Francis Bacon · Science
Why two thousand years of rigorous logic discovered nothing new about nature.
For two thousand years the learned had refined and re-arranged the inheritance of antiquity. Humanity’s command over nature had not grown. They had spun fine webs of argument out of very little raw material, like spiders drawing threads from their own bodies.
In 1620 a strange and ambitious book set out to start again from the beginning. Its author was Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, and he believed that almost everything Europe called knowledge was hollow. What was needed was not another clever system but a complete restart, a clearing away of inherited assumptions so that the work of understanding could begin again on a firm footing.
He gave the restart a grand name, the Instauratio Magna, the Great Instauration, a word that means both a renewal and a rebuilding from foundations. Everything then turned on what exactly was being cleared away.
The schools’ most rigorous instrument could discover nothing new about nature. Bacon did not deny that the syllogism, their engine of proof, is valid. His complaint was that it only unpacks what is already contained in its premises. Those premises had themselves been snatched too hastily from a few casual observations and from words whose meanings were vague.
Scholastic science worked downward. It began from general principles taken as settled and drew out their consequences by deduction. A syllogism arranges accepted statements so that a conclusion follows of necessity: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. If the foundation is shaky, no amount of rigorous deduction can make the building sound.
Aristotle would not concede the point. For him a demonstration from principles already grasped is not a road toward scientific knowledge but that knowledge itself. If he is right, reversing the direction of inquiry adds nothing the schools lacked. Bacon’s answer was that the syllogism commands assent to propositions but does not lay hold of the things themselves. Laying hold of things would mean starting somewhere else entirely.
The better of the two roads had scarcely been tried. Bacon framed the choice as two roads for the seeker of truth, and called the second one the true way.
That true road climbs slowly. It draws its generalisations out of the senses and particular facts by a gradual and unbroken ascent. The most general principles arrive only at the very end, and every step is tested along the way.
The road in fashion flies. It leaps up at once from a handful of observations to the most general principles, treats those principles as fixed, and reasons downward from them. This was the deductive road of the schools.
Bacon’s method was not a tidying-up of the old logic but a reversal of its direction. Why walk the slow road at all, when the fast one had ruled the schools for two thousand years?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You studied Bacon’s new instrument. Say what he thought a syllogism cannot do, which direction he made inquiry run, and where the most general axioms belong on that road.
Leads to Aristotle.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.