Abstract
Francis Bacon’s works cover a diverse range of spheres, including natural philosophy, experimental science, discursive essays and contemporary politics; yet underpinning this diversity, and spanning his roles as intellectual scholar and public official, lies his belief in a hybridity and adaptiveness in Nature that is also expressed in humans. Bacon describes the compound nature of the human body as an extreme manifestation of the hybridity to be found in Nature more generally, and it is this that results in humans’ particularly fluid and impressionable nature. This hybridity is also expressed by the co-effective nature of the bodily humours and the passions of the mind, with the distribution of the faculties of the mind in the organs of the body also reflecting the non-trivially embodied nature of the mind. The embodied mind is described as an ‘uneven mirror’ which ‘inserts and mingles its own nature with the nature of things as it forms and devises its own notions’; this reveals that a blurring between the characteristics of subject and object is inevitable, with a projection of one’s own qualities onto the object (Bacon 2000b, 19). Errors and false beliefs on the epistemological level result from the ontological interrelationship of natural bodies; these errors arise not just from our hybridity, or flawed sensory perceptions, but also from the discernment and motions of the minuscule yet material spirits through which all matter is dynamically interconnected. That humans are not only embodied but also extended into the world is implied by the flux from spirit to spirit, not only within, but also between entities, and this resulted in Bacon’s interest in pursuing empirical tests on social permeability, as well as on humans’ and other entities’ more general susceptibility to appropriate another substance’s properties.
In Sylva Sylvarum Bacon explained that the spirits or ‘Pneumaticals’ are the properties which govern nature in both animate and non-animate bodies. Without proper knowledge of the almost unceasing motion of the spirits no true analysis of Nature in general or of human nature in particular could be made: only a more empirical natural history could provide the necessary foundation for the building of a true philosophy. Hybridity in Nature requires a similar hybridity on a theoretical level, with inclusive approaches to understanding humans and Nature, as a supplement to their categorical division. Natural hybridity reflects, and in addition necessitates, hybridity on a linguistic, technological and sociocultural level, since while Bacon argues that humans are both the rulers and the cause for which the world was created, he also continues that without the aid of many resources they are unarmed and naked. Awareness and skepticism about humans’ tendency to frame experience according to human qualities and beliefs, and to accept elegant fictions and abstractions as truth, leads Bacon to emphasize the need by the human mind of tools and assistance, in order to overcome the illusions that impede it. One such tool is language, since although words can cause error because they only reflect the current notions of things, language’s contingency also allows for the concentrated transmission of ideas, and writing further supplements the memory, enabling the retaining and recovery of knowledge.
In De sapientia veterum Bacon explained that those who aim to forcibly govern matter will discover that matter instead metamorphoses into diverse forms, until, as if completing a circuit, it returns to its original state of being. Matter’s adaptation into metamorphosed and renewed forms indicates the underlying cause of human nature’s capacity to be flexible and hybrid and yet remain itself. Only through perceiving Nature anew could humans ever hope to grasp epistemologically their natural extendedness: Bacon’s innovative, albeit paradoxical seeming, proposal is that admission of the intellectual need for external tools and assistance is the necessary antidote to ontological hybridity and adaptability.
[T] his Proteus of Matter, being held by the Sleeves, will turn and change into many Metamorphoses.
Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum
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Jonathan Sawday --> explores the -->relation of concepts -->of anatomization to wider Renaissance cultural and literary discourses in The Body --> Emblazoned (Sawday 1995); Marina Wallace --> and Martin Kemp --> also tackle their -->interrelation in the book --> Spectacular Bodies (Kemp and Wallace 2000).
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Crooke 1615, 4: ‘For now we see through a -->glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’. See 1 Cor. 13:12.
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An anonymous reviewer was careful to point out that the spirit is usually understood as material and the vehicle of the soul rather than interchangeable with it; however, as I argue here, there is slippage or variation in the particular uses of terms, with the spirit frequently also described as superior to, or as the superior intellective part of the soul, as in the following example from Charron 1608, 54: ‘The --> action of the reasonable Soule is the knowledge--> and vnderstanding of all things: The Spirit of man--> is capable of vnderstanding all things… The first soueraigne Spirit, GOD, doth first know himselfe, and afterwards in himselfe all things; the latter Spirit, Man, quite contrarie, all other things rather than himselfe’. This slippage is explicitly described in La Primaudaye 1618, 34: ‘So that one would thinke, that the soule and spirit are two distinct things, although we see euery where the one taken for the other’. The relation is then discussed, and a distinction and a tautology simultaneously drawn: ‘I thinke we may here set downe some speciall difference betwixt them, although vndoubtedly the one is taken indifferently for the other, without any absurdity, yea they are one and the same thing. The difference may be made in this sort, if wee say, that the soule is common to all things that haue life-->, as we vse to say, that all beasts are animated, and haue sensible soules: but that the spirit which is immortall, and capable of reason--> & knowledge, is proper and peculiar to man onely, And it seemeth that Sophocles would teach vs this distinction, when he saith, that The spirit is the same thing to the soule, which the eye is to the body’ (35). See also Nixon 1612, 3–4: ‘The Soule is --> common to all things that haue life, But the Spirit (which is immortall and capable of Reason and knowledge) is proper to Man only: Or wee may say, the Spirit is the first and principall part of the Soule, wherein the minde, vnderstanding, and memory --> are contayned.’ Marginal commentary on the Bible--> (1590) glosses ‘the spirite of a man’ as the ‘minde of man’ (1 Cor. 2.11) and John Donne requires an entire sermon to describe the range of possible meanings of the word ‘spirit’: ‘amongst the manifold acceptations of the word spirit… it is either the soul it self-->, or the vitall spirits… or the superior faculties of the soul’ (Sermons 5: 65).
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On the role of the spirits see Rees 1977.
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See also Davies of Hereford 1609.
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De sapientia veterum, the original in Latin, was published in 1609, and was then translated into English in 1619 with the title The Wisedome of the Ancients.
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See Sartre 1956, liv: ‘This self-->-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something’.
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For a discussion of the way in which feminist historiography has problematized Bacon’s concept of the masculine domination of man--> over the -->feminine world, see Vickers 2008 and Park 2008; these issues -->will not be tackled here other than implicitly by suggesting the extent to which Bacon’s --> natural philosophy shows human knowledge--> and power as fundamentally dependent on nature.
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Also compare with Sylva Sylvarum, 18: ‘It helpeth, both in Medicine, and Aliment, to Change and not to continue the same Medicine & Aliment still’.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2011–2013) and further editing and proofreading occurred while the author was a Research Fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for the project A History of Distributed Cognition (2014–2017).
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Anderson, M. (2016). Francis Bacon’s Flux of the Spirits and Renaissance Paradigms of Hybridity and Adaptation. In: Giglioni, G., Lancaster, J., Corneanu, S., Jalobeanu, D. (eds) Francis Bacon on Motion and Power. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 218. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27641-0_6
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