KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Francis Bacon comes in for a lot of stick these days, much of which is unjustified, according to this new book by John Henry. Many of Bacon's critics are targeting the symbolic Bacon of the Enlightenment, ignoring the real context of his times. The process began soon after his death with the focus by the early Fellows of the Royal Society on facts and observations as opposed to hypotheses. Newton famously said 'I feign no hypotheses' even though we would now regard such a remark to be a contradiction. And Newton himself has been misunderstood in a similar way to Bacon – both men were deeply interested in the magical tradition.

This brings us to the central thesis of Henry's book, which depicts Bacon is the founding father of philosophy of science rather than of science. He quotes Bacon as saying that 'the aim of magic is to recall natural philosophy from the vanity of speculations to the importance of experiments'. The magical tradition stressed the value of using knowledge to gain mastery over nature for human benefit. Bacon's new move was that he 'advocated the use of the experimental method of the magician in a reformed natural philosophy' and with this he established the experimental tradition of modern science along with his emphasis on inductive rather than deductive logic. This procedure enables new discoveries to be made and tested.

The reader learns in this book that Bacon spent most of his life in pursuit of the high office, which he attained in 1618 when he became Lord Chancellor. His enforced retirement in 1621 meant that he was able to devote more time to his studies and writing. He was steeped in the kind of magical thinking that was not considered at all irrational (or even supernatural) in his day, with its central idea of the Great Chain of Being and symbolic correspondences within it. He was concerned, however, to liberate people from the shackles of Aristotle, whom he thought encouraged university trained philosophers to spin useless cobwebs of learning out of their own minds. Bacon provides a charming image of the true business of philosophy:

'Those who have handled sciences have either been men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own'.

A final theme brings up another of Bacon's images – putting nature on the rack. He repeatedly insists on the need to obey nature and the impossibility of forcing apart chains of causes. As a lawyer he would have been accustomed to cross-examination in order to elicit the truth, but nowhere does he support torture as a part of judicial proceedings. This is an excellent book for understanding Bacon in the context of his time.