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Before Ayn Rand There Was … The Contribution of Sir Francis Bacon

By Dr. Jerome Huyler

December 18, 2023

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“It lay like a motionless log across the stream of human progress for more than a dozen centuries,” 

For the historian Paul Johnson, “it” was the Roman Catholic Church, and it held the human mind in intellectual captivity for just as long. At the beginning of the 17th century, Sir Francis Bacon lifted the log and set the stream of human progress free to crash up and down the shoreline of Western Civilization. In time, progress turned into improvement and life’s challenges grew far less challenging.

Bacon declared the human mind’s independence from ordained authority, and almost single-handedly ignited the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

Bacon declared the human mind’s independence from ordained authority, and almost single-handedly ignited the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Though his own record of scientific accom­plishment was not very great, Bacon’s “great service to science,” as Basil Wiley explained, was in giving “it an incompa­rable adver­tisement, by associating with it his personal prestige, his ‘Elizabethan’ glamour, and his great literary power.”[i] As Lord Chancellor in the Court of James I, he was among the first to fathom the sheer usefulness of human inquiry. Before man’s curiosity could be fully awakened and the secrets of nature systemati­cally explored, man’s mind would have to be released from its bondage to Scrip­tural dogma and a hegemonic church authority. In short, the first important battle waged in the struggle for human independence was not polit­ical, but epistemologi­cal.

Then, during the 12th and 13th centuries, a second great authority returned to Earth. This was Aristotle.

To appreciate Bacon’s world-turning contribution to human understanding and future progress, one must see what the Medieval mind saw as it looked out at the created universe. What passed for learning during the Middle Ages was what was passed down from time immemorial. The Medieval Mind venerated ancient authority. Truths had to stand the test of time to be considered as such. And the truth that mattered most was not natural, but supernatural: the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Scripture was the supreme authority in all matters under heaven. Beyond that, there would be some room for reasoned understanding, but in the immortal words of St. Anselm of Beck, it had to be “faith seeking understanding.”

Then, during the 12th and 13th centuries, a second great authority returned to Earth. This was Aristotle. The recovery of his works and sheer power of his ideas could not be ignored. What most appealed to the medieval mind about Aristotle was the treatment of logic contained in his Organon. Aristotle’s identification of the laws of identity and non-contradiction were stamped with the aura of certainty. Contradictions do not exist in nature. Therefore, they should never be countenanced in any effort to depict how nature works.

 

The Thomistic Synthesis

It was St. Thomas Aquinas who came closest to reconciling the philosophy of Aristotle with the Gospel of Jesus. Aquinas announced that God had presented mankind with two revelations. There was his Holy Word contained in Scripture and his Holy Work, as observed in Nature. The Bible tells us how to get to heaven. Unaided reason, reflecting on God’s natural world would teach mankind how to live on earth. St. Thomas Aquinas consummated a holy marriage of Scripture, as revealed in the gospels of Jesus, and Nature, and revealed by man’s five senses and the wondrous rational faculty that God implanted in every human soul.

Sir Francis followed St. Thomas’ lead. God has revealed himself to man by means of two scriptures: first, of course, through the gospels and second, through His handi­work, the created universe. “To study nature, there­fore, cannot be contrary to religion; indeed, it is part of the duty we owe to the Great Artificer of the world.”[ii] The study of nature would be nothing more than the “study of God’s Holy Work, as a sup­ple­ment to His Holy Word.” As it turned out, the Church would be driven to make the ecumenical move.
 

Scholasticism and a Church in Crisis

Long before Martin Luther and John Calvin launched the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church was hounded by controversy and conflict. The Church continually had to contend with pious believers like John Wycliffe or Jan Huss who did not see how wine and wafers could magically turn into the blood and body of Jesus Christ. And Huss found no scriptural warrant for issuing indulgences to allow wealthy Church donors to buy their way out of Purgatory. Heretical groups like the Waldensians and Albigensians also threatened the authority of the Universal Church. In fact, religious competition extended even to purely peaceful endeavors.

The 12th and 13th centuries saw a great revival of urban life and a burst of commerce. In the trading centers of Northern and Southern Europe, Christians did business with Jews, Muslims, and non-believers. Once the trading day was ended, they retired to the inns and boarding houses to discuss what consumed the minds of businessmen of all faiths. That was faith, itself. It would be a boon if Christian businessmen and clergymen could defend against the heterodox, religious challenges. Institutions would be needed to better arm the faithful for theological combat.

The Thomistic synthesis, designated as Aristotelian Scholasticism, was the Church’s response to these many challenges. The Roman Catholic Church opened universities in many European cities. First organized to train people in theology, law, and medicine so as to produce the lawyers, judges, physicians, priests, and bishops society could not do without, these centers of learning soon expanded their vital mission. At a time when printing presses were making ancient and modern texts widely available and the thirst for learning was spreading like a wildfire on a parched, prairie plain, the new universities taught generations of educated Europeans the wondrous powers of logical disputation. Learned souls would now be equipped with the intellectual weapons needed to better defend the “one, true faith.”
 

Enter Sir Francis Bacon

By the time Francis Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge University at the end of the 16th century, Europe’s intellectual life was dominated by Aristotelian Scholasticism. At Cambridge, students were instructed to “lay aside their various authors and only follow Aristotle and those that defend him.” According to one of his contemporaries it was at Cambridge that Bacon “fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle being a philosophy only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of mankind.”[iii] Bacon believed that knowledge was power. It held the power to relieve human suffering and improve the conditions of life on earth.

Bacon envisioned an empirical science that would finally unlock the secrets of nature and employ that understanding for the benefit and use of mankind.

At a time when the educated elites worshipped past authority and had no use for “rash innovators” Bacon envisioned an empirical science that would finally unlock the secrets of nature and employ that understanding for the benefit and use of mankind. Sir Francis Bacon dreamt of a universal science, comprehending all useful objects of study. He compiled a list of the objects that could be studied in a lengthy “Catalogue of Particular Histories.” Clouds, minerals, water currents, animal species, health, all the things of nature could be studied, yielding useful applications to overcome life’s vexing problems.

Insightfully, Bacon grasped that if a full knowledge of nature was to be had, the faculty charged with knowing nature would also have to be investigated. Accordingly, the seven­ty-eighth item in Bacon’s “Catalogue” is listed as a “Histo­ry of the Intellectual Faculties, Reflexion, Imagina­tion, Discourse, Memory, etc.” Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Neal Wood imaginatively concluded, “was just such a natural history, one that would have satisfied Bacon’s complaint that an analysis of the understanding in terms of sensation still remained to be done.”[iv]

The “Catalogue” included more than a hundred elements of nature to be explored. To what end? For the sake of “charity.” Christian charity, for Bacon, was any effort that could ameliorate the unendurable suffering that so marred daily life in medieval times. Bacon was not repudiating God or the Gospel of Christ. He was no atheist. He merely wished to see faith firmly divorced from natural philosophy – i.e., the study of the things of the natural world. His most essential work, The New Organon, argued that such an inductive experimental science, free from the dead weight of the past, could yield new fields of knowledge that would be dynamic, cumulative, and, above all, useful. His ultimate vision was that human beings, if governed by charity, could use knowledge to alter their relationship to nature and society on behalf of “the effecting of all things possible.”[v]

Investigatory methods mattered most. Religious devotion relied on deductive truths drawn from general and fundamental principles. Scientific understanding demanded a procedure guided by induction. This meant going from particulars to generalities, always tested by experiment and open to revision. “To study the book of nature is to come to know the power of God. To apply the knowledge so gained to the relief of man’s estate is to carry out God’s will.”[vi] Science and service to mankind were thus inseparably linked in Bacon’s mind by the very doctrine of the Creation.”

But there was more in Bacon’s way than the Word of God implanted in Scripture. There was the accumulated wisdom of all the venerated ancients. Logical deduction from long-accepted, church-endorsed axioms, rather than careful observation and disciplined induction, was the method of the Old Learning. Beyond that, what passed for energetic inquiry in all the Schools was the mere picking apart of logical incongruencies and wondrous paradoxes in the body of received opinion. The goal of Scholasticism was to achieve a glorious resolution of all apparent inconsistencies that could be drawn from ancient authority.

If real inquiry was to get underway the authority of the ancients would have to be challenged no less than the authority of Scripture. Unable to abide the “dead hand” of Scholastic learning, the empty laboratories of “hair-splitters,” un­willing to counte­nance the “proud, puffed-up minds” labor­ing “to except ignorance from ignominy,” Bacon sallied forth: “Sciences of this kind stand almost at a stay, without receiving any aug­mentations worthy of the human race; in so much that…not only what was asserted once is asserted still, but that what was a question once is a question still.”[vii]

A fiery battle for epistemological independence would be joined, Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, and Newton would command on this field of combat.

In short order, a fiery battle for epistemological independence would be joined, Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, and Newton would command on this field of combat. They urged rational, empirical inquiry and experimenta­tion and promised astonishing results. Received opinion was as a dead hand. The New Learning would be for the benefit and use of life: “In behalf of the business which is in hand I en­treat men to believe that it is not an opinion to be held, but a work to be done.”[viii] Here I stand, proclaims Bacon in his Great Instauration, laboring to lay the foundation “not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.”[ix]  But it is in the Nova Organon that Bacon most clearly names the grand object of his desire: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”[x]

What Bacon set himself to demonstrate was the folly of holding fast to the wisdom of the ancients when that meant closing one’s eyes and ears to the sweep­ing discoveries of the moderns. Knowledge would be employed for the sake of power: not the kind of power that ends in men’s subjugation, but the kind that will enable mankind to rule nature for the betterment of man’s earthly estate. What a thing to contemplate. If nature could only be obeyed—i.e., studied by reason’s purifying light marking and measuring the material provided by the senses—she could then be com­mand­ed. Her dreaded famines and floods, her plagues and pesti­lence, her storms and tempests might be stilled forev­er.

 

Bacon’s Legacy

Bacon wasn’t alone in calling for the empirical study of nature. Innumerable others were busy developing the tools that would facilitate the exercise. Mathematical discoveries would soon make more comprehensive observation and measurement possible. The rise of a new system of algebraic equations offered improvements in computation of events on and above the earth. A newly-minted analytic geometry would make it possible to convert geometric into algebraic relationships. The Calculus, discovered by Isaac Newton and Gotlieb Leibniz further made calculation of movement more exact.

Bacon wasn’t alone in calling for the empirical study of nature.

Then came a bevy of new scientific tools that allowed for far accurate calculations, accounts that could be duplicated and verified. The vacuum tube allowed for experimentation with air and gases. The barometer enabled the curious to check air pressure. The thermometer let the new scientists take temperature. Antoine van Leeuwenhoek was among the first to look through a microscope at bacteria and protozoa. Finally, Galileo didn’t invent but was first to perfect the telescope. What he saw with his own two eyes would overturn the cosmology promoted by the Church for more than a thousand years.

 

At War with Aristotle

Taking a page from Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd century AD astronomer, the Scholastics held that the Earth was at the center of the Universe, furthest away from God. Being that far removed from the Deity, the earth was but a place of imperfection and sin, home to fallen man. Above the earth, stood the moon, the stars and other heavenly orbs, along with layers of angels to do God’s bidding. Here was the realm of permanence and pure perfection. The heavenly orbs spun in perfect circular patterns and were unmarred by messy mountains or valleys. This was part and parcel of the Christian worldview. To doubt or dispute any part of this portrait of existence was to call into question the entire theology of the Roman Catholic faith.

Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the stars and planets. His huge cache of astronomical observations would be passed on to Johannes Kepler who succeeded Brahe to the post of Imperial Mathematician. As early as 1609 Kepler published his 3 laws of planetary motion. He found out that the planet Mars made an elliptical, not a circular orbit in the heavens and that the heavenly bodies do not run at a uniform speed. They slow down and speed up depending of their alternating distance from the sun. Kepler also confirmed Nicholas Copernicus hunch that the sun, not the earth was at the center of the solar system. Galileo gazed at the skies through his telescope. What he saw further cast doubt on Aristotelian Scholasticism and vindicated Bacon’s commitment to empiricism.

Galileo totally overturned the Scholastic cosmology.

Galileo totally overturned the Scholastic cosmology. Looking through his telescope nightly after 1609 Galileo was finally able to empirically view the skies above as no prior person had. What his two eyes told him was that the heavenly bodies moved in imperfect elliptical revolutions not perfectly circular orbs. What was worse, examining the surface of the moon he saw anything but a purely perfect object in the sky. He could easily discern the moon’s craters and mountains. Then, by putting the Earth, not the moon, at the center of the heavenly skies and placing the planets in elliptical orbit around the Sun, he could paint a far more accurate picture of God’s created universe.

For his trouble, Galileo was placed on life-long house arrest, shown the instruments of torture used by the Holy Inquisition and ordered to recant his heretical views. An old man, by then, Galileo so recanted. He described his torment at the hands of the Church in a letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. In no respect did Galileo dispute the teachings of the Church, not where the salvation of souls was concerned. But Scripture, itself, did not say anything about the motion of the stars and planets in relation to the earth. So he concludes “that the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” In fine Baconian fashion, Galileo affirmed:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.  He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matter which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstration.”[xi]

The Baconian Revolution’s crowning achievement came with Sir Isaac Newton’s publication of the Principia in 1687. Believing he was looking into the mind of God and proceeding from observation and mathematical computation, he described a single, universal law that would describe the attraction of any two objects anywhere on or over the earth. His universal law of gravity told it like it was.

And anyone who cared to look through a telescope could confirm his findings. For appearing to replace the empirical facts and spreading specific scientific falsehoods, Aristotelian Scholasticism eventually lost its appeal. This is highly ironic, since it was Aristotle who was the first to empirically study the natural world in his Posteria Analytics. By the close of the 17th century Bacon’s pioneering vision would enjoy near universal acclaim. The results were remarkable. In the years that followed the English Civil War (1640-60), the empirical/inductive approach to learning came to dominate intellectual life.

And Bacon would contribute one more world-turning advance. At a time when every individual was seated in one or another social class with little if any prospect of upward mobility, Bacon imagined a civilization open to the talents. Here individuals would be advanced according to the achievements they personally chalked up. The creative idea was tried out in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model army. During the English Civil war, parliamentary soldiers were promoted on the basis of the courage and leadership roles they displayed in the war against King Charles I. Then, in 1660, came the Great Restoration – the return of the House of Stuart.

 

The Royal Society

The Royal Society received its charter from King Charles II in 1662 at Gresham College. Originally, it was comprised of two scientific groups:  one, already occupying the grounds of Gresham was headed by the mathematician, John Wallis. Wallis during the Civil War had been busy decoding enemy mes­sages for Cromwell.  The second scientific group belonged to Robert Boyle, the chem­ist and physicist, whose family had also sided with Parlia­ment against the King. The Royal Society would boast 130 members at its inception.

By 1664, the Society formed eight committees, including groups designed to study: (1) mechanics or matter in motion, (2) astronomical phenomena, (3) anatomical matters, (4) chemical properties and interactions, (5) agricultural methods, (6) the history of trade and navigation, (7) phenomena of nature as yet unrecorded and undetected, and (8) a committee of correspondence to share its discoveries with other scientific groups.

The preoccupation of the Royal Society whose minds had been formed by the writings of Francis Bacon, was practical. Brownowski and Mazlish estimate that roughly sixty percent of the work done by the Royal Society in its first thirty years was prompted by practical concerns and only forty percent by issues of pure science. Useful inventions and gadgets proliferated, and if an experiment did not prove functional overnight, the Fellows “were tempted by morning to move on to another.[xii] The experiments and calculations disclosed by the scientists of the Royal Society found practical application by clever mechanics and tinkerers in the workshops of Europe. Herein lay the roots of the Industrial Revolution of the next two centuries.

But the first business of the Royal Society was sci­ence, i.e., rational, empirical inquiry into the natural laws governing the relations of all the world’s objects. Thus the laws of production and trade would, themselves, become fit objects of study. To that end, empirical tools and rigorous conceptual methods would have to be furnished. It fell to Sir William Petty (1623-1687), an early Fellow of the Soci­ety, to devise the statistical methods for that particular undertaking. Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1691) and Treatise on Taxes and Contributions (1692) laid the founda­tions of modern economic science.  Statistics could now be gathered and organized for study and sound policy recommen­dations advanced. And beyond matters pertaining to political economy, ques­tions relating to the laws and organization of the polity—the civil frame within which men would live and labor—would also have to be investigated. A science of politics, too, could serve a useful human purpose. Locke and Montesquieu would gain prominence in that vital field of inquiry.

In fact, in publishing Some Considerations on the conse­quenc­es of Lowering the Rate of Interest and Rais­ing the Value of Money (and sundry other economic papers), and in publishing An Essay Concerning the True, Original, Extend and End of Civil Government, as well as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and significant educa­tional writings, John Locke re­vealed, in unmistak­able terms, his steadfast devotion to Francis Bacon’s vision of improvement. Often depicted as an exponent of “possessive individualism” and capitalist greed, John Locke was among the most civic-minded men of his age. His lasting contribution to improvement and human felicity cannot be exaggerated.

The Transactions of the Royal Society, published periodically, was a sensation. Each issue contained discoveries in the field of pure science as well as the arts. The arts came to be the application of scientific principles for the practical benefit and use of mankind. Every imaginable topic, from optics, to mathematics, to navigation, to medical discoveries, even notable recipes became fit topics of inquiry for the Royal Society and made a part of the Transactions.

 

Conclusion

No one would mistake Sir Francis Bacon for an Objectivist. But he was committed to at least two foundational principles on which Ayn Rand’s philosophical outlook rests. Bacon empirical approach has it that knowledge begins with the evidence of reality provided by the senses. That is the key that unlocks the door to Objectivist epistemology. And Bacon also believed that the justification of any science or intellectual endeavor is ultimately the contribution it makes to man’s life, to his ability to cope effectively with reality. Why is that? Because as Ayn Rand insisted, life is the standard. Thus, Sir Francis Bacon shared two of Ayn Rand’s deepest premises. To that extent Bacon was a forerunner to Objectivism three centuries before Ayn Rand could draw her first breath.

To that extent Bacon was a forerunner to Objectivism.

Ayn Rand once said that without the Industrial Revolution, she would not have been able to construct her comprehensive philosophy of man and nature. That Revolution brought so many inventions and technological innovations to market and steadily eased the burden of life for successive generations. And every new device or commodity flowed from the scientific study of such natural forces as magnetism, gravity, electricity, optics, mechanics, vacuums, anatomy, and chemical reactions. To the extent to which Bacon inspired the scientific revolution of the 17th century, he can be said to have made a fine contribution to the Industrial Revolution on which Ayn Rand, herself, depended.

 

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