Bacon, Francis

BACON, FRANCIS. - Philosopher and statesman, b. 22 Jan. 1561 near London, son of Nicholas, keeper of the great seal to Queen Elizabeth and nephew of the prime minister Burleigh; d. at Highgate (London) on 9 Apr. 1626. He entered the university college of Cambridge at the age of thirteen, whence he emerged three years later, thoroughly imbued with that sense of profound impatience with logical and scholastic Aristotelianism which was later to become the central polemical motif, implicit or explicit, of his speculation. Sent to Paris by his father, he was forced to return to his homeland because of his father's premature death (1580), and, pressed by economic necessity, to turn to legal studies and then to the practice of law. But this was too distasteful to him: wherefore, directing his aims toward another goal, he attempted the path of honors. A member of parliament already from 1584, in 1597 he was appointed extraordinary counselor to the crown. But, having fallen out with Elizabeth, it was not possible for him, during her reign, to rise to higher offices, despite the protection of the earl of Essex, whom B. did not hesitate subsequently to become the accuser of when the earl was tried as the leader of the conspiracy against the queen (1601). B. had greater political fortune under James I, to whose service and defense he had totally devoted himself, not hesitating therefore to change his political convictions. He was successively appointed Solicitor general (1607), Attorney general (1613), Privy Counselor to the crown (1616), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (1617), Lord Chancellor (1618), Baron of Verulam and Viscount of St. Albans (1621). But such good fortune was short-lived: in that same year, accused of corruption in his political and administrative conduct, he was brought to trial by parliament and sentenced to a fine of 40,000 pounds, to imprisonment in the Tower of London and to disqualification from any political office. Having recovered his freedom after a few days, following remission of the sentence, he devoted his last years, until his death, to his preferred studies. It may well be said that in B. the strength of will was not equal to the height of his intellect: wherefore it is a very arduous task for the historian (as the disagreement of opinions attests, moreover) to pronounce on the uprightness of his moral character.

Works. - B. conceived a great encyclopedic work, the Instauratio magna, which was to carry out, in his intention, 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 current 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 to apply the method; the fourth ("ladder of the intellect") showed the double use, inductive and deductive, of the intellect in the search for laws; the fifth advanced "anticipations" of truth, that is, discoveries achieved by the common method; the sixth, finally, comprised the definitive systematization of "active science." Of these parts, however, only the first was composed by B., under the title De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (London 1623), and the second, represented by the celebrated Novum Organum (ibid. 1620); while of the third there remains only a jumbled collection of scientific material, published posthumously under the title Sylva Sylvarum. Of the De dignitate and the Novum Organum we may consider preparatory drafts, respectively, The advancement of Learning (London 1605) and the Cogitata et visa (composed in 1607, published posthumously).

B.'s masterpiece is, without doubt, the Novum Organum, which represents the first, unequivocal expression of the renewed modern scientific-philosophical consciousness, and constitutes the center of gravity of the entire production of Verulam. It is composed of two books and a preface: in the former the new method is set forth (which is, in effect, a "new logic," as is said in the title, whose polemical reference to Aristotle's Organon is evident); in the latter there is affirmed, against the skeptics and the dogmatists, the possibility of a certain science, founded upon a new method. Sketched in the Cogitata et visa of 1607, the Novum Organum was begun by the author in 1608, but published only in 1620. There are furthermore to be remembered, among B.'s writings, the Nova Atlantis, written in English around 1621, then 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): which (published posthumously) either express still fragmentary anticipations of future intuitions, or have scant theoretical and historical importance.

If many of the traditional moral values found no response in B.'s soul, one ideal nevertheless directed his activity as a scholar: the ideal of science and of knowledge, the certainty, indeed, that in knowledge and in science lies the only possibility of a redemption of man from the slavery of nature and the sole source of an effective and substantial human power. This certainty B. already affirms in a well-known passage of the Cogitata et visa ("hominis imperium sola scientia constare: tantum enim potest quantum scit"), and reaffirms later in the first book of the Novum Organum ("scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt, quia ignoratio causae destituit effectum"). One already perceives that B. is a spiritual son of the new science, and one well understands his admiration for the modern inventions of printing, the compass, and gunpowder. B. clearly intuits that a new era has by now been inaugurated for human knowledge. But he also intuits that the new science rests on foundations different from those of the old; that a new element ("experience") has intervened to modify radically its constructive process; that this very process is, indeed, the process of the mind, which, freeing itself from the contingency of particular sensible data, ascends inductively to the formulation of universal laws. To traditional metaphysical interests there is substituted, therefore, in B. a typically modern epistemological interest, directed no longer toward a world of objective essences, but rather toward the subjective activity of the mind which constructs its science of nature on the solid foundations of experience. Hence his frequent polemics against the Aristotelianism of the schools and its intellectualistic degenerations, and the fundamental importance attributed to the problem of "method."

For B. the problem of "method" is the very problem of experience viewed in the mental process whereby it constitutes itself as science: his solution is the determination of "inductio vera." "Experience" and "induction" are terms that do not conceal for B. a crudely empiricist doctrine; but they express the best meaning of the new methodology, inasmuch as it translates the problem of science into a properly philosophical problem. B.'s "experience" does not mean a formless congeries of empirical data, nor does it constitute the result of that false form of induction per enumerationem simplicem, which takes no account of negative instances and therefore never concludes necessarily; but it expresses rather the very process of "true induction," which grows upon itself through the ordered concurrence of sense and intellect, of a sense which supplies the datum and an intellect that elaborates it. Sense and intellect are precisely the terms of the Baconian cognitive synthesis, and more than terms, they are moments of that active synthesis, and as such purified of the dross deriving from an abstract or disordered use of them. The senses, in themselves uncertain and prone to error, are provided with means and instruments suited to correcting their deviations; the intellect, which, when left to itself («sibi permissus»), is the source of innumerable abstractions, is, so to speak, lightened of the dead weight of its idola or anticipations and arbitrary presuppositions that divert it from the true pursuit of knowledge. B. identifies these minutely, gathering them into four classes: a) idola tribus, or errors deriving from our own mental constitution (and therefore 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 deriving from the individual psychic conformation or from the particular education and culture of individuals; c) idola fori, or errors arising from the mutual relations of men, and more particularly from the unreflective use of language, which often leads one to consider purely imaginary and verbal entities as real; d) idola theatri, or errors introduced into minds by the various philosophical systems and traditional theories, which have succeeded one another like theatrical apparatus on the stage of human history, and which are capable of leading thought astray from the true knowledge of nature.

With the theory of the idola, highly significant and historically important for the critical sense that inspires it, the first moment of B.'s methodological construction comes to a close. This moment is, then, essentially critical-negative (destruens), but it implicitly prepares the vision of the constructive process of science, toward which the new logic, the «new organ», tends as its final goal. B. is extremely concerned to follow through the various moments of that process: from the first collection of empirical material (historia naturalis) and its ordering into the tabulae, classifying phenomena according to their presence (tabulae praesentiae), or their absence (tabulae absentiae), or their quantitative variations (tabulae graduum), down to the istanze prerogative, or privileged cases, in which the phenomenon occurs under entirely new and unforeseen circumstances, or does not occur under circumstances wholly similar to those in which it usually presents itself.

The ultimate end of this scientific reconstruction toward which the new method tends is, for B. (and in this he pays his tribute to the scholastic Aristotelianism he so energetically combated), 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 the natures, as they manifest themselves to us in the presence of material causes and in the action of efficient causes. Nevertheless, the dynamic motive introduced by B. into the conception of the cognitive process of science seems in a certain way to be reflected in the meaning of the Aristotelian «form», resolving its substantial nature into a principle of actualization of the phenomenon. The pure act is thus no longer the unmoved Aristotelian first cause, but rather the infinite internal principle of the infinite actualization of forms, which is determined in the latent process of the latent structure «latens schematismus» of phenomena. And since this process is movement, the whole variety of forms is ultimately reduced to it. But the true form of forms, the forma indica, as the absolute and immanent principle of every phenomenal determination, is beyond our cognitive possibilities and is known only to God, who is its author.

It should be observed at this point that the concern to guarantee the objective value of knowing (that is, the possibility of knowing the world not ex analogia hominis, but ex analogia universi) ultimately brought B. back toward traditional metaphysics, at the same time that his new intuition forced him to give of it a tendentially mechanistic interpretation. In effect, B.'s thought cannot be understood without referring it to the speculative tradition in which it is grafted. And it was precisely a polemical reference to the degenerate forms of Aristotelian intellectualism that, in the name of a most fruitful inductive procedure, caused B. to lose the profound sense of the genuinely Aristotelian deduction, which nevertheless concealed within its logical-categorial procedure a demand for universality, to which Kant himself would have to turn anew with his epistemological criticism.

The importance of B.'s thought in the particular fields of philosophical knowledge is of lesser moment. He admits, with Telesio, an obscure form of perception diffused throughout all things; and in man a spiritual soul: on this, however, philosophy has nothing to say and only religion can pronounce. B., who nevertheless saw in atheism a cause of degradation for man, and in faith in God a principle of elevation (his affirmation is well known that, if a superficial philosophy can distract the mind from religious interest, a deeper experience of speculation makes one perceive all its substantial vitality), was not, however, a profoundly religious spirit. His ethics already demonstrates this, which we can extract from his various writings, and which in him, deprived as he is of a true sense of the interiority of spiritual life, and accustomed to considering «man» in his totality in the uniform light of his «science» that pours him out into the external world, assumes the meaning of a body of precepts or of an empirical casuistry, from which every concrete reference to the absolute and divine principle of moral values is excluded. But his explicit conception of God as supreme reality, placed beyond every spiritual, and therefore rational, interference with man and the object only of faith, demonstrates it even more. B.'s theology is, at bottom, very simple, but of a simplicity that is poverty: book IX of the De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum proves it clearly. Reason and faith are reconciled, but only by means of a radical separation («concludamus igitur, theologiam sacram ex verbo et oraculis Dei, non ex lumine naturae aut rationis dictamine, hauriri debere»). No wonder, moreover, at this, if we think of the then recent successes of the theory of double truth!

The importance of B. must, then, be sought elsewhere than in a profound religiosity, namely in that faith in science to which we alluded at the beginning. This is a faith which, outside of every schema and every didactic scaffolding, directs him decisively toward the future: and it is not superfluous to recall, in this connection, that B. himself, as if to crown his work, wished to celebrate in the New Atlantis his fervent faith in future progress. The pansophic utopia, which in this work is concealed beneath the fantastic design of the House of Solomon (or University of research) and which would find wide echo in Comenius, contains here, unlike the political utopias of a Plato or a Campanella, a pedagogical recommendation, which connects to the fundamental inspiration of Baconian thought: only by educating themselves in science and collaborating in the field of knowledge will men be able to attain the conquest of their true empire: the empire of the knowable, which is the only empire conceivable over the very forces of nature.

Vittorio Sainati