Francis Bacon was a philosopher, lawyer, and statesman who served as lord chancellor of England from 1618to 1621.
Bacon attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and then went to Paris (1576). Recalled abruptly after the death of his father (1579), he took up residence at Gray’s Inn, an institution for legal education, and became a barrister in 1582. He progressed through several legal positions, becoming a member of Parliament in 1584, but had little success in gaining political power. About 1591 Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, became his patron. By 1600, however, Bacon was the queen’s learned counsel in the trial of Essex, and in 1601 he drew up a report denouncing Essex as a traitor.
With the accession of James I in 1603, Bacon sought anew to gain influence by means of unsparing service in Parliament, persistent letters of self-recommendation, and the help of important associates. He was engaged in a series of conflicts with Sir Edward Coke, the great jurist, in an effort to safeguard the royal prerogative. After a succession of legal posts, he was appointed lord chancellor and Baron Verulam in 1618; in 1620/21 he was created Viscount St. Albans. Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 draftings of his most celebrated work, the Novum Organum, in which he presented his scientific method; he developed his Instauratio Magna, a plan to reorganize the sciences; and he wrote several minor philosophical works.
Bacon fell from power in 1621, following his being charged with bribery. He spent his final years writing what are considered some of his most valuable works.
THE IDOLS OF THE MIND
In the first book of Novum Organum Bacon discusses the causes of human error in the pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was original in looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological causes. He invented the metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of human error.
Bacon distinguishes four idols, or main varieties of proneness to error. The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are universal to mankind, or, at any rate, very common. One, for example, is a tendency toward over-simplification, that is, toward supposing, for the sake of tidiness, that there exists more order in a field of inquiry than there actually is. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are in fact unrepresentative.
The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses, another on the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on the totality.
The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which language is responsible. It has always been a distinguishing feature of English philosophy to emphasize the unreliable nature of language, which is seen, nominalistically, as a human improvisation. Nominalists argue that even if the power of speech is given by God, it was Adam who named the beasts and thereby gave that power its concrete realization. But language, like other human achievements, partakes of human imperfections. Bacon was particularly concerned with the superficiality of distinctions drawn in everyday language, by which things fundamentally different are classed together (whales and fishes as fish, for example) and things fundamentally similar are distinguished (ice, water, and steam). But he was also concerned, like later critics of language, with the capacity of words to embroil men in the discussion of the meaning-less (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune).
The fourth and final group of idols is that of the idols of the theatre, that is to say mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest, Baconian sense of the term, in which it embraces all beliefs of any degree of generality. Bacon’s critical polemic in discussing the idols of the theatre is lively but not very penetrating philosophically. He speaks, for example, of the vain affectations of the humanists, but they were not a very apt subject for his criticism. Humanists were really anti-philosophers who not unreasonably turned their attention to nonphilosophical matters because of the apparent inability of philosophers to arrive at conclusions that were either generally agreed upon or use-ful. Bacon does have something to say about the skeptical philosophy to which humanists appealed when they felt the need for it. Insofar as skepticism involves doubts about deductive reasoning, he has no quarrel with it. Insofar as it is applied not to reason but to the ability of the senses to supply the reason with reliable premises to work from, he brushes it aside too easily.
THE NEW METHOD
The core of Bacon’s philosophy of science is the account of inductive reasoning given in Book II of Novum Organum. The defect of all previous systems of beliefs about nature, he argued, lay in the inadequate treatment of the general propositions from which the deductions were made. Either they were the result of precipitate generalization from one or two cases, or they were uncritically assumed to be self-evident on the basis of their familiarity and general acceptance.
In order to avoid hasty generalization Bacon urges a technique of “gradual ascent,” that is, the patient accumulation of well-founded generalizations of steadily increasing degrees of generality. This method would have the beneficial effect of loosening the hold on men’s minds of ill-constructed everyday concepts that obliterate important differences and fail to register important similarities.
The crucial point, Bacon realized, is that induction must work by elimination not, as it does in common life and the defective scientific tradition, by simple enumeration. Thus he stressed “the greater force of the negative instance”—the fact that while “all A are B” is only very weakly confirmed by “this A is B,” it is shown conclusively to be false by “this A is not B.” He devised tables, or formal devices for the presentation of singular pieces of evidence, in order to facilitate the rapid discovery of false generalizations. What survives this eliminative screening, Bacon assumes, may be taken to be true.
The conception of a scientific research establishment, which Bacon developed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, may be a more important contribution to science than his theory of induction. Here the idea of science as a collaborative undertaking, conducted in an impersonally methodical fashion and animated by the intention to give material benefits to mankind, is set out with literary force.
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