FRANCIS BACON AND THE SOCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE
I
From Plato to Bacon
“As I read Plato,” writes Professor Dewey, “philosophy began with some
sense of its essentially political basis and mission--a recognition that
its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But
it soon got lost in dreams of another world.”[48] Plato and Aristotle
are the _crura cerebri_ of Europe. But in Aristotle, along with a wealth
of acute observation of men and institutions, we find a diminishing
interest in reconstruction; the Stagirite spent too much of his time in
card-cataloguing Plato, and allowed his imagination to become suffocated
with logic. With the Stoics and Epicureans begin that alienation of
ethics from politics, and that subordination of philosophy to religious
needs, which it is part of the task of present thinking to undo.
Alexander had conquered the Orient, only to have Orientalism conquer
Greece. Under Scholasticism it was the fate of great minds to retrace
worn paths in the cage of a system of conclusions determined by external
authority; and the obligation to uphold the established precluded any
practical recognition of the reconstructive function of thought. With
the Renaissance--that Indian summer of Greek culture--the dream of a
remoulded world found voice again. Campanella, through the darkness of
his prison cell, achieved the vision of a communist utopia; and other
students of the rediscovered Plato painted similar pictures. Indeed this
reawakening of Plato’s influence gave to the men of the Renaissance an
inspiriting sense of the wonders that lay potential in organized
intelligence. Again men faced the task of replacing with a natural ethic
the falling authoritarian sanctions of supernatural religion; and for a
time one might have hoped that the thought of Socrates was to find at
last its due fruition. But again men lost themselves in the notion of a
cultured class moving leisurely over the backs of slaves; and perhaps it
was well that the whole movement was halted by the more Puritan but also
more democratic outburst of the Reformation. What the world needed was a
method which offered hope for the redemption not of a class, but of all.
Galileo and Roger Bacon opened the way to meeting this need by their
emphasis on the value of hypothesis and experiment, and the necessity of
combining induction with deduction; it remained for Francis Bacon to
lay out the road for the organized employment of these new methods, and
to inspire all Europe with his warm vision of their social
possibilities.
II
Character
If you would understand Bacon, you must see him as not so much a
philosopher as an administrator. You find him a man of great practical
ability: he remoulds philosophy with one hand and rules part of England
with the other; not to speak of writing Shakespeare’s plays between
times! He rises brilliantly from youthful penury to the political
pinnacle; and meanwhile he runs over the whole realm of human knowledge,
scattering praise and censure with lordly hand. Did we not know the fact
as part of the history of England we should never suspect that the
detailed and varied learning of this man was the incidental
accomplishment of a life busied with political intrigue. _Bene vixit qui
bene latuit_: surely here is a man who has lived widely, and in no
merely physical sense has made the world his home. Life is no “brief
candle” to him, nor men “such stuff as dreams are made of”; life is a
glorious gift, big with blessing for him who will but assist at the
delivery. There is nothing of the timid ascetic about him; like
Socrates, he knows that there is a sort of cowardice in shunning
pleasure;[49] best of all, there is so much work to be done, so many
opportunities for the man of unnarrowed soul. He feels the exhilaration
of one who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority:
he sees before him an uncharted future, raw material for hands that dare
to mould it; and he dares. All his life long he is mixed up with the
heart of things; every day is an adventure. Exiled from politics he
plunges gladly into the field of scientific reconstruction; he does not
forget that he is an administrator, any more than Plato could forget
that he was a dramatist; he finds the world of thought a chaos, and
bequeaths it a planful process for the coördination of human life; all
Europe responds to his call for the “enlarging of the bounds of human
empire.” He works joyfully and buoyantly to the very last, and dies as
he has wished, “in an earnest pursuit, which is like one that is wounded
in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt.”
III
The Expurgation of the Intellect
Consider the reaction of an experienced statesman who leaves the service
of a king to enter the service of truth. He has left a field wherein all
workers moved in subordination to one head and one focal purpose; he
enters a field in which each worker is working by himself, with no
division of labor, no organization of endeavor, no correlation of ends.
There he has found administration, here he finds a naïve
_laissez-faire_; there order, here anarchy; there some sense of common
end and effort, here none. He understands at once the low repute of
philosophy among men of affairs. “For the people are very apt to contemn
truth, upon account of the controversies raised about it; and so think
those all in a wrong way, who never meet.”[50] He understands at once
why it is that the world has been so little changed by speculation and
research. He is a man whose consciousness of pervasive human misery is
too sharp for comfort;[51] and he sees no hope of remedy for this in
isolated guerilla attacks waged upon the merest outposts of truth, each
attack with its jealously peculiar strategy, its own dislocated, almost
irrelevant end. And yet if there is no remedy for men’s ills in this
nascent science and renascent philosophy, in what other quarter, then,
shall men look for hope and cure?
There is no other, Bacon feels; unless victory is first won in the
laboratory and the study it will never be won in political assemblies;
no plebiscite or royal edict, but only truth, can make men free. Man’s
hope lies in the reorganization of the processes of discovery and
interpretation. Unless philosophy and science be born again of social
aims and social needs they cannot have life in them. A new spirit must
enter.
But first old spirits must be exorcised. Speculation and research must
bring out a declaration of independence against theology. “The
corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is
... widely spread, and does the greatest harm.”[52] The search for final
causes, for design in nature, must be left to theologians; the function
of science is not to interpret the purposes of nature, but to discover
the connections of cause and effect in nature. Dogma must be set aside:
“if a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he
will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”[53]
Dogma must be set aside, too, because it necessitates deduction as a
basic method; and deduction as a basic method is disastrous.
But that is not all; there is much more in the way of preliminaries:
there must be a general “expurgation of the intellect.” The mind is full
(some would say made up) of prejudices, wild fancies, “idols,” or
imaginings of things that are not so: if you are to think correctly,
usefully, all these must go. Try, then, to get as little of yourself as
possible in the way of the thing you wish to see. Beware of the very
general tendency to put order and regularity in the world and then to
suppose that they are native to the structure of things; or to force all
facts into the unyielding mould of a preconceived opinion, carefully
neglecting all contrary instances; or to give too credulous an ear to
that which flatters the wish. Look into yourself and see the forest of
prejudices that has grown up within you: through your temperamental
attitudes; through your education; through your friends (friendship is
so often an agreement in prejudices); through your favorite authors and
authorities. If you find yourself seizing and dwelling on anything with
particular satisfaction, hold it in suspicion. Beware of words, for they
are imposed according to the apprehension of the crowd; make sure that
you do not take abstractions for things. And remind yourself
occasionally that you are not the measure of all things, but their
distorting mirror.
So much by way of clearing the forest. Comes then induction as the fount
and origin of all truth: patient induction, obedient to the call of
fact, and with watchful eye for, above all things, the little unwelcome
instance that contradicts. Not that induction is everything; it includes
experiment, of course, and is punctuated by hypothesis.[54] (More, it is
clearly but the servant of deduction, since the aim of all science is to
predict by deduction from generalizations formed by induction; but just
as clear is it that the efficacy of the whole business lies grounded in
the faithfulness of the induction: induction is servant, but it has all
men at its mercy.) And to formulate methods of induction, to surround
the process by mechanical guards, to protect it from the premature
flights of young generalizations,--that is a matter of life and death to
science.
IV
Knowledge is Power
And now, armed with these methods of procedure, we stand face to face
with nature. What shall we ask her? _Prudens questio dimidium scientiæ_:
to know what to ask is half of every science.
You must ask for laws,--or, to use a Platonic term, forms. In every
process there is matter and there is form: the matter being the seat of
the process or operation, and the form its method or law. “Though in
nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure
individual acts, according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy the very
law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the
foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law,
with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of Forms.”[55] Not so much
what a “thing” is, but how it behaves;--that is the question. And what
is more, if you will examine your conception of a “thing,” you will see
that it is really a conception of how the “thing” behaves; every _What_
is at last a _How_. Every “thing” is a machine, whose essence or meaning
is to be found not by a mere description of its parts, but by an account
of how it operates. “How does it work?” asks the boy before a machine;
see to it that you ask the same question of nature.
For observe, if you know how a thing works, you are on the way to
managing and controlling it. Indeed, a Form can be defined as those
elements in a process which must be known before the process can be
controlled. Here we see the meaning of science; it is an effort to
discover the laws which must be known in order “that the mind may
exercise her power over the nature of things.”[56] Science is the
formulation of control; knowledge is power. The object of science is not
merely to know, but to rebuild; every science longs to be an art. The
quest for knowledge, then, is not a matter of curiosity, it is a fight
for power. We “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness”
against herself. Where this conception reigns, logic-chopping is out of
court. “The end of our new logic is to find not arguments but arts; ...
not probable reasons but plans and designs of works; ... to overcome not
an adversary in argument but nature in action.”[57]
But there is logic-chopping in other things than logic. All strife of
men with men, of group with group, if it leaves no result beyond the
victory and passing supremacy of the individual or group, is
logic-chopping. Such victories pass from side to side, and cancel
themselves into final nullity. Real achievement is victory, not over
other men but with them. “It will not be amiss to distinguish the three
kinds, and as it were grades, of ambition in mankind. The first is of
those who desire to extend their own power in their native country;
which kind is vulgar and degenerate. The second is of those who labor to
extend the power of their country and its dominion among men. This
certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man
endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human
race over the universe, his ambition is without doubt both a more
wholesome thing and a more noble than the other two. The empire of man
over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot
command nature except by obeying her.”[58]
V
The Socialization of Science
_Natura non vincitur nisi parendo._ “I accept the universe,” says
Margaret Fuller. “Gad! you’d better!” says Carlyle. I accept it, says
Bacon, but only as raw material. We will listen to nature, but only that
we may learn what language she understands. We stoop to conquer.
There is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so. “By far the
greatest obstacle to the progress of science and the undertaking of new
tasks ... is found in this, that men despair and think things
impossible.... If therefore any one believes or promises more, they
think this comes of an ungoverned and unripened mind.”[59] There is
nothing that we may not do, if we _will_, but we must will; and must
will the means as well as the end. Would we have an empire of man over
nature? Very well: organize the arts and sciences.
“Consider what may be expected from men abounding in leisure, and from
association of labors, and from successions of ages; the rather because
it is not a way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the
case with that of reasoning), but within which the labors and industries
of men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the
best effort be distributed and then combined. For then only will men
begin to know their strength when instead of great numbers doing all the
same things, one shall take charge of one thing and another of
another.”[60] There should be more coöperation, less chaotic rivalry, in
research. And the coöperation should be international; the various
universities of the world, so far as they engage in research, should be
like the different buildings of a great manufacturing plant, each with
its own particular specialty and quest. Is it not remarkable how “little
sympathy and correspondence exists between colleges and universities, as
well throughout Europe as in the same state and kingdom?”[61] Why cannot
all the research in the world be coördinated into one unified advance?
Perhaps the truth-seekers would be unwilling; but has that been shown?
And is the number of willing coöperators too small to warrant further
effort? How can we know without the trial? Grant that the genius would
balk at some external central direction; but research after all is
seldom a matter of genius. “The course I propose ... is such as leaves
but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits
and understandings nearly on the level.”[62] Let scope and freedom be
amply provided for the genius; it is the work of following up the
_aperçus_ of genius that most sorely needs coördination. Organization of
research means really the liberation of genius: liberation from the
halting necessities of mechanical repetition in experiment. Nor is
coördination regimentation; let each man follow his hobby to whatever
university has been assigned to the investigation of that particular
item. Liberty is futility unless it is organized.
It is a plan, you see, for the socialization of science. It is a large
and royal vision; to make it real involves “indeed _opera basilica_,” it
is the business of a king, “towards which the endeavors of one man can
be but as the sign on a cross-road, which points out the way but cannot
tread it.”[63] It will need such legislative appropriations as are now
granted only to the business of competitive destruction on land and sea.
“As the secretaries and spies of princes and states bring in bills for
intelligence, so you must allow the spies and intelligencers of nature
to bring in their bills if you would not be ignorant of many things
worthy to be known. And if Alexander placed so large a treasure at
Aristotle’s command for the support of hunters, fowlers, fishers and the
like, in much more need do they stand of this beneficence who unfold the
labyrinths of nature.”[64]
VI
Science and Utopia
Such an organization of science is Bacon’s notion of Utopia. He gives us
in _The New Atlantis_, in plain strong prose, a picture of a state in
which this organization has reached the national stage. It is a state
nominally ruled by a king (Bacon never forgets that he is a loyal
subject and counsellor of James I); but “preëminent amongst the
excellent acts of the king ... was the erection and institution of an
Order or Society which we call Solomon’s House; the noblest foundation,
as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this
kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the nature of all things.”[65]
Every twelve years this Order sends out to all parts of the world
“merchants of light”; men who remain abroad for twelve years, gather
information and suggestions in every field of art and science, and then
(the next expedition having brought men to replace them) return home
laden with books, instruments, inventions, and ideas. “Thus, you see, we
maintain a trade not for gold, silver or jewels; nor for silk; nor for
spices; nor for any other commodity or matter; but only for God’s first
creation, which was Light.”[66] Meanwhile at home there is a busy army
filling many laboratories, experimenting in zoölogy, medicine,
dietetics, chemistry, botany, physics, and other fields; there are, in
addition to these men, “three that collect the experiments in all the
books; ... three that try new experiments”; three that tabulate the
results of the experimenters; “three that look into the experiments of
their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use ...
for man’s life; ... three that direct new experiments”; three that from
the results draw up “observations, axioms, and aphorisms.”[67] “We
imitate also the flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the
air; we have ships and boats for going under water.”[68] And the purpose
of it all, he says, with fine Baconian ring, is “the enlarging of the
bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”[69]
VII
Scholasticism in Science
This is the voice of the Renaissance, speaking with some method to its
music. It is the voice of Erasmus rather than that of Luther; but it is
the voice of a larger and less class-bound vision than that which moved
the polite encomiast of folly. Such minds as were not lost in the
religious turmoil of the time responded to Bacon’s call for a new
beginning; a “sense of liberation, ... of new destinies, pulsates in
that generation at Bacon’s touch.”[70] Bacon says, and with justice,
that he “rang the bell which called the wits together.”[71] When, in
1660, a group of London savants formed the Royal Society, it was from
Bacon that they took their inspiration, and from the “House of Solomon”
part of their plan of organization. Diderot and D’Alembert acknowledged
the impetus given by their reading of Bacon to the adventurous
enterprise which completed and distributed the _Encyclopédie_ despite
the prohibition of the king. To-day, after two hundred years of
Cartesian futility about mind and body and the problem of knowledge, the
Baconian emphasis on the socially-reconstructive function of thought
renews its power and appeal. The world returns to Socrates, to Plato,
and to Bacon.
But with some measure of wholesome disillusionment. These last two
centuries have told us that science, unaided, cannot solve our social
problem. We have invented, invented, invented, invented; and with what
result? The gap between class and class has so widened during these
inventive years that there are now not classes but castes. Social
harmony is a matter of brief interludes in a drama more violent than any
ever mimicked on the stage. Men trained and accomplished in science,
like Prince Kropotkin, abandon it on the score that it has turned its
back on the purpose that gave it vitality and worth.[72]
What is the purpose of science? What do scientists consider to be the
purpose of science? The laboratories are crowded with men who have no
inkling of any other than a purely material reconstruction as the
function of their growing knowledge. Specialization has so divided
science that hardly any sense of the whole survives. The ghosts of
scholasticism--of a pursuit of knowledge divorced from its social
end--hover about the microscopes and test-tubes of the scientific world;
and the upshot of it all is that to them who have, more is given. Let
Bacon speak here: “There is another great and powerful cause why the
sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not
possible to run a course aright, when the goal itself has not been
rightly placed.”[73] Sciences with obvious social functions have
languished through lapse of all sense of direction, all feeling of
focus; psychology, for example, is but now reviving under the stimulus
of men who dared to “stir the earth a little about the roots of this
science,”[74] because they had perceived its purpose and meaning in the
drama of reconstruction. The blunt truth is that unless a scientist is
also a philosopher, with some capacity to see things _sub specie
totius_,--unless he can come out of his hole into the open,--he is not
fit to direct his own research. “As no perfect discovery can be made
upon a flat or level, neither is it possible to discover the more remote
and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the
same science, and ascend not to a higher science.”[75] Before it can be
of real service to life, science must be enlightened by some
discrimination of values, some consideration and fitting together of
human ends: without philosophy as its eye piece, science is but the
traditional child who has taken apart the traditional watch, with none
but the traditional results.
There is more to this indictment. Science has been organized, though
very imperfectly, for research; it has been organized hardly at all for
social application and control. The notion that science can be used in
conserving the vital elements of order and at the same time facilitating
experimental and progressive change, is but beginning to walk about.
Indeed, the employment and direction of scientific ability in the
business of government is still looked upon as a doubtful procedure; to
say that the administration of municipal affairs, for example, is to be
given over to men trained in the social sciences rather than to men
artful in trapping votes with oratorical molasses, is still a venture
into the loneliness of heresy. Again let Bacon speak, who was
administrator and philosopher in one. “It is wrong to trust the natural
body to empirics who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but
who know neither the causes of the disease, nor the constitution of
patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And
so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed
by empirical statesmen, unless well mixed with others who are grounded
in learning. On the contrary it is almost without instance that any
government was unprosperous under learned governors.”[76]
Plato over again, you say. Yes; just as “Greek philosophy is the dough
with which modern philosophers have baked their bread, kneading it over
and over again,”[77] so this vital doctrine of the application of the
best available intelligence to the problem of social order and
development must be restated in every generation until at last the world
may see its truth and merit exemption from its repetition.
VIII
The Asiatics of Europe
But the place of Bacon in the continuum of history is hardly stated by
connecting him with Plato. Conceive of him rather as a new protagonist
in the long epic of intelligence; another blow struck in the seemingly
endless war between magic and science, between supernaturalism and
naturalism, between the spirit of worship and the spirit of control.
Primitive man--and he lives everywhere under the name of legion--looks
out upon nature as something to be feared and obeyed, something to be
cajoled by ritual and sacrifice and prayer. In ages of great social
disorder, such as the millennium inaugurated in Western Europe by the
barbarian invasions, the primitive elements in the mental make-up of men
emerge through the falling cultural surface; and cults rich in ritual
and steeped in emotional luxury grow in rank abundance. It is in the
character of man to worship power: if he feels the power without him
more intensely than the power within, he worships nature with a humble
fear, and leans on magic and supernatural rewards; if he feels the power
within him more intensely than the power without, he sees divinity in
himself and other centres of remoulding activity, and thinks not of
worshipping and obeying nature, but of controlling and commanding her.
The second attitude comes, of course, with knowledge, and action that
expresses knowledge; it is quite human that nature should not be
worshipped once she has been known. A man is primitive, then, when he
worships nature and makes no effort to control her; he is mature when he
stops worshipping and begins to control,--when he understands that
“Nature is not a temple but a workshop,”[78] not a barrier to divinity,
but the raw material of Utopia.
Now the essence of Bacon is not the replacement of deduction by
induction, but the change of emphasis from worship to control. This
emphasis, once vivid in Plato but soon obscured by Oriental influence,
is one of the two dominant elements in modern thought (the other being
the puzzling over an artificial problem of knowledge); and unless the
Baconian element finally subordinates the Cartesian, the word _modern_
must no longer arrogate to itself a eulogistic connotation. Hence Bacon,
and not Descartes, is the initiator of modern philosophy; part
initiator, at least, of that current of thought which finds rebellious
expression in the enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and comes to
supremacy in the scientific victories of the nineteenth. The vital
sequence in modern philosophy is not Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel,
and Bergson (for these are the Asiatics of Europe), but Bacon, Hobbes,
Condorcet, Comte, Darwin, and James.[79]
The hope of the world is in this resolute spirit of control,--control of
the material without us, and of the passions within. Bit by bit, one is
not afraid to say, we shall make for ourselves a better world. Shall we
not find a way to eliminate disease, to control the increase of
population, to find in plastic organization a substitute for revolution?
Shall we perhaps even succeed in transmuting the lust for power over man
into ambition to conquer the forces that impede man? Shall we make men
understand that there is more potency of joy in the sense of having
contributed to the power of men over nature than in any personal triumph
of one over another man?--more glory in a conquest of bacteria than in
all the martial victories that have ever spilled human blood? Here is
the beginning of real civilization, and the mark of man. “The
environment transforms the animal; man transforms the environment.”[80]
“Looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been
in Europe to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate
man to nature. Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature
was most bountiful; now the richest countries are those in which man is
most active.”[81] Control is the sign of maturity, the achievement of
Europe, the future of America. It is, one argues again, the drama of
history, this war between Asia and Europe, between nature and man,
between worship and control. Fundamentally it is the upward struggle of
intelligence: Plato is its voice, Zeno its passing exhaustion, Bacon its
resurrection. It was not an unopposed rebirth: there is still no telling
whether East or West will win. Surrounded by the backwash of Oriental
currents everywhere, the lover of the Baconian spirit needs constantly
to refresh himself at the fount of Bacon’s inexhaustible inspiration and
confidence. “I stake all,” he says, “on the victory of art over nature
in the race.” And one needs to hold ever before oneself Bacon’s favorite
device: A ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules out into the
unknown sea, and over it the words, PLUS ULTRA.
More beyond!