Nature, therefore, must be called upon to explain her own phenomena. Since the laws of nature are found by investigating nature phenomena as we experience them, the laws must be a part of nature and can be found nowhere else. To explain nature phenomena by referring them to spiritual influence is no real explanation. To say that God moves the planets is to involve the subject in mystery. Here is where Galileo shows that he does not belong to the Scholastics or the Mystics or the Humanists. He searched for some constant element, and not for a “vital force” behind nature phenomena. He declared this constant element to be motion—measurable motion. He is the author of the theory that mechanics is the mathematical theory of motion.Science was therefore taken by him out of the paralyzing grip of the theologian.
The Life of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam (1561–1626). Francis Bacon was a native of London and received his university education at Cambridge. He was in the English diplomatic service at an early age, but he later returned to London and took up the legal profession. At the age of thirty-two he entered Parliament and became immediately distinguished as a debater. At forty-three he became legal adviser of the crown, and when he was fifty-six he was made Lord Chancellor. After a brilliant career in public office he was accused and convicted of bribery and corruption, deposed from office, and heavily fined. His most notable writings are his Essays, two parts of his uncompleted Instauratio Magna, viz., De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and Novum Organum, and his New Atlantis, a Utopian fragment.
The Position of Bacon in Philosophy. Tradition has frequently placed Bacon as the founder of modern philosophy. This estimate is due to a remark by Diderot, which was repeated by many French writers. The estimate, however, rests on a misapprehension of Bacon’s influence. Bacon was more of a Humanist than a technical philosopher, and in his constructive philosophy he seems not only to have had no influence upon his contemporaries, but also to have been uninfluenced by them. He was unconscious of the influence of Kepler and Galileo and their mighty scientific constructions. Bacon’s Novum Organum, which embodies his scientific methods, had no influence upon his own time, nor was it read in the seventeenth century. Its influence was first felt in the eighteenth century. However, all thismust be qualified in one respect. Bacon’s New Atlantis did have an immediate influence. The ideal of a college of science, which Bacon presented in his New Atlantis, was not only the cause of the work of Diderot in his Encyclopedia in the eighteenth century, but what is more important, it had effect in his own time. It led to the founding of the Royal Society, thirty-six years after Bacon’s death, and later to the founding of similar academies abroad. While the reader may be confused by the conflicting estimates of Bacon, the words of his own countryman, Sir David Brewster, may be accepted as embodying the truth: “Had Bacon never lived, the student of nature would have found in the works and writings of Galileo not only the principles of inductive philosophy, but also its practical application to the noblest efforts of invention and discovery.” So far from being the founder of modern science, Bacon developed only one side of it, the inductive side, and that without success. He identified deduction with the Aristotelian syllogism, and he was therefore unaware of the importance of the use of mathematics in the method of deduction. He did not seem to have the slightest idea that mathematics was going to be the scientific method; consequently science has gone much further than Bacon dreamed it would go. Bacon’s importance in the Renaissance does not consist in his contribution to the content of philosophy or to his successful formulation of the scientific method.
Wherein then lies the value of Bacon’s work as a philosopher?[10] Bacon was the first in England to collectthe fruits of the Renaissance and give them a secular character. Taking them out of the hands of the theologian, he, a lawyer, “gave them a legal existence by the most eloquent plea that has ever been made for them.” It was a time when philosophy and science were passing out of the hands of the theologian; and Bacon, feeling that science, including philosophy, should be secularized, drew a sharp line between the work of science and that of theology. Out of his great contempt for antiquity, Bacon voiced for England the contemporary reaction against the old scholastic methods. He set up the ideal and gave directions for following it. He issued the call to go from abstractions back to things. A man of worldly wisdom and pungency, his nature was buoyant in its belief in the coming age. He had confidence amounting to an optimism that final principles would be found to explain all the particulars of the “new world.” He was a prophet who outlined his prophecy. He felt that not only nature but all the activities of man would be reduced to some simple principles. He shared and expressed the confidence of his time that wonderful things were to be revealed; that nothing is impossible to man, provided man hits upon the right key to nature’s secrets. Just as every age, that feels itself upon the threshold of a new epoch, writes Utopias,[11] so Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, the Utopian fragment, for his age. This is the literary expression of his optimismabout the future of a distinctively secular science. The world of the New Atlantis is the world of new machines. Bacon’s most ambitious scientific contribution to the same end is his Instauratio Magna. Of this only two parts were completed: De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and Novum Organum. Bacon is best known in philosophy by the second part, which was thus named to contrast it with the “old” Organum of Aristotle.
The high influence that Bacon gained later among philosophers may therefore be accounted for by the association of his eminent position and wonderful personality with his bold expression of this congenial utilitarianism. Even in that rich Elizabethan age of English literature, he was prominent as a writer and politician. He had occupied high political positions under James I; but his peculiar personality would in itself have attracted attention, for his genius was such that any of the products of that age—even the plays of Shakespeare—have seemed possible to him. Pope describes him as “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” Macaulay says in his essay, Bacon, that there were many things that he loved more than virtue and many that he feared more than guilt. His career shows that he loved himself, wealth, and learning. His unusual love for learning may be safely taken as his excuse for his unscrupulous lust for wealth. His great versatility prevented his success in any one direction, but he had the power of expressing the feeling of his impressive age and of becoming its personal representative.
The Aim of Bacon. Bacon sought to secularize philosophy by making it the same as science. It was the age when Nature was conceived to be identical with theworld of the natural sciences. Bacon stood in this age as the formulator of the scientific usefulness of philosophy. Philosophy is to ameliorate social conditions and enrich human life by bringing nature under control. Ancient and mediæval times had not been occupied with the improvement of human society, but Bacon was inspired with the feeling of the modern statesman for such improvement. The true test of philosophy, according to Bacon, is what it will do. That philosophy is worth while which will effectively remove the weighing conditions upon human society, so that there are no longer two classes,—those that sacrifice and those that satisfy their ambitions. This dominant utilitarian motive in Bacon sets him in opposition to pure theoretical and contemplative knowledge, and makes him the father of utilitarianism and positivism[12] in England.[13] Knowledge is the only kind of permanent power, and man can master the world when he gives up verbal discussions and belief in magic. Man must gain a positive insight into nature. Science and philosophy must be separated from theology, and philosophy must be reduced to science. Thus while aiming to give a tangible form to the scholastic doctrine of the “twofold truth,” Bacon through his utilitarianism missed the goal reached by Galileo and Descartes.
The Method of Bacon. Bacon says that the method of the scientist should not be like that of the spiderthat spins a web out of himself, nor like that of the ant which merely collects material, but like that of the bee which collects, assimilates, and transforms. Bacon’s original inspiration had been his respect for method, and this grew more pronounced. Philosophy, i. e. science, is method. With Bacon we see the beginning of philosophy cut loose from personality and over-valued because it had mechanical accuracy. Nevertheless, the method of Bacon was very comprehensive. It included on the one hand a critical survey of the past, and on the other an anticipatory programme for the science of the future. Let us now turn to these two aspects of his method.
(a) Bacon’s criticism of the past was a trenchant criticism of prevailing philosophy, and amounted to a break with the past. Bacon felt that what passed for science in his day was but a pretence. In the presence of the facts of life traditional science was but empty words. The early thinkers are not the ancients. We are the ancients, for we embody in ourselves all the preceding centuries. Thus does Bacon swing from the mediæval blind acceptance of the past to an equally blind rejection of the past. But why did the ancient thinkers err? Not because they were not men of talent, nor because they lacked in intellectual opportunity; but because their method of procedure led them astray. The early thinkers followed wrong paths, and their results, which we now possess, are vain.
What must be our attitude in the presence of this traditional philosophy? We must dispossess ourselves of the prejudices that have misled the past, for they form the obstacles to our true knowledge of the world. The roots of the errors that have infected philosophyare “fantastic, contentious, and delicate learning.” We must not, indeed, trust to our every-day perceptions; for although science is based on our perceptions, our every-day perceptions are corrupted by our uncritical habits of thought. Thus there have arisen perversions and falsifications, of which we must first of all be rid. Bacon calls these Idols.[14] Idols are false images, that intervene between us and the truth and are mistaken for reality. Bacon makes four general classes of Idols:—
(1) The Idols of the Tribe, or the presuppositions common to the human race.