Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

A man is led into a temple and shown the votive tablets: paintings hung up by sailors who called on the gods in a storm and lived to keep their vows. Will he now admit, his hosts ask, that the gods look after those who pray? The man answers with a question. Where are the pictures of the ones who made the same vows and were lost at sea anyway? Bacon retells that ancient story in the Novum Organum, and then does something with it that no one before him had quite done: he turns an anecdote about superstition into a law of psychology. The human understanding, once a proposition is laid down, "forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation," and ignores, despises, or distinguishes away every contrary instance "rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions" (Novum Organum I.46). This is not a failing of fools, he insists; it is the default behavior of every mind, the careful ones included, and it works "still more craftily" in philosophy and the sciences than in superstition. Four centuries before anyone said "confirmation bias," Bacon had described it, classified it among its relatives, and drawn the conclusion the modern sciences are built on: inquiry has to be designed on the assumption that the inquirer cannot be trusted.

The four idols. The classification is the doctrine of the idols, Novum Organum I.39 through I.44, and it has aged better than almost anything else written in 1620. Idols of the tribe are the errors built into the species: the mind "resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects," supposing more order in nature than it finds, moved more by what confirms than by what contradicts. Idols of the den are private: each of us reads the world through a temperament, an education, an admired author, a home discipline whose habits we apply to everything (the den is this translation's English for the cave Bacon borrowed from Plato). Idols of the market, "the most troublesome of all" (I.59), live in language: words coined for the convenience of common life that philosophy then mistakes for realities, names for things that do not exist. And idols of the theatre are the received systems themselves: "all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined" are, he says, "so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds." The sorting is the point. Error is not one thing, and a remedy that works against an inherited system (read more skeptically) does nothing against a defect of the species (build instruments; go count the negatives). The doctrine of idols, Bacon says, stands to the interpretation of nature as the confutation of sophisms stands to logic (I.40): a field guide to the ways an inquiry goes wrong before it ever reaches the page.

The bee, not the ant or the spider. The cartoon Bacon is a clerk of nature: a man who thought science meant heaping up facts until a theory precipitated out, and whose method no working scientist ever followed. His own emblem for inquiry rules the cartoon out. Mere empirics, he writes, are like ants: they "only heap up and use their store." Dogmatists are like spiders: they "spin out their own webs," whole systems secreted from their own substance. The model is the bee, which gathers from the field but "works and fashions it by its own efforts," and the moral is "a closer and purer alliance of these faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted" (I.95). The induction that alliance practices is not enumeration but exclusion. In Book II Bacon runs the demonstration on heat: tables of cases where heat is present, where it is absent in otherwise similar cases, where it varies by degree, and then the real work, rejection: strike every candidate nature that shows up without heat or fails to rise and fall with it. What survives is the form, and at II.20 he allows himself a provisional harvest, the "first vintage": heat is "an expansive motion restrained, and striving to exert itself in the smaller particles." As a guess disciplined by elimination it is startlingly good; physics took two and a half centuries to say it much better. And among his "prerogative instances," the fourteenth kind, the "instances of the cross" (II.36), named for the finger-posts where two roads meet, is the decisive experiment that settles between rival causes: the ancestor of the experimentum crucis that Hooke and Newton would make canonical.

What "knowledge is power" actually says. The slogan everyone attaches to Bacon appears in this room's text in a more interesting form: "Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission" (I.3). Power here is not a license; it is a strict exchange. Nature grants command only to those who have first obeyed her, which means the will to dominate is, by itself, a way of staying ignorant and weak. And the purpose of the power is named in The Advancement of Learning: knowledge is for "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." When Adorno and Horkheimer opened the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Bacon as the original sin of instrumental reason, they kept the ambition and dropped the two clauses that govern it, the submission and the charity. Bacon's own measure of what works can do is I.129: printing, gunpowder, and the compass "have changed the appearance and state of the whole world," more, he says, than any empire, sect, or star. None of this makes him infallible about the science itself. He underrated mathematics at the very moment Galileo, his exact contemporary, was showing that nature's book is written in it, and he never came around to Copernicus. The room does not need him to have been right about the heavens. His claim was about the mind and its instruments, and there he was right early and almost alone.

A Lord Chancellor's philosophy. Born in 1561 at York House on the Strand, son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth, Francis Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at twelve and left convinced, as his chaplain later recorded, that the philosophy of Aristotle was strong for disputation but "barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man." The rest of the life ran through institutions, not cloisters: Gray's Inn and the law, Parliament at twenty-three, then the long climb to Lord Chancellor, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans. The Advancement of Learning (1605) is a state paper as much as a treatise, addressed to King James: a survey of every province of knowledge, a catalogue of what each lacks, and an argument that the deficiencies are a public problem, wanting libraries, instruments, and salaries for experimenters, because the rebuilding Bacon planned was too large for any single mind or purse. In 1621 the climb ended in scandal: he confessed to taking gifts from suitors while sitting as a judge in Chancery, was fined, and was barred from office. The disgrace returned him to his desk, and the five years that followed were the most productive he ever had: the Latin De Augmentis expanding the Advancement, the history of Henry VII, the enlarged Essays, the Sylva Sylvarum, the New Atlantis. The Great Instauration, the six-part reconstruction of all knowledge announced in 1620, remained a torso; the Novum Organum is only its second part, itself unfinished. He drew plans for a building no one generation could roof, and said so; a theory of inquiry as a collective, cumulative enterprise required nothing less.

What this room reads. Four texts, all public domain, all in English. The Novum Organum is here in Joseph Devey's nineteenth-century English edition of the 1620 Latin (the Bohn Philosophical Library text, in its 1902 Collier printing). The Advancement of Learning is Bacon's own 1605 English, in Henry Morley's 1893 Cassell's National Library edition. The Essays appear in the fifty-eight-essay text of the 1625 edition, and the New Atlantis is the unfinished fable Bacon's chaplain William Rawley published in 1627. Cite the Novum Organum by book and aphorism (Novum Organum I.46, II.20), the Advancement by book (Advancement of Learning II), the Essays by title ("Of Truth," "Of Studies"), and the New Atlantis by title alone. Not in the corpus: the Latin De Augmentis of 1623, the Sylva Sylvarum and the natural histories, the history of Henry VII, the legal works and the letters; ask about those and the chat will say so and answer from general knowledge instead of the shelf. One wording caution comes free with the provenance: Devey's English is not the Victorian Spedding-Ellis rendering most quoted today, so famous lines surface here in slightly different dress ("nature to be commanded must be obeyed" is Spedding; this room's text says "nature is only subdued by submission"), and the chat cites the words it can actually see.

Salomon's House. The New Atlantis is a sailors' tale: a crew blown off course in the South Sea reaches Bensalem, an island polity unknown to the maps, courteous, pious, and quietly two or three centuries ahead of Europe. The reason for the lead is the island's central institution, Salomon's House (the text's own spelling), whose charter is the most quoted sentence Bacon wrote: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." What follows reads less like a marvel and more like an organizational chart: fellows who sail abroad for the books and methods of other nations, fellows who collect the experiments of the mechanical arts, who try new ones, who compile, who look for applications, who design the next round of trials, and a few, the interpreters of nature, who raise the whole mass into axioms. Thomas More had given the genre its name a century before, but Utopia perfects laws and property; Bensalem perfects inquiry. The fiction became a founding document. When the Royal Society organized in 1660, its apologists claimed Bacon as the design's author, set his image on the frontispiece of Sprat's history of the Society, and took for a motto a vow he would have countersigned, nullius in verba: take no one's word for it. The research institute, the funded laboratory, the journal, the division of scientific labor: all of it is sketched in a fable left without an ending.

Most readers meet Bacon first in the Essays, and the Essays are the right door: short anatomies of truth, ambition, friendship, cunning, gardens, studies, written in flat, weighable sentences by a man who had practiced everything he describes at the highest tables in England. "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Montaigne had invented the essay a generation earlier as an instrument of self-examination; Bacon turned the instrument outward, onto courts and businesses, and he names his model plainly in the Advancement: "we are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do." That sentence is the Baconian program in miniature. The Essays apply it to ambition and envy; the Novum Organum applies it to the understanding itself: describe how the mind actually behaves, not how the logic books say it ought to, then design the correction. The line out of his study runs long. The young Hobbes took dictation on his garden walks; Locke and the Royal Society grew in ground he cleared; Hume turned his induction into a problem that has never closed; Mill codified his tables into the canons of experimental inquiry; Kant set a sentence of his at the front of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. And every control group, every preregistered trial, every reviewer paid to distrust an author's too-clean results is the wager of 1620 still running: that the unassisted mind, like the unassisted hand, can do little, and that instruments can be built for both.