FRANCIS BACON. — Philosopher and statesman, born 12 January 1561 near London, son of Nicholas, Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Elizabeth and nephew of the first minister Burleigh; died at Highgate (London) on 9 April 1626. At the age of thirteen he entered the University College at Cambridge, from which he departed three years later, thoroughly imbued with that profound sense of dissatisfaction with Aristotelian and scholastic logic which was to become the central polemical motive, implicit or explicit, of his thought. Invited to Paris by his father, he was forced to return to England upon the latter’s premature death (1580), and, pressed by economic necessity, turned to legal studies and then to the practice of law. But this profession was too distasteful to him; redirecting his aims elsewhere, he sought advancement through public office. Already a member of Parliament since 1584, in 1597 he was appointed Queen’s Counsel Extraordinary. However, having fallen out with Elizabeth, he was unable during her reign to rise to higher office, despite the protection of the Earl of Essex, whose cause Bacon later did not hesitate to prosecute when the Earl was tried as the ringleader of a conspiracy against the Queen (1601). Under James I, however, Bacon enjoyed greater political fortune, having devoted himself entirely to the King’s service and defence, even going so far as to alter his political convictions. He was successively appointed Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613), Privy Councillor (1616), Keeper of the Great Seal (1617), Lord Chancellor (1618), Baron of Verulam and Viscount St Albans (1621). But this good fortune was short-lived: in that same year he was accused of corruption in his political and administrative conduct, subjected to parliamentary trial, and condemned to a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower of London, and exclusion from all public office. After a few days he was pardoned and released, and in the remaining years of his life, until his death, he devoted himself to his beloved studies.
It may well be said that in Bacon the height of his intellect was not matched by the strength of his will; hence it is a difficult task for the historian (as the disagreement of opinions attests) to pronounce definitively on the rectitude of his moral character.
Works. — Bacon conceived a vast encyclopedic work, the Instauratio magna, which in his intention was to unfold a general plan for the reform of science. The design of the work comprised six parts, of which the first presented a systematic “division of the sciences,” which was in reality a radical revision of their present state; the second explained the “principles of the interpretation of nature,” that is, the new method of science; the third provided a “natural and experimental history for the foundation of philosophy,” or, more simply, the scientific material to which the method was to be applied; the fourth (“the ascent of the intellect”) showed the double use, inductive and deductive, of the intellect in the search for laws; the fifth advanced “anticipations” of truths, i.e., discoveries made by the common method; and the sixth comprised the definitive systematization of “operative science.” Of these parts, however, Bacon completed only the first, under the title De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (London 1623), and the second, represented by the famous Novum Organum (ibid. 1620); while of the third only a rambling collection of scientific material survives, published posthumously under the title Sylva Sylvarum. The De dignitate and the Novum Organum may be considered preparatory drafts, respectively, of The Advancement of Learning (London 1605) and the Cogitata et visa (composed in 1607, published posthumously).
Bacon’s masterpiece is, without doubt, the Novum Organum, which represents the first unequivocal expression of the renewed scientific-philosophical consciousness of the modern age and constitutes the central focus of all the writings of the Verulam. It is composed of two books and a preface: in the former, the new method is expounded (which is in fact a “new logic,” as stated in the title, with its obvious polemical reference to Aristotle’s Organon); in the latter, it is affirmed against sceptics and dogmatists that a certain science is possible, founded upon a new method. Outlined in the Cogitata et visa of 1607, the Novum Organum was begun by the author in 1608 but published only in 1620. Among Bacon’s other writings may also be recalled the New Atlantis, written in English around 1621, later translated into Latin and published posthumously in 1627; De sapientia veterum (London 1609); Temporis partus maximus (1585); Valerius Terminus (1603); Redargutio philosophiarum (1609); Descriptio orbis intellectualis (1612): these works (published posthumously) either express anticipations still fragmentary of future intuitions or have little theoretical and historical significance.
If many traditional moral values find no echo in Bacon’s soul, one ideal nonetheless guided his activity as a scholar: the ideal of science and knowledge, indeed the conviction that in knowledge and science alone lies the only possibility of man’s redemption from the slavery of nature and the sole source of effective and substantial human power. This conviction Bacon already affirmed in a well-known passage of the Cogitata et visa (“hominis imperium in sola scientia constatatur: tantum enim potest quantum scit”), and later reiterated in the first book of the Novum Organum (“scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt, quia ignorantia causae destituit effectum”). It is already evident that Bacon is the spiritual son of the new science, and one readily commends his admiration for modern inventions such as printing, the compass, and gunpowder. Bacon clearly intuited that a new era had now dawned for human knowledge. But he also perceived that the new science rests upon foundations different from those of antiquity; that a new element (experience) had intervened to radically transform its constructive process; indeed, that this very process is the process of the mind, which, freeing itself from the contingency of particular sensible data, ascends inductively to the formulation of universal laws. In Bacon, therefore, the traditional metaphysical interests are replaced by a distinctly modern epistemological concern, directed no longer toward a world of objective essences but toward the subjective activity of the mind that constructs its science of nature upon the solid foundation of experience. Hence his frequent polemics against the Aristotelianism of the schools and its intellectualistic degenerations, and the fundamental importance he attributed to the problem of “method.”
For Bacon, the problem of “method” is the very problem of experience as seen in the mental process by which it constitutes itself as science: its solution is the determination of “true induction.” “Experience” and “induction” are terms that do not, for Bacon, conceal a crudely empiricist doctrine; rather, they express the best meaning of the new methodology, inasmuch as they translate the problem of science into a properly philosophical problem. Bacon’s “experience” does not signify an unformed mass of empirical data, nor does it consist in the result of that false form of induction by simple enumeration, which takes no account of negative instances and therefore never concludes with necessity; rather, it expresses the very process of “true induction,” which grows by the orderly concurrence of sense and intellect.
BACON, FRANCIS – Portrait in Virtue.
Sense and intellect are precisely the terms of Bacon’s cognitive synthesis, and more than terms, moments of that active synthesis, purified as they are from the dross deriving from their abstract or disordered use. Sense, inherently uncertain and prone to error, is provided with means and instruments capable of correcting its deviations; intellect, when left to itself (“sibi permissus”), is a source of countless abstractions, and is, so to speak, relieved of the dead weight of its idols or arbitrary anticipations and presuppositions that divert it from the true pursuit of knowledge. B. identifies these minutely, grouping them into four classes: a) *idola tribus*, or errors deriving from our very mental constitution (and thus innate to the human species or “tribe”), whereby the knowledge of things is deformed by the active intervention of the mind; b) *idola specus*, or errors arising from the individual’s psychic conformation or particular education and culture; c) *idola fori*, or errors born from human intercourse, and more particularly from the unreflective use of language, which often leads to regarding as real purely imaginary and verbal entities; d) *idola theatri*, or errors introduced into minds by the various philosophical systems and traditional theories, which have succeeded one another like theatrical apparatuses on the stage of human history, and are capable of leading thought astray from true knowledge of nature.
With the theory of the idols, highly significant and historically important for the critical spirit that inspires it, the first moment of Bacon’s methodological construction comes to an end. This is essentially critical and negative (*destruens*), but implicitly prepares the vision of the constructive process of science, toward which his new logic, the “new organon,” is ultimately directed. Bacon is extremely concerned to follow closely the various moments of that process: from the initial gathering of empirical material (*historia naturalis*) and its organization into tables classifying phenomena according to their presence (*tabulae praesentiae*), their absence (*tabulae absentiae*), or their quantitative variations (*tabulae graduum*), up to the prerogative instances, or privileged cases, in which the phenomenon occurs under entirely new and unforeseen circumstances, or fails to occur under conditions altogether similar to those in which it usually presents itself.
For Bacon, the ultimate end of this scientific reconstruction, to which the new method tends, is the knowledge of the world in itself, of the forms or formal causes of the real, through the study of the phenomenal world; that is, of natures as they manifest themselves to us in the presence of material causes and the action of efficient causes. Yet the dynamic motive introduced by Bacon into the conception of the scientific process of knowledge seems in a certain way to reflect upon the meaning of the Aristotelian “form,” resolving its substantial nature into a principle of actualization of the phenomenon. Pure act is no longer, as it were, the first unmoved cause of Aristotle, but rather the infinite principle of the infinite actualization of forms, which is determined in the latent process of the *latens schematismus* of phenomena. And since this process is movement, all the variety of forms ultimately reduces to this. Yet the true form of forms, the *forma indita*, as the absolute and immanent principle of every phenomenal determination, lies beyond our cognitive possibilities and is known only to God, its author.
It is worth noting, at this point, how Bacon’s concern to guarantee the objective value of knowledge (i.e., the possibility of knowing the world not *ex analogia hominis* but *ex analogia universi*) ultimately led him back to traditional metaphysics, even as his new intuition compelled him to give it a tendentially mechanistic interpretation. Indeed, Bacon’s thought cannot be understood without reference to the speculative tradition in which it is rooted. It was precisely a polemical engagement with the degenerate forms of Aristotelian intellectualism that, in the name of a most fruitful inductive procedure, led Bacon to lose sight of the profound meaning of genuine Aristotelian deduction, which, in its logical-categorial procedure, concealed an exigency of universality to which Kant himself would later return with his epistemological criticism.
Bacon’s importance in the particular fields of philosophical knowledge is of lesser significance. He admits, with Telesio, a dark form of perception diffused in all things; and in man a spiritual soul: yet philosophy has nothing to say about it, and only religion can pronounce upon II. Though Bacon saw in atheism a cause of human degradation and in faith in God a principle of elevation (his famous statement that while superficial philosophy may distract the mind from religious concerns, deeper speculative experience makes one fully aware of their vital substance), he was not, however, a deeply religious spirit. This is shown by the ethics that can be distilled from his various writings, which, lacking any true sense of the inwardness of spiritual life and accustomed to considering “man” in his totality under the uniform light of his “science” that casts him back into the external world, assumes the character of a set of precepts or empirical casuistry, from which all concrete reference to the absolute and divine principle of moral values is absent. But this is shown even more clearly by his explicit conception of God as a supreme reality, placed beyond any spiritual interference with man, and thus a merely rational object of faith. Bacon’s theology is, in the end, very simple, but simplicity that is poverty: Book IX of *De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum* makes this abundantly clear. Reason and faith are reconciled, but only through a radical separation (“*concludamus igitur, theologiam sacram ex verbo et oraculis Dei, non ex lumine naturae aut rationis dictamine, hauriri debere*”). There is nothing surprising in this, moreover, if we consider the then-recent successes of the theory of double truth!
Bacon’s importance must therefore be sought elsewhere than in profound religiosity, namely in that faith in science to which we alluded at the beginning. It is a faith that, free from any didactic framework, decisively steers him toward the future: and it is not superfluous to recall, in this regard, that Bacon himself, almost as a crowning of his work, wished to celebrate in *New Atlantis* his fervent faith in future progress. The pansophic utopia concealed in this work beneath the fantastic design of the House of Solomon (or University of Research) and which would find wide resonance in Comenius, contains here, unlike the political utopias of Plato or Campanella, a pedagogical recommendation that connects back to the fundamental inspiration of Baconian thought: only by educating themselves in science and collaborating in the field of knowledge can men attain the conquest of their true empire—the empire of knowledge, which is the only conceivable empire over the forces of nature themselves.