1.
Among the great precursors of a new order of thought Francis Bacon
occupies a unique position. He drew up a definite programme for a
"great Renovation" of knowledge; he is more clearly conscious than his
contemporaries of the necessity of breaking with the past and making
a completely new start; and his whole method of thought seems
intellectually nearer to us than the speculations of a Bruno or a
Campanella. Hence it is easy to understand that he is often regarded,
especially in his own country, as more than a precursor, as the first
philosopher, of the modern age, definitely within its precincts.
[Footnote: German critics have been generally severe on Bacon as
deficient in the scientific spirit. Kuno Fischer, Baco van Verulam
(1856). Liebig, Ueber Francis Bacon van Verulam und die Methode der
Naturforschung (1863). Lange (Geschichte des Materialismus, i. 195)
speaks of "die aberglaubische und eitle Unwissenschaftlichkeit Bacos."]
It is not indeed a matter of fundamental importance how we classify
these men who stood on the border of two worlds, but it must
be recognised that if in many respects Bacon is in advance of
contemporaries who cannot be dissociated from the Renaissance, in other
respects, such as belief in astrology and dreams, he stands on the same
ground, and in one essential point--which might almost be taken as
the test of mental progress at this period--Bruno and Campanella have
outstripped him. For him Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo worked in vain;
he obstinately adhered to the old geocentric system.
It must also be remembered that the principle which he laid down in his
ambitious programme for the reform of science--that experiment is the
key for discovering the secrets of nature--was not a new revelation. We
need not dwell on the fact that he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon;
for the ideas of that wonderful thinker had fallen dead in an age
which was not ripe for them. But the direct interrogation of nature
was already recognised both in practice and in theory in the sixteenth
century. What Bacon did was to insist upon the principle more strongly
and explicitly, and to formulate it more precisely. He clarified and
explained the progressive ideas which inspired the scientific thought
of the last period of the European Renaissance, from which he cannot, I
think, be dissociated.
But in clearing up and defining these progressive ideas, he made a
contribution to the development of human thought which had far-reaching
importance and has a special significance for our present subject. In
the hopes of a steady increase of knowledge, based on the application of
new methods, he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon, and further back
by Seneca. But with Francis Bacon this idea of the augmentation of
knowledge has an entirely new value. For Seneca the exploration of
nature was a means of escaping from the sordid miseries of life. For the
friar of Oxford the principal use of increasing knowledge was to prepare
for the coming of Antichrist. Francis Bacon sounded the modern note; for
him the end of knowledge is utility. [Footnote; The passages specially
referred to are: De Aug. Sc. vii. i; Nov. Org. i. 81 and 3.]
2.
The principle that the proper aim of knowledge is the amelioration
of human life, to increase men's happiness and mitigate their
sufferings--commodis humanis inservire--was the guiding star of Bacon
in all his intellectual labour. He declared the advancement of "the
happiness of mankind" to be the direct purpose of the works he had
written or designed. He considered that all his predecessors had gone
wrong because they did not apprehend that the finis scientarum, the real
and legitimate goal of the sciences, is "the endowment of human life
with new inventions and riches"; and he made this the test for defining
the comparative values of the various branches of knowledge.
The true object, therefore, of the investigation of nature is not, as
the Greek philosophers held, speculative satisfaction, but to establish
the reign of man over nature; and this Bacon judged to be attainable,
provided new methods of attacking the problems were introduced. Whatever
may be thought of his daring act in bringing natural science down from
the clouds and assigning to her the function of ministering to the
material convenience and comfort of man, we may criticise Bacon for his
doctrine that every branch of science should be pursued with a single
eye towards practical use. Mathematics, he thought, should conduct
herself as a humble, if necessary, handmaid, without any aspirations
of her own. But it is not thus that the great progress in man's command
over nature since Bacon's age has been effected. Many of the most
valuable and surprising things which science has succeeded in doing for
civilisation would never have been performed if each branch of
knowledge were not guided by its own independent ideal of speculative
completeness. [Footnote: This was to be well explained by Fontenelle,
Preface sur l'utilite des mathematiques, in Oeuvres (ed. 1729), iii,
I sqq.] But this does not invalidate Bacon's pragmatic principle, or
diminish the importance of the fact that in laying down the utilitarian
view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental
atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was afterwards to develop.
3.
Bacon's respect for the ancients and his familiarity with their writings
are apparent on almost every page he wrote. Yet it was one of his
principal endeavours to shake off the yoke of their authority, which he
recognised to be a fatal obstacle to the advancement of science. "Truth
is not to be sought in the good fortune of any particular conjuncture of
time"; its attainment depends on experience, and how limited was theirs.
In their age "the knowledge both of time and of the world was confined
and meagre; they had not a thousand years of history worthy of that
name, but mere fables and ancient traditions; they were not acquainted
with but a small portion of the regions and countries of the world."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 84; 56, 72, 73, 74.] In all their systems and
scientific speculation "there is hardly one single experiment that has a
tendency to assist mankind." Their theories were founded on opinion,
and therefore science has remained stationary for the last two thousand
years; whereas mechanical arts, which are founded on nature and
experience, grow and increase.
In this connection, Bacon points out that the word "antiquity" is
misleading, and makes a remark which will frequently recur in writers
of the following generations. Antiquitas seculi iuventus mundi; what we
call antiquity and are accustomed to revere as such was the youth of the
world. But it is the old age and increasing years of the world--the
time in which we are now living--that deserves in truth to be called
antiquity. We are really the ancients, the Greeks and Romans were
younger than we, in respect to the age of the world. And as we look to
an old man for greater knowledge of the world than from a young man, so
we have good reason to expect far greater things from our own age than
from antiquity, because in the meantime the stock of knowledge has been
increased by an endless number of observations and experiments. Time
is the great discoverer, and truth is the daughter of time, not of
authority.
Take the three inventions which were unknown to the ancients-printing,
gunpowder, and the compass. These "have changed the appearance and state
of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in
navigation; and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that
no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power
or influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. 129. We have seen that these three inventions had
already been classed together as outstanding by Cardan and Le Roy. They
also appear in Campanella. Bodin, as we saw, included them in a longer
list.] It was perhaps the results of navigation and the exploration of
unknown lands that impressed Bacon more than all, as they had impressed
Bodin. Let me quote one passage.
"It may truly be affirmed to the honour of these times, and in a
virtuous emulation with antiquity, that this great building of the world
had never through-lights made in it till the age of us and our fathers.
For although they [the ancients] had knowledge of the antipodes... yet
that mought be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it
requireth the voyage but of half the earth. But to circle the earth, as
the heavenly bodies do, was not done nor enterprised till these later
times: and therefore these times may justly bear in their word... plus
ultra in precedence of the ancient non ultra.... And this proficience in
navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of the further
proficience and augmentation of all sciences, because it may seem that
they are ordained by God to be coevals, that is, to meet in one age. For
so the prophet Daniel, speaking of the latter times foretelleth, Plurimi
pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia: as if the openness and
through-passage of the world and the increase of knowledge were
appointed to be in the same ages; as we see it is already performed in
great part: the learning of these later times not much giving place to
the former two periods or returns of learning, the one of the Grecians,
the other of the Romans." [Footnote: Advancement of Learning, ii. 13,
14.]
In all this we have a definite recognition of the fact that knowledge
progresses. Bacon did not come into close quarters with the history of
civilisation, but he has thrown out some observations which amount to a
rough synthesis. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 1, 6; Nov. Org. i. 78,
79, 85.] Like Bodin, he divided, history into three periods--(1) the
antiquities of the world; (2) the middle part of time which comprised
two sections, the Greek and the Roman; (3) "modern history," which
included what we now call the Middle Ages. In this sequence three
particular epochs stand out as fertile in science and favourable to
progress--the Greek, the Roman, and our own--"and scarcely two centuries
can with justice be assigned to each." The other periods of time are
deserts, so far as philosophy and science are concerned. Rome and Greece
are "two exemplar States of the world for arms, learning, moral virtue,
policy, and laws." But even in those two great epochs little progress
was made in natural philosophy. For in Greece moral and political
speculation absorbed men's minds; in Rome, meditation and labour were
wasted on moral philosophy, and the greatest intellects were devoted to
civil affairs. Afterwards, in the third period, the study of theology
was the chief occupation of the Western European nations. It was
actually in the earliest period that the most useful discoveries for
the comfort of human life were made, "so that, to say the truth, when
contemplation and doctrinal science began, the discovery of useful works
ceased."
So much for the past history of mankind, during which many things
conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow, fitful,
and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if the errors
of the past are understood and avoided there is every hope of steady
progress in the modern age.
But it might be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of
things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force
against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not
true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of the
sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when they have
reached a certain point they can proceed no further? This doctrine of
Returns or ricorsi [Footnote: Bodin's conversiones.] is denounced
by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge,
creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally
refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these
reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine
of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious
law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or
continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men
from setting to work in the right way. The difficulties in advancing did
not arise from things which are not in our power; they were due to the
human understanding, which wasted time and labour on improper objects.
"In proportion as the errors which have been committed impeded the past,
so do they afford reason to hope for the future."
4.
But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove to
secure, be of indefinite duration? He does not consider the question.
His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies that he did
not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of mankind's career
on earth. And an orthodox Christian of that time could hardly be
expected to predict. The impression we get is that, in his sanguine
enthusiasm, he imagined that a "prudent interrogation" of nature could
extort all her secrets in a few generations. As a reformer he was so
engaged in the immediate prospect of results that his imagination did
not turn to the possibilities of a remoter future, though these would
logically follow from his recognition of "the inseparable propriety of
time which is ever more and more to disclose truth." He hopes everything
from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to the
world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of Grecian
and Roman learning. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 24.] If he could have
revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had performed since
his death his hopes might have been more than satisfied.
But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo
da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of an
increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress. He
prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his own time
as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an indefinite
advance in the future, which is essential if the theory is to have
significance and value. And in regard to progress in the past, though he
is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly adds anything to what
Bodin had observed. The novelty of his view lies not in his recognition
of the advance of knowledge and its power to advance still further, but
in the purpose which he assigned to it. [Footnote: Campanella held its
purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance,
De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua
Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their
usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend
the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and
happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To Plato
or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine
would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary:
for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its
own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This
idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose;
and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which
rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.
Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan
contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the
Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed
more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation. But, I
think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not
press it or emphasise it. [Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On
the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the
beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's
History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p.
8.]
5.
Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his
sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a part of
the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote: In
1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost certain that he
was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae
(1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan
for a scientific college to reform the civilised world. Andreae, who was
acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society
in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in
Palestine). Andreae's work had also a direct influence on the Nova
Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his
edition of Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state
of the seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of
Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.]
It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination
was different from that which guided Plato. While Plato aimed at
securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles,
the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve
dominion over nature by progressive discoveries. The heads of Plato's
city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by
abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important
feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators,
who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of
life. Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive
improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify
the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient
speculation.
On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal
society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies
of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was framed by the
wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it resembles
the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed initially once for
all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of Campanella's Civitas Solis is
not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its
institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver. Harrington,
in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be
well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building.
[Footnote: Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]
What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his
perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes
to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the
government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less
rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's
influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this
in common with More--and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would
have agreed here--that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the
classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is
impartially considered, in contrast with Plato's scheme in the Laws,
where the artisans and manual labourers were an inferior caste existing
less for their own sake than for the sake of the community as a whole.
[Footnote: This however does not apply to the Republic, as is so
commonly asserted. See the just criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of
Greek Economic Thought (Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]
It may finally be pointed out that these three imaginary commonwealths
stand together as a group, marked by a humaner temper than the ancient,
and also by another common characteristic which distinguishes them, on
one hand, from the ideal states of Plato and, on the other, from modern
sketches of desirable societies. Plato and Aristotle conceived their
constructions within the geographical limits of Hellas, either in the
past or in the present. More, Bacon, and Campanella placed theirs in
distant seas, and this remoteness in space helped to create a certain
illusion, of reality. [Footnote: Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620).
Expectancy of end of world: Ib. p. 455.] The modern plan is to project
the perfect society into a period of future time. The device of More
and his successors was suggested by the maritime explorations of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the later method was a result of the
rise of the idea of Progress. [Footnote: Similarly the ideal communistic
states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed
their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in the
Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander. One wonders whether Campanella
knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to the Islands of
the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 55-60.]
6.
A word or two more may be said about the City of the Sun. Campanella was
as earnest a believer in the interrogation of nature as Bacon, and the
place which science and learning hold in his state (although research is
not so prominent as in the New Atlantis), and the scientific training of
all the citizens, are a capital feature. The progress in inventions, to
which science may look forward, is suggested. The men of the City of
the Sun "have already discovered the one art which the world seemed
to lack--the art of flying; and they expect soon to invent ocular
instruments which will enable them to see the invisible stars and
auricular instruments for hearing the harmony of the spheres."
Campanella's view of the present conditions and prospects of knowledge
is hardly less sanguine than that of Bacon, and characteristically he
confirms his optimism by astrological data. "If you only knew what their
astrologers say about the coming age. Our times, they assert, have more
history in a hundred years than the whole world in four thousand. More
books have been published in this century than in five thousand
years before. They dwell on the wonderful inventions of printing, of
artillery, and of the use of the magnet,--clear signs of the times--and
also instruments for the assembling of the inhabitants of the world into
one fold," and show that these discoveries were conditioned by stellar
influences.
But Campanella is not very sure or clear about the future. Astrology
and theology cause him to hesitate. Like Bacon, he dreams of a great
Renovation and sees that the conditions are propitious, but his faith is
not secure. The astronomers of his imaginary state scrutinise the stars
to discover whether the world will perish or not, and they believe in
the oracular saying of Jesus that the end will come like a thief in the
night. Therefore they expect a new age, and perhaps also the end of the
world.
The new age of knowledge was about to begin. Campanella, Bruno, and
Bacon stand, as it were, on the brink of the dividing stream, tenduntque
manus ripae ulterioris amore.