Novum Organum

“In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” Francis Bacon

By Alex P. Vidal

SIR Francis Bacon was an Enlightenment of almost universal accomplishment.

He rose quickly as a lawyer during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and was knighted in 1603 before being named chancellor of King James I in 1618.

His career took a tragic turn in 1621 when he was charged with financial corruption, expelled from Parliament, and briefly imprisoned before his death in 1626.

Throughout his career as a royal official, he wrote histories, moral essays, and philosophical treaties.

But he never lost his interest in scientific studies, and, although not a scientist except in an amateur sense, he has traditionally been regarded as the father of scientific empiricism, the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sense of experience, observation, and experimentation.

In books such as The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620), Bacon set the tone for a new standard of scientific inquiry and attacked the medieval Scholastic belief that most truth had already been discovered by calling into question the traditional reverence for the authority of the ancient authors.

Bacon urged his contemporaries to have confidence in their own abilities and see change as desirable.

EXCERPTS

The following excerpts, published by the Aspects of Western Civilization, focus on the goals of Bacon’s new methods of scientific inquiry and offer some of the thoughts on the relationship between religion and science:

“I Have Made a Beginning of the Work”: Novum Organum (1620)

For my own part at least, in obedience to the everlasting love of truth, I have committed myself to the uncertainties and difficulties and solitudes of the ways, and relying on the divine assistance have upheld my mind both against the shocks and embattled ranks of opinion, and against my own private and inward hesitations and scruples, and against the fogs and clouds of nature, and the phantoms flitting about on every side; in the hope of providing at last for the present and future generations guidance more faithful and secure.

Wherein if I have made any progress, the way has been opened to me by no other means than the true and legitimate humiliation of the human spirit.

For all those before me have applied themselves to the invention of arts have but cast a glance or two upon facts and examples and experience, and straightway proceeded…to invoke their own spirits to give them oracles, I on the contrary, dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature, withdraw my intellect from them no further than my suffice to let the images and rays of natural objects meet in a point, as they do in the sense of vision…And by these means I suppose that I have established forever a true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which has thrown into confusion all the affairs of the human family…I have sought on all sides diligently and faithfully to provide helps for the sense—substitutes to supply its failures, rectifications to correct its errors; and this I endeavor to accomplish not so much by instruments as by experiments.

For the subtlety of experiments is far greater than that of the sense itself, even when assisted by the exquisite instruments; such experiments, I mean, as are skillfully and artificially devised for the express purpose of determining the point in question.

To the immediate and proper perception of the sense therefore I do not give much weight; but I contrive that the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the experiment, and that the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.

But I design not only to indicate and mark out the ways, but also to enter them. And therefore the third part of the work embraces the Phenomena of the Universe; that is to say, experience of every kind….Those who aspire not to guess and divine, but to discover the know; who propose not to devise mimic and fabulous worlds of their own, but to examine and dissect the nature of this very world itself; must go to facts themselves for everything….This therefore we must have, or the business must be forever abandoned.

But up to this day such has been the condition of men in this matter, that it is no wonder if nature will not give herself into their hands….

I have a beginning of the work—a beginning, as I hope, not unimportant….For the matter in hand is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortunes of the human race, and all power of operation.

For man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of nature’s order in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing.

For the chain of causes cannot by any force be loosed or broken, nor can nature be commanded except by being obeyed.

And to those twin objects, human Knowledge and human Power, do really meet in one; and it is from ignorance of causes that operation fails.