Government suffers, precisely like science, for lack of philosophy. Philosophy bears to science the same relationship which statesmanship bears to politics: movement guided by total knowledge and perspective, as against aimless and individual seeking. Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy. “It is wrong to trust the natural body to empirics, who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but who know neither the cause of the disease, nor the constitution of patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed by empirical statesmen, unless well mixed with others who are grounded in learning . . . . Though he might be thought partial to his profession who said, ‘States would then be happy, when either kings were philosophers or philosophers kings,’ yet so much is verified by experience, that the best times have happened under wise and learned princes.”70 And he reminds us of the great emperors who ruled Rome after Domitian and before Commodus.
So Bacon, like Plato and us all, exalted his hobby, and offered it as the salvation of man. But he recognized, much more clearly than Plato (and the distinction announces the modern age), the necessity of specialist science, and of soldiers and armies of specialist research. No one mind, not even Bacon’s, could cover the whole field, though he should look from Olympus’ top itself. He knew he needed help, and keenly felt his loneliness in the mountain-air of his unaided enterprise. “What comrades have you in your work?” he asks a friend. “As for me, I am in the completest solitude.”71 He dreams of scientists coördinated in specialization by constant communion and coöperation, and by some great organization holding them together to a goal. “Consider what may be expected from men abounding in leisure, and from association of labors, and from successions of ages; the rather because it is not a way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that of reasoning), but within which the labors and industries of men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the best effort be collected and distributed, and then combined. For then only will men begin to know their strength when, instead of great numbers doing all the same things, one shall take charge of one thing, and another of another.”72 Science, which is the organization of knowledge, must itself be organized.
And this organization must be international; let it pass freely over the frontiers, and it may make Europe intellectually one. “The next want I discover is the little sympathy and correspondence which exists between colleges and universities, as well throughout Europe as in the same state and kingdom.”73 Let all these universities allot subjects and problems among themselves, and coöperate both in research and in publication. So organized and correlated, the universities might be deemed worthy of such royal support as would make them what they shall be in Utopia—centers of impartial learning ruling the world. Bacon notes “the mean salaries apportioned to public lectureships, whether in the sciences or the arts”;74 and he feels that this will continue till governments take over the great tasks of education. “The wisdom of the ancientest and best times always complained that states were too busy with laws, and too remiss in point of education.”75 His great dream is the socialization of science for the conquest of nature and the enlargement of the power of man.
And so he appeals to James I, showering upon him the flattery which he knew his Royal Highness loved to sip. James was a scholar as well as a monarch, prouder of his pen than of his sceptre or his sword; something might be expected of so literary and erudite a king. Bacon tells James that the plans he has sketched are “indeed opera basilica,”—kingly tasks—“towards which the endeavors of one man can be but as an image on a cross-road, which points out the way but cannot tread it.” Certainly these royal undertakings will involve expense; but “as the secretaries and spies of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spies and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills if you would not be ignorant of many things worthy to be known. And if Alexander placed so large a treasure at Aristotle’s command for the support of hunters, fowlers, fishers, and the like, in much more need do they stand of this beneficence who unfold the labyrinths of nature.”76 With such royal aid the Great Reconstruction can be completed in a few years; without it the task will require generations.
What is refreshingly new in Bacon is the magnificent assurance with which he predicts the conquest of nature by man: “I stake all on the victory of art over nature in the race.” That which men have done is “but an earnest of the things they shall do.” But why this great hope? Had not men been seeking truth, and exploring the paths of science, these two thousand years? Why should one hope now for such great success where so long a time had given so modest a result?—Yes, Bacon answers; but what if the methods men have used have been wrong and useless? What if the road has been lost, and research has gone into by-paths ending in the air? We need a ruthless revolution in our methods of research and thought, in our system of science and logic; we need a new Organon, better than Aristotle’s, fit for this larger world.
And so Bacon offers us his supreme book.
2. THE NEW ORGANON
“Bacon’s greatest performance,” says his bitterest critic, “is the first book of the Novum Organum.”77 Never did a man put more life into logic, making induction an epic adventure and a conquest. If one must study logic, let him begin with this book. “This part of human philosophy which regards logic is disagreeable to the taste of many, as appearing to them no other than a net, and a snare of thorny subtlety . . . . But if we would rate things according to their real worth, the rational sciences are the keys to all the rest.”78
Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophers was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. But thought should be the aide of observation, not its substitute. “Man,” says the first aphorism of the Novum Organum, as if flinging a challenge to all metaphysics,—“Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature . . . permit him; and neither knows nor is capable of more.” The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. “To go beyond Aristotle by the light of Aristotle is to think that a borrowed light can increase the original light from which it is taken.”79 Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten; to renew herself philosophy must begin again with a clean slate and a cleansed mind.
The first step, therefore, is the Expurgation of the Intellect. We must become as little children, innocent of isms and abstractions, washed clear of prejudices and preconceptions. We must destroy the Idols of the mind.
An idol, as Bacon uses the word (reflecting perhaps the Protestant rejection of image-worship), is a picture taken for a reality, a thought mistaken for a thing. Errors come under this head; and the first problem of logic is to trace and dam the sources of these errors. Bacon proceeds now to a justly famous analysis of fallacies; “no man,” said Condillac, “has better known than Bacon the causes of human error.”