Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science

302 Pages·1968·15.23 MB·English

by  Paolo Rossi

Francis Bacon
From Magic to Science
by
Paolo Rossi
translated from the Italian by
Sacha Rabinovitch
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Translated from the Italian
FRANCESCO BACONE*. DALLA MAGIA ALLA SCIENZA
(Editori Laterza, Bari 1957)
First published in Great Britain ig68
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London, E.C.4
Printed in Great Britain by
Butler & Tanner Ltd
Frome and London
English translation
© Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd ig68
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism
SBN 7100 6016 5
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DfV73$E
to the memory of my father
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Contents
Introduction page ix
Introduction to the English edition xvi
I The Mechanical Arts, Magic, and Science i
II The Refutation of Philosophies 36
III The Classical Fable 73
IV Logic, Rhetoric, and Method 135
V Language and Communication 152
VI Rhetorical Tradition and the Method of Science 186
List of Abbreviations used in the Notes 224
Notes 227
Index 273
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Introduction
Among the asserters of free reason’s claim
Our nation’s not the least in worth or fame
The world to Bacon does not only owe
Its present knowledge, but its future too.
JOHN DRYDEN
On y voit que Locke est successeur de Bacon, ce qui est incon­
testable; ony voit que Locke, k son tour, engendre Helvetius;
etque tous ces ennemis du genre humain r6unis . . . descendent
de Bacon.
J. DE MAISTRE
Francis Bacon lived between 1561 and 1626 in an age of con­
flicting political and cultural ideas. In those years the seeds of
England’s political and industrial power were sown, the founda­
tions of the Empire were laid; England was drawn into inter­
national politics by her support of the Dutch rebels and the
French Protestants; Raleigh’s establishment in Virginia opened
the doors to colonisation; England defeated the Spanish
Armada and sacked Cadiz; Scotland, Ireland, and England
were united to form a political whole; the struggle of Parlia­
ment against monopolies foreshadowed the increasing inter­
vention of both Houses in financial and commercial legislation
and religious matters. This was the age of Elizabeth, Marlowe,
and Shakespeare; an age of vitality and exuberance where new
urges rubbed shoulders with century-old traditions; a decisive
age both for English and European history.
Many aspects of this civilisation were not new but derived
ix
INTRODUCTION
from medieval English and European culture. For instance,
/the typical seventeenth-century intellectual probings are a
direct legacy ofj^ccamist empiricism, the Occamist concept
j of knowledge as experienceTancl of nominalism—of all those
doctrines, in fact, which questioned the Thomist compromise
and the translation of Christianity into Aristotelian terms on
which Scholastic learning was based. A new science of nature
and a new form of religious belief were inspired by Occam’s
notion of experience. Further, a revival of the classics, the
anti-clerical revolt, and the birth of a new philosophy of nature
widened the gap that separated English culture from syste­
matic theology and Aristotelianism. The English humanists’
distaste for ‘barbarous’ forms of theological erudition and their
partiality to a religious revival that would reveal the practical
aspects of the Gospels and oppose theological definitions, im­
plied a radical change of attitude towards the corpus of meta­
physical doctrines. Thus the urge to reinstate the Gospels in
their integrity that we find in John Golet and Thomas More
was merged with an Erasmian rebellion against Scholasticism.
Yet scholars have discovered links between this period of history
and earlier traditions, even where these had previously been
denied.
S ’ However the fact remains that around 1600 the English
w intellectual was more than half medieval and around 1660
I he was more than half modem.1 Such a transformation, in­
volving the whole economic and social structure of a country,
besides its intellectual manifestations, is too far-reaching to be
dealt with here in detail. But it is only against the background
of this upheaval that the peculiar mentality of an age which
opened with Bacon’s programme and closed with Newton’s
laws can be fully appreciated.
After the great reforms of King Henry VIII a new class of
landed gentry came to occupy the political foreground, replac­
ing the clergy and that feudal aristocracy which had perished
in the Wars of the Roses. Macaulay, in his famous essay on
Bacon, paints a brilliant portrait of this first generation of ‘new
men’ to which Bacon’s father belonged. They were the first
professional statesman England had ever produced; though
they had grown up in the midst of theological controversies
and were in the vanguard of intellectual life because they were
INTRODUCTION
jPro test ant s.jjieyshqwed little religious zeal or fanaticism, and
their reform of the Church of England'Was accomplished by
appealing to the anti-Catholicism of public opinion and bank­
ing on the success of the European Protestants. These men had
none of the pomp and majesty of the next generation of courtiers
and politicians, nor their daring adventurousness, but the
future greatness of England was built on their skilful, cautious
diplomacy. Queen Elizabeth’s England, governed by this new
class of men of law and country squires, knew a period of ex­
traordinary prosperity; and from France and Holland, where
religious dissensions were raging, came workmen and merchants
bringing with them capital, technical ability, and initiative.
As more and more new industries sprang up England was
changed from an agricultural into an industrial nation. Her
first industrial revolution took place in the hundred years
L .k'
following Cromwell’s abolition of the monasteries. Between ■V ,
V*
1575 and 1642 England became the leading European country
in mining and heavy industries; the average annual production
of pit coal rose from 210 tons in the decade 1551-60 to nearly (
two million in the decade 1681-90. Wool had always been sent
to Flanders for the manufacture of cloth, but now there were
cloth-weavers in every town and village; companies were
chartering fleets for trade, voyages of discovery, and piracy,
thus adding to England’s wealth and power. The number of
ships weighing over 100 tons rose from 35 in 1545, to 183 in
1558, to 350 in 1620. The port of London saw ships from Asia
berthed beside ships from the New World, and expeditions
launched against the galleons of Spain. In 155^, while the 7
sixteen-year-old Bacon was rebelling against Aristotelianism,
Drake, who had repeated Magellan’s venture, was returning
home laden with Spanish spoil. In 1584 Walter Raleigh founded
the first English colony in America and the same year the
Levant Company—later to become the East India Company—
was established in London.
Technology, commerce, and banking are the principal ^
activities of such a society, and Puntamsm responded admirably ^ \
to“its "needs; the idea of a God who could be reached by a y
diligent conquest of reality was, indeed, far more amenable to
these prac tical men and women than the idea of contemplation.
Tt is for action that God maintained! us and our activities,
xi
INTRODUCTION
work is the moral as well as the natural end of power.* This is
a passage from a contemporary religious text and not, as one
might suppose, from Bacon. Literature too reflects this attitude.
The one desire of Marlowe’s Faustus is to satisfy his thirst for
knowledge and power. He wants to know and to possess all:
he is willing to sell his soul to Mephistopheles in order to acquire
all the gold of the Indies and the Oceans, to know every plant
that grows on the earth and every star that shines in the
heavens. Hell and the after-life are ‘trifles and mere old-wives*
tales’ but ‘oh might I see Hell and return again, how happy
were I then!*
But the merry pagan aspect of Elizabethan England had its
counterpart in the pessimistic, morbid vein that runs through
English literature from Sackville to Spenser, from Shakespeare
to Donne and Browne, reaching its climax in the reign of
James I. In the same way Bacon’s attitude was balanced by
the survival of medieval Scholastic traditions in men such as
Everard Digby, Richard Hooker, and John Case. Though we
tend to forget it, the great Elizabethans, Shakespeare, Spenser,
Marlowe, and Sidney drew their cosmology neither from Ramus
nor from atomist physics, but from these medieval Scholastic
and magico-Hatonist traditions.
Besides showing the dangers of indiscriminate generalisa­
tions these reflections may throw some light on the complexity
| of the English intellectual scene in its transition from Renais­
sance to modem times. Many early seventeenth-century writers
reveal an assortment of conflicting influences: classical culture
and the demands of a new logic; scientific experimentalism
and magico-alchemical enquiries; astrology and Copernican
astronomy; atomistic theories of matter and the quest for the
philosophers* stone; classical mythology and the evocation of
demons; pagan and evangelical moralities; political agitation
and contemplative ideals,2 while others lived passionately
through a tumultuous succession of contradictory experien­
ces whose diversity—in true Renaissance style—they did not
attempt to reconcile or justify.
Complexity and contradiction are certainly not absent from
f Bacon’s own writings. Thus he has quite naturally been seen
i as the first modern philosopher, a typical product of Renais-
\ sance culture, the theorist and fatheTof empinasm^ a ration-
~ xii