Bacon

by R. W. Church

For we find that the greatest differences of opinion exist on the value of what he did. Not only very unfavourable judgments have been passed upon it, on general grounds—as an irreligious, or a shallow and one-sided, or a poor and "utilitarian" philosophy, and on a definite comparison of it with the actual methods and processes which as a matter of history have been the real means of scientific discovery—but also some of those who have most admired his genius, and with the deepest love and reverence have spared no pains to do it full justice, have yet come to the conclusion that as an instrument and real method of work Bacon's attempt was a failure. It is not only De Maistre and Lord Macaulay who dispute his philosophical eminence. It is not only the depreciating opinion of a contemporary like Harvey, who was actually doing what Bacon was writing about. It is not only that men who after the long history of modern science have won their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily experience with the ways in which it works—a chemist like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard—say that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's methods. It is not only that a clear and exact critic like M. de Rémusat looks at his attempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, and are now practically useless;" and assuming that Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete as far as the progress of science up to his time could direct it, proceeds to construct a Novum Organum Renovatum. But Bacon's writings have recently undergone the closest examination by two editors, whose care for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their capacity is undoubted, and their willingness to take trouble boundless. And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, with all their interest in every detail of Bacon's work, and admiration of the way in which he performed it, make no secret of their conclusion that he failed in the very thing on which he was most bent—the discovery of practical and fruitful ways of scientific inquiry. "Bacon," says Mr. Spedding, "failed to devise a practicable method for the discovery of the Forms of Nature, because he misconceived the conditions of the case.... For the same reason he failed to make any single discovery which holds its place as one of the steps by which science has in any direction really advanced. The clew with which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far enough; before he had nearly attained his end he was obliged either to come back or to go on without it."

"His peculiar system of philosophy," says Mr. Spedding in another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the "organum," the "formula," the "clavis," the "ars ipsa interpretandi naturam," the "filum Labyrinthi," or by whatever of its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a command over the powers of nature—of this philosophy we can make nothing. If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way."—Works, iii. 171.

What his method really was is itself a matter of question. Mr. Ellis speaks of it as a matter "but imperfectly apprehended." He differs from his fellow-labourer Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its central and characteristic innovation. Mr. Ellis finds it in an improvement and perfection of logical machinery. Mr. Spedding finds it in the formation of a great "natural and experimental history," a vast collection of facts in every department of nature, which was to be a more important part of his philosophy than the Novum Organum itself. Both of them think that as he went on, the difficulties of the work grew upon him, and caused alterations in his plans, and we are reminded that "there is no didactic exposition of his method in the whole of his writings," and that "this has not been sufficiently remarked by those who have spoken of his philosophy."

In the first place, the kind of intellectual instrument which he proposed to construct was a mistake. His great object was to place the human mind "on a level with things and nature" (ut faciamus intellectum humanum rebus et naturæ parem), and this could only be done by a revolution in methods. The ancients had all that genius could do for man; but it was a matter, he said, not of the strength and fleetness of the running, but of the rightness of the way. It was a new method, absolutely different from anything known, which he proposed to the world, and which should lead men to knowledge, with the certainty and with the impartial facility of a high-road. The Induction which he imagined to himself as the contrast to all that had yet been tried was to have two qualities. It was to end, by no very prolonged or difficult processes, in absolute certainty. And next, it was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds and capacities. It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. "Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure" says Mr. Ellis, "such that all men should be capable of employing it, are the two great features of the Baconian system." This he thought possible, and this he set himself to expound—"a method universally applicable, and in all cases infallible." In this he saw the novelty and the vast importance of his discovery. "By this method all the knowledge which the human mind was capable of receiving might be attained, and attained without unnecessary labour." It was a method of "a demonstrative character, with the power of reducing all minds to nearly the same level." The conception, indeed, of a "great Art of knowledge," of an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a "Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindered discovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should be certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can be; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human mind and the field it has to work in.

In the next place, though the prominence which he gave to the doctrine of Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after the event, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element in his system which gave it life and power and influence on the course of human thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far from complete and satisfactory. Without troubling himself about the theory of Induction, as De Rémusat has pointed out, he contented himself with applying to its use the precepts of common-sense and a sagacious perception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed. But even these precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and the qualities needed for working rules. The change is great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the Novum Organum, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared and systematized. But there is a great interval between his method of experimenting, his "Hunt of Pan"—the three tables of Instances, "Presence," "Absence" and "Degrees, or Comparisons," leading to a process of sifting and exclusion, and to the First Vintage, or beginnings of theory—and say, for instance, Mill's four methods of experimental inquiry: the method of agreement, of differences, of residues, and of concomitant variations. The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations and classifications are subtle and instructive. But in his hands nothing comes of them. They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions; they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations and guesses, sometimes—as in connecting Heat and Motion—very near to later and more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He had a radically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature. He looked on them as things which told their own story, and suggested the questions which ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materials which his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, and another be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms." Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and ingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes them into their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. But we look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even to suggest. Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever suggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices—his great bugbear was so much the "intellectus sibi permissus" the mind given liberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts—that he missed the true place of the rational and formative element in his account of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first "vintage" of provisional generalisations. But of the way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that come no one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare his elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the Novum Organum, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's Treatise on Dew, or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural Philosophy. And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is to disappear.

"That his method is impracticable," says Mr. Ellis, "cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it. In all cases this process involves an element to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of 'Comparence' and 'Exclusion,' namely, the application to the facts of observation of a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the discoverer antecedently to the act of induction. It may be said that this idea is precisely one of the naturæ into which the facts of observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed. And this is in one sense true; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which results from it. In most cases the act of induction follows as a matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been introduced."—Ellis, General Preface, i. 38.

Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy so narrow as to exclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, "it cannot be denied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed as the subject of his inductive method; but Bacon's scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often very imperfect—more imperfect than they ought to have been for his time. Of one large part of science, which was just then beginning to be cultivated with high promise of success—the knowledge of the heavens—he speaks with a coldness and suspicion which contrasts remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to the sphere of the earth and within reach of the senses. He holds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, wonderful as they are to him, are—compared with other things—out of his track of inquiry. He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his "Descriptio Globi Intellectualis" and his Thema Coeli He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work. But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy. He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did. He was not a mathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do. He cared so little about them that he takes no notice of Napier's invention of Logarithms. He was not able to trace how the direct information of the senses might be rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident results of geometry and arithmetic. He was impatient of the subtleties of astronomical calculations; they only attempted to satisfy problems about the motion of bodies in the sky, and told us nothing of physical fact; they gave us, as Prometheus gave to Jove, the outside skin of the offering, which was stuffed inside with straw and rubbish. He entirely failed to see that before dealing with physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathematically. "It is well to remark," as Mr. Ellis says, "that none of Newton's astronomical discoveries could have been made if astronomers had not continued to render themselves liable to Bacon's censure." Bacon little thought that in navigation the compass itself would become a subordinate instrument compared with the helps given by mathematical astronomy. In this, and in other ways, Bacon rose above his time in his conceptions of what might be, but not of what was; the list is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the instances which show that he was ill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his mind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities—"the only collection," says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we find in his works," and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in which they were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of the famous experiment of Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipated himself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how for one reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in the terms he employed, and the assumptions on which he argued. The caution does not seem to have occurred to him that the statement of a fact may, in nine cases out of ten, involve a theory. His whole doctrine of "Forms" and "Simple natures," which is so prominent in his method of investigation, is an example of loose and slovenly use of unexamined and untested ideas. He allowed himself to think that it would be possible to arrive at an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the doctrine of appetites and passions and inclinations and dislikes and horrors in inorganic nature. His whole physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives this account—"that in every tangible body there is a spirit covered and enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and invisible, and yet having place and dimension, and real." ... "a middle nature between flame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent." Yet these are the very things for which he holds up Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Italian speculators to reprobation and scorn. The clearness of his thinking was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decorative material which his meditation brought along with it. The defect was greater than that which even his ablest defenders admit. It was more than that in that "greatest and radical difference, which he himself observes" between minds, the difference between minds which were apt to note distinctions, and those which were apt to note likenesses, he was, without knowing it, defective in the first. It was that in many instances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which he charged on the older philosophies: haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his real ignorance.

What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history of science?

1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones; and they had never before been propounded so systematically, so fully, and so earnestly. His was not the first mind on whom these principles had broken. Men were, and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of nature precisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of real things which he enjoined. They had seen, as he saw, the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with the contradictions or corrections or verifications of experience. In Italy, in Germany, in England there were laborious and successful workers, who had long felt that to be in touch with nature was the only way to know. But no one had yet come before the world to proclaim this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain path to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolution in the methods of interpreting her; and this Bacon did with an imposing authority and power which enforced attention. He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like Harvey with a largeness and richness which they could not command, and which they perhaps smiled at. He disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courage and clearness of mind to formulate. What Bacon did, indeed, and what he meant, are separate matters. He meant an infallible method by which man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meant an irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time. It was too much. He himself saw no more of what he meant than Columbus did of America. But what he did was to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was the successful road to know. No one had yet done this, and he did it. His writings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achievements. "The man who is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, "wonders to see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and war," and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Bacon impressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle observation and forcible statement, that "the man who is growing great by electrifying a bottle" is as important a person in the world's affairs as the arbiter of peace and war.

2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a larger science. But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form of a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of the whole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractive lights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disaster could make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his rich imagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable. It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the Novum Organum, in the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentis, in the romance of the New Atlantis. It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be humble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it—this announcement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world—a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined; this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, "such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of things and men's minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined," yet more than verified in the wonders which our eyes have seen—it is this which gives its prerogative to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doctrine of Forms, did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident. There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the glory which it threw around the investigation of nature. It was the presence and the power of a great idea—long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organum, in the sentiment that "a fool could not have written it, and a wise man would not"—it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.