Protestants in an Age of Science

The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought

Theodore Dwight Bozeman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781469610061
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Since Princeton College and Princeton Seminary were major radii of Realist influence, the conservative Presbyterianism headquartered there is an ideal choice for a case study in the American impact of Baconianism. Presbyterian thinkers, already committed to a synthesis of Protestant religion and Newtonian science, were afforded with additional means of elaborating a doxological version of natural science and of defending it against naturalism and other enemies of Christian faith. Originally published in 1977. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1.
The Source and Rise of Baconianism in America

In 1823, Edward Everett gave utterance to a trend currently pervasive among Anglo-American thinkers when he declared, “At the present day, as is well known, the Baconian philosophy has become synonymous with the true philosophy.”¹ Any cross-sectional reading in representative British and American literature of the day—college and university addresses, scientific and philosophical essays and addresses, quarterly reviews, theological journals—will reveal the prevalence of a configuration of thought often labeled “the Baconian Philosophy.” This pattern generally was equated with the “inductive” methodology of current science, which, it was held, was careful to root its depiction of the general laws of nature in a meticulous survey of particulars. Yet it also evoked a cluster of related ideas: a strenuously empiricist approach to all forms of knowledge, a declared greed for the objective fact, and a corresponding distrust of “hypotheses,” of “imagination,” and, indeed, of reason itself. The entire complex was ascribed ultimately to Francis Bacon.

How is this remarkable Baconian vogue, appearing nearly two centuries after Bacon’s death, to be explained? To the small but growing corps of seventeenth-century “moderns” who worked out a program of “experimental science” in dissent from the established Aristotelianism, “Bacon” was a magic name; his writings seem particularly to have inspired several of the men who founded the Royal Society.² Yet at no time during the eighteenth century could it be said that an overt “Baconianism”—in the sense described in this study—played an extensive role in Anglo-American intellectual traditions. Sir Isaac Newton himself, the greatest figure of British science and the idol of the Enlightenment, scarcely mentioned Bacon in his published writings, and not a single reference to Bacon appears in Locke’s An Essay on the Human Understanding, which set the tone for most subsequent philosophical developments in both Britain and America. An examination of other characteristic intellectual productions of the eighteenth century reveals a similar picture. Such prominent figures as George Berkeley, David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Butler, Jonathan Edwards, John Wise, Benjamin Franklin, and William Paley occasionally referred to Bacon, at times with marked admiration. Most accepted complacently the current assumption that Bacon was the originator of scientific method, the “Legislator of Science,” as William Whewell later remarked; but they knew nothing of the explicit and ardent Baconianism that emerged shortly.³

One significant exception to the preceding generalization supplies a vital clue to the popularity of a “Baconian Philosophy” after the turn of the nineteenth century: the philosophical work of Thomas Reid and of the emerging Scottish School of commonsense Realism to which his thought gave rise. The initial purpose of this chapter will be to examine the possible significance of Scottish Realism for nineteenth-century Baconianism. Only those features of the original Realism that have direct bearing upon a later consideration of Baconianism in American thought will be considered. In the subsequent portion of the chapter, the rapid absorption of the Baconian pattern by American thinkers will be traced.

Realism and Natural Science

Although the Scottish School comprised several figures, two were of central importance. Thomas Reid (1710–96), Adam Smith’s successor in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, was clearly the chief architect of the Realist position.⁴ Reid developed a cautious “scientific” epistemology that proved so attractive and accessible it became the basis, as Rudolf Metz has indicated, of the first “real school of philosophic training” in British thought since the Cambridge Platonists.⁵ Of the several figures who became identified as leading Realists in the following generation, clearly the most important, and the most influential in America, was Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), who held the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1785 to 1809. Stewart’s philosophy was largely a more elegant restatement and embellishment of Reid’s, and he devoted a long career in his influential Edinburgh post to the consolidation and promulgation of what already had become known as “the Scottish Philosophy.” Reid and Stewart comprehend between them the essential range of early Scottish Realism insofar as it is pertinent to the present study, and attention, therefore, will be limited primarily to their formulations.⁶

In a grateful memoir of the man whose intellectual labors so extensively undergirded his own, Stewart observed accurately and with keen approval that the influence of “Lord Bacon” upon Reid “may be traced in almost every page.”⁷ Reid’s plentiful virtues as a “scientific” thinker, thought Stewart, owed specifically to his un-deviating “Baconian” discipleship. As for himself, Stewart professed faithful devotion to Baconian principles. The intellectual historian Robert Blakey accurately noted in 1850 that “Mr. Stewart was an enthusiastic admirer of Lord Bacon. . . . Indeed, his enthusiasm on this point seems to have been . . . intense and indiscriminate.”⁸

The seldom-qualified veneration in which Reid and Stewart held the name of Bacon appears to be the effectual root of the Baconian Philosophy. For their estimation of Lord Bacon was not unfocused. It was not Bacon the moralist, nor Bacon the elegant English stylist, nor Bacon the subtle statesman who elicited their zeal. The Bacon who stood forth in their works was supremely the creator of the inductive method and, hence, the father of modern science.

Few of the scholars who in recent years have given attention to Scottish Realism have amply recognized the extent to which it was shaped by the powerful stimulants of Enlightenment natural science. In the memoir of Reid, Stewart laconically observed that Reid had been “familiarized from his early years . . . to experimental inquiries”; he evidently thought it gratuitous to add that scientific enthusiasm for “experimental inquiries” in many ways had dominated Reid’s philosophical development from the beginning and thus supplied several of its nucleating concerns.⁹ Dazzled both with the fresh intellectual grandeur and the stunning practical achievements of Newtonian science, Reid had acquired a devoted mastery of its basic methods and principles. His correspondence reflects a day-to-day preoccupation with the latest writings, apparatus, experiments, and findings of natural philosophy. It was therefore fitting that his first university position was a chair of philosophy comprising mathematics and physics as well as logic and ethics.¹⁰ Stewart’s involvement with natural science was only slightly less extensive than Reid’s. As a student at Edinburgh at a time when intellectual life at the university was “nourished in great measure by the writings of Bacon and Newton,” Stewart acquired a lifelong attachment to science in a course in natural philosophy presided over by an infectious Newtonian, James Russell.¹¹ Stewart succeeded his father in the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh in 1775; here he handled a course in astronomy and may have dealt at least nominally with the algebraic methods of recent physics.¹²

Thus it is no surprise that Reid and Stewart frequently coupled the name of Bacon with that of Newton, whose scientific achievements had established him as a national hero and as the most potent symbol of the triumphant enterprise of natural science.¹³ But the Newton who came to voice in the works of Reid and Stewart was preeminently the apostle of Bacon. Both attributed Newton’s huge accomplishments in science not primarily to genius but to method, that is, to his dogged adherence to the “rules of philosophizing” laid down by Bacon and summarized in the critical formula of “induction.” They acknowledged that Bacon himself had performed little inductive research of value. A far-seeing pioneer, he had merely charted the way into the scientific future. It had remained for Newton to enflesh the bones of right method, to give “the first and noblest examples of that chaste induction, which Lord Bacon could only delineate in theory.”¹⁴

The Realists’ appeal to science and to Bacon as the author of scientific method suggests a number of fresh clues for the study of the Scottish Philosophy and of its subsequent massive impact upon British and American intellectual life. Existing analyses of Realism concentrate upon its constructive, positive philosophical basis as formulated by Reid: the replacement of the Cartesian and Lockean theory of “ideas” with a doctrine of intuited “first principles,” and the resulting accommodation of basic epistemology to the “commonsense” of mankind. This approach is deficient on two vital counts. First, it does not adequately accent the profound concern for the state and course of the natural sciences which conditioned most Realist thought; and, second, it fosters neglect of a closely associated current of skepticism and restraint which, no less than the positive doctrine of “first principles,” shaped the full contribution of the Scottish School to Anglo-American intellectual culture. An analysis of the factor of Baconianism integral to Realist perspective will make it possible to bring these often disregarded but important considerations into proper view; they, in turn, will contribute to an explanation of the broad popularity of Realism in nineteenth-century America.

Both Reid and Stewart considered their entire philosophical program to be an enactment of the inductive plan of research set forth in Bacon’s Novum Organum. Their appeal to Bacon meant in the first place a conviction that the fortunes of scientific discovery had been overwhelmingly dependent upon a right grasp of methodology. “Taught by Lord Bacon,” declared Reid, men at last had won release from the treadmill of medieval “deductionism,” at last had been set unerringly on “the road to the knowledge of nature’s works.”¹⁵ Highly impressed, in the manner of the “moderns,” with Bacon’s frequent and slashing attacks upon the abstract “whirling about” of Aristotelian orthodoxy, Reid set the new measures of induction sharply over against the scientifically barren syllogistic exercises of the Schoolmen. Bacon first had laid bare the sham of fruitless inquiry, had bridled the wandering intellect of the classical and medieval centuries with a simple yet infallible procedure for disclosing the concrete structure and laws of the universe, namely “the slow and patient method of induction.”¹⁶

This centering of science upon inductive methodology allowed the Realists easily to make the characteristic Enlightenment leap from natural philosophy to a “science of man.” Reid and Stewart spent their mature university careers in chairs of moral philosophy, which in the Realist version meant an extension of scientific method to mind, society, and morality.¹⁷ In this trio of concerns, the study of “mind,” which in the eighteenth century had come to be known as “mental philosophy” or “psychology,” had priority; for through an “inductive” analysis of the faculties and powers by which the mind knows, feels, and wills, Realist moral philosophers hoped to establish scientific foundations for existing society and morality. What is important, however, is that underlying the heavy emphasis on “psychology” that characterized all Realist thought was also an acutely felt need to supply a fitting philosophical foundation for the scientific practice of induction itself.

A certain circularity was involved in the effort to validate the inductive method by means of induction, but the Realists seriously attempted to do so, and their effort amounted finally to an identification of the human mind as a structure “designed” explicitly and solely for an inductive style of knowing.

Ideas, Objects, and Intuition

The philosophical occasion for Reid’s first efforts in mental philosophy was his startled realization, while perusing Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, that currently accepted assumptions about the knowing facility of the mind were woefully deficient.¹⁸ Much of his work is to be understood as an effort to parry the Humean challenge to traditional certainties with a new epistemological formula more capable of meeting the conceptual needs of inductive science.

Reid began by acknowledging that the notorious mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes to the Enlightenment had not yet been satisfactorily resolved. The conceptual point of departure for the Scottish Philosophy—and a basic point in all Baconianism —was a resolution of the natural order into “two great kingdoms,” a “system of bodies” and a “system of minds.” This formulation, however, posed for philosophy and for natural science the acute difficulty of negotiating the “vast interval between body and mind” which it assumed; for all “knowing,” and especially the analysis of nature propounded by natural science, plainly presupposed an intimacy of connection between the two disparate “kingdoms.”¹⁹ Into the original Cartesian breach Locke had insinuated an epistemology of “ideas,” itself derived...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Protestants in an Age of Science
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Source and Rise of Baconianism in America
• 2. The Presbyterian Old School: A Case-Study Profile
• 3. Christian Inquiry and Inductive Restraint
• 4. Doxological Science and Its Enemies
• 5. Saving Doxological Science: Baconian Strategies for the Defense
• 6. Positive Strategies in Doxological Science
• 7. Baconianism and the Bible: Hermeneutics for an Age of Science
• 8. Summary and Concluding Reflections
• Abbreviations in Notes and Bibliography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index