Knowledge is Power (Icon Science)

How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Helped Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science

John Henry

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785782510
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Francis Bacon - a leading figure in the history of science - never made a major discovery, provided a lasting explanation of any physical phenomena or revealed any hidden laws of nature. How then can he rank as he does alongside Newton? Bacon was the first major thinker to describe how science should be done, and to explain why. Scientific knowledge should not be gathered for its own sake but for practical benefit to mankind. And Bacon promoted experimentation, coming to outline and define the rigorous procedures of the 'scientific method' that today from the very bedrock of modern scientific progress. John Henry gives a dramatic account of the background to Bacon's innovations and the sometimes unconventional sources for his ideas. Why was he was so concerned to revolutionize the attitude to scientific knowledge - and why do his ideas for reform still resonate today?

• CHAPTER 1 •

‘KINDLING A LIGHT IN NATURE’

Francis Bacon was a great genius who helped to shape the modern world. But many people would be hard put to say exactly why. He made no new discoveries, developed no technical innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature. His achievement was to offer an eloquent account of a philosophy and a method for doing those things. And in that way he turned out to be as important as people famed for particular discoveries, like Galileo or Isaac Newton, in what historians now call the Scientific Revolution.

Essentially, Bacon (1561–1626) wanted to reinvent investigation of the natural world. He was dazzled by a vision of progress whose ambition knew no bounds, stemming from a conviction as strong as that of a later philosophical revolutionary, Karl Marx, that the point of philosophy was not just to interpret the world, but to change it. As Bacon saw it in one of his soaring flights:

[A]bove all, if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature – a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so, spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world – that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race – the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities (‘Proemium’ (Preface), Of the Interpretation of Nature, 1603).

In our terms, Bacon was a philosopher of science – perhaps the first one who really mattered. He was driven to combine three concerns: how knowledge was justified, how it could be expanded and how it could be made useful. His new method was designed to transform completely the knowledge of the natural world of his day, which he saw as both misconceived and sterile. As he was also a great writer, he helped to inspire others to adopt a new attitude to natural philosophy, an influence that lasted long after his death in 1626.

Two hundred and fifty years later, for instance, Charles Darwin described the method of working that was to lead him to his theory of natural selection. It was, he said, perfectly Baconian.

After I returned to England it appeared to me that … by collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature, some light might perhaps be thrown on the whole subject. My first notebook was opened in July 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale … (Autobiography, 1892, but written in 1876).

Darwin didn’t strictly work like this. Nor has any other successful scientist, because you cannot collect facts in this undirected way without disappearing beneath a mountain of irrelevancies. But the fact that the mild-mannered Victorian scientific revolutionary saw fit to invoke the Elizabethan statesman and philosopher is one index of Bacon’s enduring fame. Another is the expectation we still hold, in a century when governments spend billions on research, that systematic experiment, conducted in a highly organised and institutionalised way, will yield useful answers to all kinds of problems – from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) to global warming. Our idea of science as the ‘endless frontier’, as the American Vannevar Bush titled a report to the US government just after World War Two, is also Baconian in spirit.

More recently, though, as increasing numbers of people question the impact of science, Bacon has attracted as many critics as admirers. Some deny his influence or significance. Others who acknowledge his importance see his attitudes as baleful or pernicious, his writings as a call to seek the domination of nature, and male domination at that. But all this scholarly argument just makes it more important to get to know what he was about. The fact that Bacon was concerned not with making scientific discoveries but with the very nature of science itself – seeking to establish what its purposes should be, the optimal methods for making discoveries, the best way to establish truth – has not only ensured his place in history but also ensured that it is controversial.

After all, while the value of a specific invention or discovery might be immediately recognisable, claims about the best way of going about things are endlessly debatable. When the subject for debate is something as culturally important as modern science and technology, it is hardly surprising that Bacon has continued to divide opinion. But what critics of Bacon sometimes fail to realise is that he himself was instrumental in making science and technology such characteristic aspects of Western culture. Before Bacon there was no such thing as science in our modern sense of the word. After Bacon, Western Europe was set on a course of discovery and invention that was to result in a civilisation based on the power of science and technology. In a very real sense, therefore, Bacon invented modern science.

In the text that follows we will look in some detail at Bacon’s achievements, including why and how they came about. Before that, though, let’s briefly consider just how Bacon can be said to be the inventor of modern science.

• CHAPTER 2 •

INVENTING MODERN SCIENCE

Bacon’s main claims to fame rest on three innovatory recommendations about the best way of acquiring knowledge of the natural world. These, in turn, led to other new attitudes to natural knowledge. The combination of Baconian methods with Baconian attitudes and expectations was to lead to the formation of something recognisably like modern science, and the modern scientific enterprise. What’s more, it was to set science on the road to becoming one of the dominant aspects of modern Western culture.

To begin with, he was one of the very first natural philosophers (we have to call him that because there was no such thing as a ‘scientist’ in Bacon’s day – just as there was no such thing as ‘science’ in our sense) to advocate the experimental method as the most efficient and reliable way of acquiring knowledge of the natural world. Before Bacon’s time, the study of nature was based largely on armchair speculation. It relied almost entirely on abstract reasoning, starting from a restricted range of presuppositions about the nature of the world, and its aim was to explain known phenomena in ways that were consistent with those presuppositions. We now know that these presuppositions were incorrect and that much of pre-modern natural philosophy was therefore entirely misconceived, but this would never, could never, have been realised by anyone working within the tradition of natural philosophy (and therefore taking the presuppositions for granted). It needed someone like Bacon, willing to question the very foundations of natural philosophy, to ring the changes. Furthermore, there was no concern with discovery in traditional natural philosophy. When accidental discoveries were made, natural philosophers tried to accommodate them into their presupposed schemes. But there was no incentive to go out and make discoveries. Bacon helped to change all this by showing natural philosophers how successful and powerful the experimental method could be in discovering and understanding new facts about the world.

Second, Bacon believed that knowledge of nature should be turned to the benefit of mankind by exploiting new discoveries and inventions in a practical way. Familiar as this idea seems to us, it marked a radical break from the speculative and contemplative study of nature that was typical in Bacon’s day, and that was concerned with understanding for its own sake. Bacon’s insistence on putting knowledge to use was to have the most far-reaching consequences, not only in stimulating specific discoveries and inventions, but also in changing everybody’s attitude towards, and expectations of, scientific knowledge.

Third, Bacon had an equally innovatory view of what has been called ‘the logic of scientific discovery’. The prevailing rationalist natural philosophy upheld deductive logic as the only sound form of reasoning, but Bacon insisted that deductive logic was only useful for confirming what was already known, rather than for pointing to new discoveries. Since he believed that what was already ‘known’ by traditional natural philosophy was mostly wrong, Bacon went so far as to say that deductive logic perpetuated error by confirming as true what was in fact false. As an alternative, he suggested a refinement of what is known as ‘inductive logic’, the logic of everyday experience.

If we always suffer a headache after drinking red wine, we might suppose that red wine gives us a headache. In doing so we are instinctively deploying inductive logic. All too often, though, this is not a reliable form of logic. Maybe our headaches are caused by something else we do whenever we drink red wine, but that we haven’t noticed. Accordingly, Bacon tried to develop an elaborate procedure that would, he believed, make induction more certain. This last aspect of Bacon’s philosophical reforms has been the most controversial and has divided philosophical opinion about its validity. It was nevertheless very influential in the subsequent history of science.

These three recommended changes in our approach to the understanding of nature were the primary features of Bacon’s teachings, but they led to important secondary features, which are now no less characteristic of modern science.

Science is now inseparably linked with notions of progress. As scientific knowledge advances, so does our way of life in the West. But this, too, is part of the Baconian legacy. Before Bacon, the general assumption among intellectuals was that knowledge must be recovered from the past. Adam, the first man, had known all things before the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden (see ‘Glossary’ for brief explanations of the terms and religious doctrines that appear throughout this book). Since then, wisdom had been progressively forgotten. Nobody thought that the truth of things was waiting to be discovered at some future time; it must be recovered from Ancient writers who lived nearer to Adam’s time, and who had forgotten less.

When Nicolaus Copernicus suggested in 1543 that the Earth went around the Sun, instead of the Sun around the Earth, his followers referred to it as the Pythagorean theory, not the Copernican theory. If the theory was true, the evidence for it must lie in past wisdom and, sure enough, they discovered Ancient Pythagoreans who had reputedly said the Earth moved. But Bacon was to change this – not overnight and not single-handedly, but he was the first to point the way forward to the future.

The sciences have made ‘but little progress’, Bacon wrote, because ‘[i]t is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed’. Bacon showed the way: ‘Now the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers’ (New Organon, or Novum Organum, I, Aphorism 81 – see Chapter 4 for a further explanation of this work). Nobody before Bacon urged that scientific knowledge should be put to use for improving mankind’s lot. Once Bacon put this idea forward, it led to expectations that scientific knowledge should lead to progress, not just in our knowledge, but through that to an improvement in our society.

Modern science is also regarded as the supreme form of objective knowledge. Where other claims can always be regarded with suspicion or merely a healthy scepticism, scientific claims can at least be seen as being capable of substantiation in ways that are free from any cultural, ideological or personal bias. The objectivity of scientific knowledge has come under increasing attack in recent years, particularly by sociologists of science who seek to show that it, too, is culturally biased. We needn’t go into these arguments here, suffice it to say that relatively speaking scientific knowledge remains the most reliable and objective form of knowledge we have. (Compare a scientist’s knowledge claims, for example, with those of a politician, a religious leader, a literary critic, a pundit speaking on behalf of modern art or anyone who believes, like the nineteenth-century Romantic poet John Keats, that the arts can speak truth. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, Keats wrote in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, but it would be foolish to take him literally.)

This supposed objectivity of scientific knowledge, in so far as it does exist, is also the outcome of Bacon’s views on science. The concept of objectivity had not been thought of in Bacon’s day. Things were thought of simply as being true or not true. But once, under Bacon’s influence, scientists began to think about the best way of establishing truth, the notion of objectivity emerged. Whether objective knowledge is really possible or not (and sociologists would say it isn’t), it is clearly better to aspire to a knowledge that is free from ideological bias rather than to promote claims to truth that have been deliberately conceived to support a particular ideology or ungrounded system of belief. The aspiration to objectivity in science is another Baconian legacy.

Given that modern Western science is characterised as progressive and objective, and that both these aspects are seen as being linked to the dominant presumption that scientific knowledge should be practically useful, it is impossible to deny, despite what critics might say, that the ethos and practice of modern science are essentially Baconian. Similarly, even the massive and complex organisation of modern science can be seen as the fulfilment of a Baconian dream.

Francis Bacon was a career civil servant who rose to be Lord Chancellor of England, and he always believed that the fully comprehensive and practically useful science he envisaged could only properly be pursued under the aegis of the state. The modern science-and-technology complex of advanced societies does indeed depend almost entirely on state funding and support, and many scientists are civil servants or, as in the case of research scientists in government-funded universities, effectively servants of the state. If Bacon himself never succeeded in having his plans for reform of scientific knowledge taken up by the government of which he was a part, his beliefs about the need for state support of science have certainly proved to be prophetic.

It can hardly be denied that there is much in modern science – whether we are talking about its intellectual content, its methods or its social and institutional organisation – that was never envisaged by Bacon. But no matter how far it has developed beyond anything that Bacon could have predicted, it has never lost sight of its Baconian beginnings in an objective experimental method allied to a concern to develop practical benefits leading to intellectual and social progress. Modern Western science remains a Baconian enterprise. We will look more closely at each of these aspects of his work in what follows, but before that we should consider where these ideas came from. Why was it that Bacon, and nobody else, developed these revolutionary innovations in the method of doing science?

There is no denying that Bacon was a great genius who helped to shape the modern world, but geniuses do not spring from nowhere. We want to know where their ideas might have come from, why they thought differently from others (but not so differently that nobody else could see the point of their innovations), why they were so passionate to change what others were complacent about. The historian is like a private investigator, not content to reveal that a suspect had the opportunity to commit the crime, but seeking also to strengthen the case by uncovering the motivation.

In the mysterious case of Francis Bacon, we will see that the story of how he came to do what he did takes us through unexpected and unfamiliar territory – through realms that now seem to have little or nothing to do with natural science, but that were once intimately connected with it. These are the realms of religion and magic. In the twenty-first century, religious and magical beliefs seem to be completely incompatible with, and even antithetical to, scientific knowledge. But there is a history behind the separation of these things, and Baconianism itself is part of that history.

There was a time, however, when religion, magic and knowledge of nature were much more closely connected, and even interdependent. So much so that religion and magic played their parts in motivating the life’s work of Francis Bacon.

• CHAPTER 3 •

‘BELIEVING THAT I WAS BORN FOR THE SERVICE OF MANKIND’

If we want to understand Bacon’s motivation we must look for clues to his psychology. By searching through his writings we can find, here and there, comments in which he seems to reveal his innermost thoughts and beliefs. One of the most famous examples of such revelations occurs in a preface that Bacon wrote, in 1603, for a work he later abandoned. Here Bacon tells us how he mused about his destiny:

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which like the air and the water belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might best be served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform (‘Proemium’, Of the Interpretation of Nature).

Bacon’s belief that he was ‘born for the service of mankind’ was not merely vanity and conceit. Though this might seem like an odd comment if it had been made by virtually anyone else, it is hardly surprising that Bacon should have thought this way about himself. He was in fact deliberately raised by his father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, to play a part in the high offices of the state. Sir Nicholas was himself Keeper of the Great Seal of England, making him one of the chief ministers under his sovereign, Elizabeth I, and he continually primed Francis and his older brother Anthony for service in the Elizabethan commonwealth. Although Francis talks in the quotation above about service to mankind in general, he shortly after acknowledges that, because of his family and education, he tended to think primarily of his own country.

So, what conclusion did Bacon reach about the service to mankind he was most suited to perform? Obviously he wanted to improve things somehow, but he was all too aware that works in politics – founding cities, establishing laws, deposing tyrants and the like – tended to be restricted in place and time. What was much more beneficial in the long run, he believed, was ‘the work of the Inventor’: ‘Now, among all the benefits that could be conferr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Kindling a Light in Nature’
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Notes