The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton and Bacon

Abstract

Discussing the deficiencies of metaphysics in the Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon claimed that ‘it is the dutie and vertue of all knowledge to abridge the infinitie of indiuiduall experience … [T]hat knowledge is worthiest, which is charged with least multiplicities.’ Yet the pursuit of knowledge is hindered by what Bacon calls ‘the Roote of all error’: ‘that men … haue made too vntimely a departure, and to remote a recesse from particulars’. It is ‘the Nature of the Minde of Man … to delight in the spacious libertie of generalities, as in a champion Region; and not in the inclosures of particularitie’, Bacon complains. In their impatience to reach the spacious liberty of metaphysics, ‘men haue with- drawne themselues too much from the contemplation of Nature, and the obseruations of experience: and haue tumbled vp and downe in their owne reason and conceits’.