/1304699817_23002&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS &DISPLAY=AUTHOR&SUBSET=1&ENTRIES=2&HIGHLIGHT _KEYWORD=default (accessed September 10, 2010).
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Description of Minute Bodies (London, 1665).
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. David Hawkes (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 96.
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© 2011 Anthony J. Funari
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Funari, A.J. (2011). An Inheritance Recovered. In: Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337916_2
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