Francis
Bacon
| Francis
Bacon |
Francis Bacon was the earliest effective campaigner, though his assault was not direct. The thrust of his message was that life could be improved if only we tried to extend our knowledge of the world - a political call in essence.
But he added to it his idea of how such new knowledge had best be acquired.
The object of such effort, Bacon continued to assume, would be the grasping of forms.
But he began the undermining of this fundamental concept by attacking the notion that forms were straightforwardly graspable by the intellect.
The forms of substances, at any rate (such as the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, of water, of air), he claimed were too 'perplexed' to be accessible in any immediate way, and he proposed instead a roundabout route involving a study of the thing's or a stuff's properties (as we should call them today) which would have to be undertaken if their forms were to be grasped.
With the next generation of thinkers (Robert Boyle and friends), however, it became clear that the Scholastic notion of a form could not usefully be distorted in this fashion, and it was effectively discarded.
An placement of Bacon in the new thinking is presented by d'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse to the great Encyclopédie of the mid 18th Century:
"The immortal Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon [1561–1626], ought to be placed at the head of these illustrious personages. His works, so justly esteemed (and more esteemed, indeed, than they are known), merit our reading even more than our praises. One would be tempted to regard him as the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of the philosophers, considering his sound and broad views, the multitude of objects to which his mind turned itself, and the boldness of his style, which everywhere joined the most sublime images with the most rigorous precision. Born in the depths of the most profound night, Bacon was aware that philosophy did not yet exist, although many men doubtless flattered themselves that they excelled in it (for the cruder a century is, the more it believes itself to be educated in all that can be known). Therefore, he began by considering generally the various objects of all the natural sciences. He divided these sciences into different branches, of which he made the most exact enumeration that was possible for him. He examined what was already known concerning each of these objects and made the immense catalogue of what remained to be discovered. This is the aim of his admirable book The Advancement of Learning. In his Novum Organum, he perfects the views that he had presented in the first book, carries them further, and makes known the necessity of experimental physics, of which no one was yet aware. Hostile to systems, he conceives of philosophy as being only that part of our knowledge which should contribute to making us better or happier, thus apparently confining it within the limits of the science of useful things, and everywhere he recommends the study of Nature. His other writings were produced on the same pattern. Everything, even their titles, proclaims the man of genius, the mind that sees things in the large view. He collects facts, he compares experiments and points out a large number to be made; he invites scholars to study and perfect the arts, which he regards as the most exalted and most essential part of human science; he sets forth with a noble simplicity his Conjectures and Thoughts on the different objects worthy of men’s interest; [20] and he would have been able to say, like that old man in Terence, that nothing which touches humanity was alien to him. Natural science, ethics, politics, economics, all seem to have been within the competence of that brilliant and profound mind. And we do not know which we ought to admire more, the riches he lavishes upon all the subjects he treats or the dignity with which he speaks of them. His writings can best be compared to those of Hippocrates on medicine; and they would be no less admired, nor less read, if the culture of the mind were as dear to mankind as the conservation of health. But in every area only the works of those who head a school of disciples make a brilliant impression. Bacon was not of that number, and the form of his philosophy prevented it; it was too wise to astonish anyone. Scholasticism, which continued to dominate, could not be overthrown except by bold and new opinions. And apparently circumstances are not such that a philosopher who is content to say to men: “Here is the little that you have learned, there is what remains for you to find,” is destined to cause much stir among his contemporaries. If we did not know with what discretion, and with what superstition almost, one ought to judge a genius so sublime, we might even dare reproach Chancellor Bacon for having perhaps been too timid. He asserted that the scholastics had enervated science by their petty questions, and that the mind ought to sacrifice the study of general beings for that of individual objects; nonetheless, he seems to have shown a little too much caution or deference to the dominant taste of his century in his frequent use of the terms of the scholastics, sometimes even of scholastic principles, and in the use of divisions and subdivisions, fashionable in his time. After having burst so many irons, this great man was still held by certain chains which he could not, or dared not, break."
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