One reason to read Two New Sciences is because of the book’s charming naïveté. Galileo was looking at the world when it was new; he was like a child finding pretty pebbles and bringing them to his mother to be appreciated. Science as it is conducted today is for the most part unintelligible. The mathematics that underlies it is difficult for everyone to understand, and the results of experiments are processed on computers and presented in a form totally lacking in romance. From time to time a great scientist calls a press conference and earnest science writers try to understand his announcements and find a way to present them to readers of the early edition. The scientist, if he writes at all, offers the results of his labors in papers that are readable only by a handful of other specialists in his field. Probably this is the way it has to be now that all the easy truths have been discovered.
But they had not been discovered yet in Galileo’s day. He was learning astonishing things about nature just by looking at it, thinking about it, conducting experiments on it. No one had done that before. It is the sense of wondrous discovery in Two New Sciences that makes the book so attractive and so moving. Reading it, you learn more about the scientist than about the nature he studies and attempts to control. And if you are of a scientific bent I think you cannot but envy Galileo despite the crudity of his instruments, despite all the things he did not know, despite his shameful punishment.
FRANCIS BACON
1561–1616
Novum Organon
The Advancement of Learning
Essays
Francis Bacon was born in London in 1561, the younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper. After studying law he entered Parliament in 1584. He met the Earl of Essex, the royal favorite, who attempted to advance Bacon’s career. When Essex fell, Bacon was willing to be his official prosecutor, a fact that has always disturbed Bacon’s admirers. Under King James I his career was meteoric, and he rose from Solicitor-General to Lord Chancellor in a mere ten years. But in 1621 he was charged before the House of Lords with having accepted bribes. He confessed and was convicted and condemned. The king was lenient with him, but Bacon never held office again, instead devoting himself to revising his many literary works until his death in 1626.
The life of Bacon remains an enigma. About few men living in the Age of Elizabeth do we know more facts: facts about his long struggle for political influence, facts about his career as James’s chief advocate and the defender of the royal prerogative against Parliament, facts about his trial and conviction and his fall from grace, facts about his philosophical career and publications. But we do not know his heart.
Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans … Strictly speaking, he was not Lord Bacon, but Lord St. Albans. It is one of his great distinctions that he rose above a mere title and is called simply Bacon to this day.
His contributions to the history of thought are important and extensive. In a letter to his friend, the Prime Minister Lord Burleigh, he wrote, in a famous phrase, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” The claim was not, for Bacon, so all-encompassing as it would be today; he did not mean what we would mean if we said it. Put the emphasis, when you say those words, on “knowledge”; “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”—knowledge as distinct from and opposed to poetry, religion, and practical experience. Formal knowledge, in short, or science, as Bacon called it. He not only took it as his province but also defended it against the numerous attacks that were common in his day. And he wrote a fine book about it, to which he gave the overall title The Great Instauration. It is a special book even though unfinished; in fact, only small pieces of it were completed by Bacon. No single man could have written it all.
The Great Instauration is comprised of a number of parts, only some of which were written by Bacon. First, there is magnificent introductory matter—a few pages only, but breathtaking in their eloquence and scope. Second, there is the “Novum Organon,” or “New Logic,” an account of a new method, as Bacon conceived it, of acquiring knowledge—the so-called inductive method—together with warnings about the obstacles that stand in the way of knowledge. Third, there is “The Advancement of Learning,” a classification of the sciences based on an analysis of the powers of the human intellect. Finally, there are a group of chapters, papers, and fragments dealing with particular questions in philosophy and the sciences that, if expanded indefinitely, would have been the exemplification of all that Bacon thought and of what he planned to do—or wanted the human race to do.
Much of this makes for excellent reading, and there are pages of both the “Novum Organon” and “The Advancement of Learning” that soar. Of particular note in the “Novum Organon” is the analysis of what Bacon called the Idols, or deep fallacies of mind, that hinder clear sight and understanding. Of these, the “Idols of the Tribe,” or fallacies incident to mankind in general, are probably the most important. Humans, as Bacon knew, are inclined to believe what they want to believe, to see what they want to see, to assume more regularity in nature than they have reason to assume, to lend credibility to the evidence of their senses more than they have reason to do. There are also “Idols of the Cave,” as Bacon said, which are the fallacies caused by individual quirks and fancies. Words, too, though necessary for discourse, make discourse difficult, and systems of thought and received methods of investigation make it difficult for new ideas to be accepted. All of this is excellent and true.
But Bacon knew that, hard as it is to comprehend the world of external nature—which can be controlled, as he was one of the first to observe, only by obeying its laws—it is even harder to comprehend man himself. His attempts to do so, and to convey his comprehension and understanding, in short his wisdom, are incorporated in his famous Essays, undoubtedly his most popular and most loved book. In the introduction to this short work he wrote that, unlike his philosophical and scientific works, his essays would “come home to men’s business and bosoms.” And indeed they do.
They are full of trenchant and memorable statements or aphorisms that sum up Bacon’s thinking on a subject and often sum up our own as well. In the “Novum Organon” he had made the revolutionary proposal that there are in nature a small number of “forms,” or essential natures, or—as we would call them—fundamental laws that govern all of nature’s operations and that must be understood if we are to understand nature as a whole. In the Essays he is suggesting something similar about human nature, and the first sentences of the Essays, most of which appear in books of quotations because of their pithiness and truth, are the forms that Bacon has discovered in a long life of observation of both people and things.