Francis Bacon · Science
Francis Bacon argued that we discover nature’s laws not by guessing at grand principles but by a patient, gradual ascent from organised observations, illustrated by his famous inquiry into the form of heat.
By 1620, when Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum (the ‘New Instrument’), he believed European thought was stuck. There were, he said, only two ways people tried to reach truth, and both were broken.
The first road was the way of the hasty generaliser. You glance at a handful of cases, and you leap at once to a sweeping conclusion, a ‘most general axiom’, which you then treat as fixed and certain. The second road was the way of the pure deducer, beloved of the schoolmen who followed Aristotle: you start from first principles taken on authority and spin out conclusions by logic alone, never returning to test them against the world.
Bacon thought both roads ended in the same place, in cobwebs of words rather than knowledge of things. He wanted a third way: a method that begins in the senses but does not jump, that rises step by patient step.
When Bacon speaks of induction, he does not mean the loose ‘induction by simple enumeration’ the logicians used, where you count up positive instances (‘this swan is white, that swan is white…’) and announce a rule. He thought that kind of counting was childish and unsafe, because a single contrary case can overturn it.
His ‘true and perfect induction’ works differently. It does not merely gather instances where a nature appears; it deliberately hunts for the cases where it is absent, and the cases where it varies in degree. Above all, it proceeds by exclusion: it rejects and throws out, one by one, every candidate explanation that the instances contradict, trusting that what survives the rejection is the truth.
To make this disciplined rather than haphazard, Bacon organised the evidence into three great Tables of Investigation.
In Book II of the Novum Organum, Bacon demonstrates his method on a single worked example: the nature, or ‘form’, of heat. He builds three tables.
The Table of Presence (he calls it the Table of Essence and Presence) lists every instance in which heat is found: the sun’s rays, flame, boiling liquids, quicklime sprinkled with water, even fresh horse-dung and the internal warmth of animals. The Table of Absence (Table of Deviation, or of Absence in Proximity) lists, against each one, a closely related case that lacks heat: the rays of the moon and stars are bright yet not warm; ordinary air is not hot of itself. The Table of Degrees (or Table of Comparison) records where heat increases and decreases: a body grows hotter with motion and friction, animals are warmer when they exercise.
The point of the three tables together is to let the philosopher exclude. A true ‘form’ of heat must be present in every instance of presence, absent in every instance of absence, and must rise and fall along with heat in the table of degrees. Anything that fails even one of these tests is rejected.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
Bacon’s true induction builds knowledge by tabulating presence, absence, and degrees of a nature, excluding what the instances contradict, and climbing slowly from particulars to axioms.
Leads to bacon-atlantis.
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