Francis Bacon · Science
Francis Bacon set out to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up, replacing Aristotle’s top-down logic with a patient ascent from observation to general truths.
In 1620 Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, published a strange and ambitious book. He believed that almost everything Europe called ‘knowledge’ was hollow. For two thousand years scholars had been refining and re-arranging the inheritance of antiquity, above all the works of Aristotle, without producing any real growth in humanity’s command over nature.
Bacon’s diagnosis was severe. The learned, he said, had spun fine webs of argument out of very little raw material, like spiders drawing threads from their own bodies. 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 this restart a grand name, the Instauratio Magna, the Great Instauration, a word that means both a renewal and a rebuilding from foundations.
Scholastic science worked downward. It began from general principles taken as settled, the supposed first truths of a subject, and then drew out their consequences by deduction, chiefly through the syllogism. A syllogism arranges accepted statements so that a conclusion follows of necessity: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
Bacon did not deny that the syllogism is valid. His complaint was that it discovers nothing new about nature. A syllogism only unpacks what is already contained in its premises, and those premises had themselves been snatched too hastily from a few casual observations and from words whose meanings were vague. If the foundation is shaky, no amount of rigorous deduction can make the building sound. The syllogism, he wrote, commands assent to propositions but does not lay hold of the things themselves.
Bacon framed the choice as two roads for the seeker of truth. The first flies 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 road then in fashion, the deductive road of the schools.
The second road climbs slowly. It draws its generalisations out of the senses and particular facts by a gradual and unbroken ascent, reaching the most general principles only at the very end, and testing each step along the way. Bacon called this second road the true way, but he admitted it had scarcely been tried. His method was not a tidying-up of the old logic but a reversal of its direction.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You should be able to recall that Bacon’s Great Instauration rejected the Aristotelian syllogism in favour of inductive ascent from particulars, and named his method the Novum Organum to replace Aristotle’s Organon.
Leads to bacon-idols.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.