Catherine Drinker Bowen

Francis Bacon

Bacon's Instauratio Magna, his vision of a new Atlantis where scientists might share experimentation in colleges and workshops—all this has become so much part of modern life that we can scarcely fix our minds on it. We are used to such ideas, we forget the courage and the vision needed to propound them in Bacon's day. We forget that to challenge the accepted epistemology—let alone to challenge God's cosmology and the mysteries of His universe—was to query also the established social and religious order. For this impudence, Bacon's Italian contemporaries—Galileo, Campanella, Giordano Bruno—were imprisoned as heretics, and one of them was burned at the stake.

If too much had not been claimed for Francis Bacon, there would be no need for so many disclaimers. He seems, indeed, not to have belonged strictly to the company of scientists. It is a pity he was ever placed there. Bacon was no mathematician, and for all his prophetic insight, was blind to the potentiality of pure mathematics in the science of the future. Dr. William Harvey was his contemporary in London. Yet Bacon never mentions Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, though this was announced publicly in 1616, when Bacon was at the height of his powers. Bacon met and talked with William Gilbert, when the latter was Queen Elizabeth's physician. But he passes over with a few words Gilbert's great work on the magnet. Nor is Bacon by any means ready to accept Galileo's new cosmos. It is true that Bacon notes it might be well to engage Sir Walter Ralegh's friend, Thomas Hariot, the mathematician, for certain experiments—but nothing comes of it.

Bacon was not a scientist but the propagandist of science. He was the prophet who urged men out of sterile scholasticism into the adventurous, experimental future. In his own words, he rang the bell that called the wits together. At his country houses, in Gorhambury or Twickenham, Bacon carried out, over the years, persistent, patient experiments in natural philosophy. His Natural History, Novum Organum, History of the Winds, Of Dense and Rare, Of Hot and Cold, Of the Ebb and Flow of the Sea, his Description of the Intellectual Globe are filled with observations and conclusions concerning things of touch, sight and sound. But it is the questions Bacon asks which are valuable, not the answers—and this applies to his legal writings as to his philosophical ones.