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"It is Bacon who, more than anyone else, urges and guides the transformation of philosophers into what later came to be known as scientists, inducing the birth of a new discipline quite different from philosophy as traditionally practised, and leaving not just philosophy, but the humanities generally, with the problem of forging a new identity for themselves." (p.1)
"Immediately after his death, a radical ‘Puritan’ interpretation was placed on his work, which located it firmly within a millenarian framework and emphasised the idea of the mechanical arts as a means of moral self-perfection. By 1660, however, Baconianism was the foundation for the apologetics of the Royal Society, which saw itself as the only heir to Bacon, a view institutionalised in Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London, which appeared in 1667. This view was reinforced by a wholesale association of Baconianism and Newtonianism. In spite of the fact that Newton, who owned a significant number of books, probably possessed neither of Bacon’s two key ‘methodological’ works –Novum Organum and De Dignitate & Augmentis Scientiarum– Bacon was widely regarded as having provided Newton with his methodological foundations. This was a reading propounded by Newton’s editors –Maclaurin, Cotes, and Pemberton– in the eighteenth century, and at the end of that century Reid could write confidently that ‘Lord Bacon first delineated the only solid foundation on which natural philosophy can be built ; and Sir Isaac Newton reduced the principles laid down by Bacon into three or four axioms which he calls regulae philosophandi.’." (pp.2-3)
"Bacon’s success in Europe in the latter part of the seventeenth century was spectacular. In the Netherlands, which was the principal source of Latin editions of Bacon, there were forty-five printings/editions of his works before 1700. In Italy, there were fourteen printings/editions before 1700,7 and following the closing of the Accademia del Cimento in 1667, a new academy, the Accademia della Traccia (‘academy of traces / footprints / tracks’) was founded along explicitly Baconian lines, as ‘tracking down the true understanding of nature along the . . . road of experience.’
In France, England’s great competitor for the mantle of patron of the sciences, where there were thirty-three printings/editions of Bacon before 1700,9 the Académie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666, was created by Colbert, chief minister to Louis XIV, in what Colbert referred to as ‘the manner suggested by Verulam’. Voltaire devotes the twelfth of his Lettres philosophiques to the praise of Bacon, and his impact on the French Enlightenment was considerable. Indeed, Baconianism was so deeply implicated in the Enlightenment advocacy of science that with the Romantic reaction to it Bacon was singled out as a prime culprit: William Blake claimed that it was Bacon who had ruined England, while De Maistre was blaming the French Revolution on Bacon. And it is certainly true that in the late-eighteenth-century French debate over ‘republican’ versus ‘monarchical’ science, Baconianism was employed by supporters of the former, principally in the advocacy of natural history as a nonelitist form of science." (pp.2-3)
"Not all Romantics derided science, of course, and Coleridge remarked that Bacon was ‘the founder of a revolution scarcely less important for the scientific world than that of Luther for the world of religion and politics’." (note 12 p.3)
"A similar phenomenon took place in American thought, and the American Constitution drew on Bacon’s advocacy of induction, with Jefferson commissioning portraits of the three ‘great minds’ –Bacon, Newton, and Locke– for his office in the State Department. Bacon was considered of particular significance because the lessons of experience were more important for the New World than they had ever been for Europeans: There was something especially appropriate about Bacon’s outlook for the colonisers of the New World." (p.4)
"When Western philosophy was reintroduced into China in the nineteenth century (having first been introduced briefly, along with Western science and theology, two centuries earlier by Jesuit missionaries, before their expulsion), it was Bacon who was taken as representative of Western thought, as being a key English thinker, along with Darwin and Spencer. The article on Bacon published in 1873 by Wang Tao, who collaborated with the missionary James Legge in his translations of classical Chinese philosophical texts, was the first article in Chinese devoted to a Western philosopher, and Wang followed it up in 1877 with a translation of Bacon’s Novum Organum. Indeed, Bacon’s work was widely read and discussed in the 1890s and early decades of the twentieth century in China, and it formed virtually a sole point of entry into the modern Western philosophical tradition." (note 16 p.4)
"By the nineteenth century, however, we find a very significant change of focus. During the revival of interest in Bacon in England in that century, in writers such as the astronomer John Herschel, the historian of science William Whewell, and the philosopher John Stuart Mill, Baconianism comes to be stripped of any political connotations, and methodological-cum-epistemological questions now dominated the discussion, a domination that continued at least until the middle of the twentieth century.
These changes to what has been seen as relevant in Bacon’s work in many ways mirror developments in the discipline of philosophy itself. Such changes in the discipline have often been thought about purely in terms of variations in the content of philosophical doctrines –this is what histories of philosophy almost always confine themselves to, for example– even though there is some awareness that more than just content changes between the late-mediæval and Renaissance philosophers and the pioneers of early modern philosophy such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi. There has been a change in mentality, a change in the understanding of the point of the exercise, a change in what the rationale of pursuing philosophy was. What emerged in the West in the early-modern era was a style of doing natural philosophy, a way of thinking about the place of natural philosophy in culture generally, and of thinking about oneself as a natural philosopher. This phenomenon is wider than Bacon, and the transformation is one that lasts into the nineteenth century, when the modern notion of a ‘scientist’ was born. But Bacon’s was the first systematic, comprehensive attempt to transform the early-modern philosopher from someone whose primary concern is with how to live morally into someone whose primary concern is with the understanding of and reshaping of natural processes. And his was the first systematic, comprehensive attempt to transform the epistemological activity of the philosopher from something essentially individual to something essentially communal." (pp.4-5)
"In a pioneering essay, Kuhn attempted to distinguish between what he referred to as the mathematical and the experimental or ‘Baconian’ traditions. This is a useful first approximation, and it indicates a divergence of research in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although Newton, for example, was considered to have produced models in both traditions, in his Principia and his Opticks, respectively). It is only to be expected that this characterisation is of less help in understanding the way in which fields of research were structured at the time Bacon was writing –and of course it is this that we need to understand if we are to comprehend what Bacon’s reforms were directed towards– but there is a similar divergence between two broad kinds of discipline. The first is what I shall call ‘practical mathematics’ (principally geometrical optics, astronomy, statics, hydrostatics, harmonics, as well as some very elementary kinematics), which had been pursued in irregular bursts of activity –in the Hellenistic Greek diaspora, in mediæval Islam, in twelfth and thirteenth-century Paris and Oxford– until, starting in Italy and the Netherlands from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, it began to be pursued in a concerted way in Western Europe. Bacon had very little interest in this kind of area. His concerns in natural philosophy were focused on disciplines and activities which make up a second, far more disparate, grouping, the ingredients of which were resolutely practical and relatively piecemeal. Many of them had traditionally been associated with crafts, like metallurgy, where the secrets were jealously protected ; or with agriculture where, along with widely shared abilities which those who worked the land picked up as a matter of course, there were closely guarded skills –in viniculture, for example– which were not shared outside the trade ; or with the herbal treatment of various maladies, where esoteric knowledge played a very significant role ; or with alchemy, where the arcane nature of the knowledge was virtually a sine qua non of the discipline. William Eamon has recently drawn attention to the shift from esoteric to public knowledge, a shift he traces primarily to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and has shown how it played an important role in the transformation of scientific culture in this period. There can be little doubt that this is a crucial element in Bacon’s reform." (pp.6-7)
"Comparing the situation in the mediæval West with roughly contemporary societies having strong scientific cultures –the Islamic Middle East and China–Toby Huff, pursuing what might broadly be termed a Weberian approach to these questions, has argued that the formation of autonomous corporate bodies, in the wake of the Investiture Controversy (1050–1122), created a decentralisation of responsibilities and expertise which fostered a protected climate, a neutral space for inquiry, in which intellectual innovation could flourish. What happened as a result of the Investiture Controversy was that the church was effectively formed as a corporation, declaring itself legally autonomous from the secular order and claiming for itself all spiritual authority. Other corporate bodies were soon formed on this model – towns, cities, guilds, universities, professional groups – and the introduction of corporate structure in the last two cases, in particular, meant that the context in which natural philosophy was pursued was very different from that in the Islamic world and China. Mediæval Islamic thought was very much a development of classical and Hellenistic work in the area of ‘practical mathematics’, but individual successes in optics and astronomy could not be followed up properly because of the very localised and isolated level on which this research was pursued. In China, on the other hand, a totalising bureaucratic structure ruled out opportunities for innovation which were not part of some state-sanctioned programme. Moreover, the model for corporate structure brought with it an elaborate legal structure which harmonised legal traditions and provided a foundation for law, in addition producing a new science of law which became a model of intellectual achievement. Crucial to this cultural dominance of law was a staunchly adversarial mode of reasoning, absent in Chinese legal argument and in its relatively internally undifferentiated pursuit of natural knowledge." (p.8 )
"So, in sum, what we have is a culture of self-governing autonomous corporate bodies which strictly regulated entry to their ranks and protected the privileges associated with membership. Exclusivity is crucial to such bodies, and Bacon is criticising the exclusivity both of the guilds, where practical information is esoteric by virtue of keeping knowledge or techniques within a trade or profession to which access is then restricted, and of the universities, where an esoteric and often convoluted language renders information inaccessible to all but those accepted into the university system. In the case of the universities, Bacon, in common with some of his reform-minded contemporaries, associates its convoluted systems with its adversarial approach, whose aim is to win arguments rather than produce new knowledge, and he rejects both." (p.9)
"The association of the conquest of land with the conquest of knowledge is something strikingly depicted in the frontispiece to his Instauratio Magna of 1620, where a warship is shown sailing back through the Pillars of Hercules, a traditional symbol of the limits of knowledge but also an emblem the Spanish kings had commandeered to represent their empire." (p.9)
"The investigation of natural processes –observation and experimentation– was contrasted with and pitted against verbal dispute, the first being construed as a procedure by which we actually learn something, the second as consisting of mere unproductive argumentation for its own sake. In a famous passage in the Advancement of Learning, Bacon chastises Aristotle on these grounds in strong terms:
And herein I cannot a little marvel at the philosopher Aristotle, that did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradiction toward all antiquity ; undertaking not only to frame new words of science at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom ; inasmuch as he never nameth or mentioneth an ancient author or opinion, but to confute and reprove." (p.10)
"The key idea is that civility and good sense dictate that one should pursue a via media, some form of middle position which both parties to a dispute could." (p.11)
"It is clearly an extension of the emphasis on civility that we find from the late fifteenth century onwards, which is exemplified in the numerous manuals which appeared in the sixteenth century, describing in detail how one should behave –that is, regulate one’s behaviour– in a variety of circumstances. In an extremely popular and influential series of manuals that Erasmus published between 1500 and 1530, for example, there are set out rules for how to behave in church, in bed, while at play, while eating, and so on ; the manuals are exhaustive, covering everything from dress, deportment, and gestures, to facial expressions and demeanours. Erasmus’s De Civilitate Morum Puerilium appeared in English as A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren in 1532 and spawned a large number of books on these topics : Among them (to confine our attention to the more popular early-seventeenth-century works) were James Cleland’s Hero-Paideia; or, The Instruction of a Young Nobleman (Oxford, 1607), William Fiston’s The Schoole of Good Manners (London, 1609), Richard Weste’s The Booke of Demeanour (London, 1619), Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622), and Robert Brathwayt’s The English Gentleman (London, 1630). Bacon’s Essayes –in their final edition entitled The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall– can be seen as making some contribution to this genre, as they deal with various passions and how to control them, and offer advice on various social questions: parenthood, marriage, friendship, custom, education, and so on." (pp.12-13)
"It may also be helpful, however, to compare Bacon’s plan to direct scientific activity by inculcating new habits in scientists with the much later reform of medical practice, inaugurated by Joseph Lister in the late 1860s, whereby surgeons and nursing staff were subjected to a new and severe regimen conducive to antiseptic conditions, a regimen which required a complete change in the deportment of surgical and medical staff. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the kind of highly regulated regime of cleanliness and alertness to infection that Lister introduced could have been possible unless there was already an ethos of self-examination and responsibility for the self which effectively begins in earnest with the kind of intense moral self-examination that we find in the sixteenth century." (p.12)
"As Jean Delumeau has pointed out, the problem for both Reformation and Counter-Reformation ‘was how to persuade hundreds of millions of people to embrace a severe moral and spiritual discipline of the sort which had never actually been demanded of their forebears, and how to make them accept that even the most secret aspects of their daily lives should thenceforth be saturated by a constant preoccupation with things eternal’." (note 22 p.12)
-Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 249 pages.
