Abstract
In seventeenth-century ideas of the philosophy of science ‘mythic’ pronouncements were demonised as unscientific, irrational and vulgar, while induction and experiment were proposed as the new ways of realising human potential and power in the study and control of the natural world. Within this scheme Francis Bacon is regarded as the ‘Father’ of the new movement, offering, in numerous works, a philosophical basis for future investigative endeavours. It is somehow fitting that this Father should represent the movement of the New Science as being not only from myth to proof, but from infancy to maturity.
And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, nor inablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) to man of the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.
Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature (1603)1
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Notes
In The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, (1859), (Reprinted, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), III, p. 222.
See Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, (1605), in Works, III, p. 329.
Referring to nature as ‘she’ — Mother Nature — is an important part of the representation of the scientific endeavour in Bacon’s writing: understanding is often closely aligned with rape, subordination and domination. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (London: Harper Row, 1980).
Charles Webster has noted the puritan support for Bacon’s ideas: the Calvinist God was distant and inscrutable, but the patient and accurate methods of experimental science, penetrating slowly towards an understanding of the secondary causes of things in the search for a gradual reconquest of nature, represented the form of intellectual and practical endeavour most suited to the puritan mentality. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 506.
In this way Robert Boyle’s personal debate about animals and his rights to use them as experimental tools places Bacon’s ideas within a very important framework. Boyle recognises the potentially questionable act of putting a sentient creature through painful experiences, but can defend, and reassert his rights to do this through the claim that he is carrying out a religious inquiry. See Malcolm R. Oster, ‘“The Beame of Divinity”: Animal Suffering in the Early Thought of Robert Boyle’, British Journal for the History of Science, 22:2 (1989), 151–179.
In Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), p. 62.
Timothy H. Paterson, ‘Bacon’s Myth of Orpheus: Power as a Goal of Science in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients’, Interpretation, 16:3 (1989), 434.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), (Reprinted, London: Routledge, 1966), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, n.p.
Once again, however, the presentation of the Royal Society as an organisation which aimed to free humanity disguised a highly elitist institution. Restrictions on membership were based predominantly on economic rather than intellectual arguments and thus excluded many: see, Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1982), p. 8.
Brian Klug, ‘Lab Animals, Francis Bacon and the Culture of Science’, Listening, 18 (1983), 66.
For discussions of the significance of the work of Gesner and Turner, see: Whitney R. D. Jones, William Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician and Divine (London: Routledge, 1988); Charles E. Raven, English Naturalists From Neckam to Ray: a Study of the Making of the Modern World (revised edition, London: Abelard and Schuman, 1959); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 51–91.
Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes, Wherein a Short Survay is taken of the Natvre and Valve of Trve Poesy and Depth of the Ancients above ovr Moderne Poets (1632), in J. E. Springarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century: Vol 11605–1650 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), p. 177.
Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968). Rossi states that [t]he elusive ambiguity of Bacon’s attitude to classical mythology derives then: from the value he attributed to fables as a means of popularising his plan for scientific reform; from his belief in ancient, forgotten wisdom that must be recaptured; and from his notion of the fable as a primitive form of expressions used by an uncivilised humanity incapable of rational thought. And this confluence of variously inspired motives can only be reconciled in the light of Bacon’s pragmatism. (pp. 127–8)
Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), pp. 92–3.
John Moore, A Mappe of Mans Mortalitie (1617), p. 43.
William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1634), p. 449.
Keith Thomas, ‘Children in Early Modern England’, in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (eds), Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) p. 63.
Bacon, Works, IV, pp. 390–1.
For a useful summary of the historical debates about parent-child relations in pre-industrial society see Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially pp. 1–67.
Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, p. 457; Anne Bradstreet, ‘Before the Birth of one of her Children’, in Germaine Greer et al. (eds), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse (London: Virago, 1988), p. 135, line 22; Ben Jonson, ‘On My First Son’ (1603), in George Parfitt (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 48, lines 9–10.
Bacon, Works, VI, p. 696.
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Fudge, E. (1999). Calling Creatures by their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_6
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