![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
To consult nature herself about nature
(Another book excerpt. It's possibly a bit too long, but Bacon is just so quotable!)
In 1620, Francis Bacon published a bold challenge to the world to start over again on scientific investigations in his Nova Organum. The title was a reference to Aristotle’s Organon, the name given to his works covering logic and syllogism, including the Posterior Analytics. In his updated version, Bacon explicitly called for this old approach to be replaced by a natural science based on empirical observations and induction. This wasn’t the first time someone had advocated for a science based on experimentation, but it was by far the most influential. It came at exactly the right time, as the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were starting to diffuse through Europe. The old Aristotelian approaches were looking increasingly stale. Bacon saw stagnation in the intellectual world around him, and he wasn’t subtle in condemning it.
“For if you look closely at the wide range of books which are the boast of the arts and sciences, you will frequently find innumerable repetitions of the same thing, different in manner of treatment but anticipated in content, so that things which at first glance seem to be numerous are found on examination to be few. One must also speak plainly about usefulness, and say that the wisdom which we have drawn in particular from the Greeks seems to be a kind of childish stage of science, and to have the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything. For it is fertile in controversies and feeble in results.”
Yet this wasn’t inevitable, Bacon argued, because other areas of human activity had been making significant improvements. The contrast he saw between them was stark.
“In the mechanical arts we see the opposite situation. They grow and improve every day as if they breathed some vital breeze. In their first authors they usually appear crude, clumsy almost, and ungainly, but later they acquire new powers and a kind of elegance, to the point that men’s desires and ambitions change and fail more swiftly than these arts reach their peak of perfection. By contrast, philosophy and the intellectual science are, like statues, admired and venerated but not improved.”
Relying on syllogistic thinking was at the core of this stalemate. If you only reason with syllogisms -- deductively, that is -- then you can never discover anything new. You’re stuck endlessly drawing conclusions from the same set of assumptions. This was the era in which the medieval scholastics started to be openly mocked for their obsession with seemingly pointless questions. Bacon didn’t quite accuse them of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pen1, but that satire does date to the time when the Nova Organon was being written.
“[...] in ordinary logic almost all effort is concentrated on the syllogism. The logicians seem scarcely to have thought about induction. They pass it by with barely a mention, and hurry on to their formulae for disputation. But we reject proof by syllogism, because it operates in confusion and lets nature slip out of our hands.”
Bacon called for science to start over again from scratch, this time building in inductive ways. He thought that was the only way to stay firmly rooted in the truths of nature. Any other approach would inevitably end up mired in philosophical arguments, without any way of knowing who was right.
“For we regard induction as the form of demonstration which respects the senses, stays close to nature, fosters results and is almost involved in them itself. And so the order of demonstration also is completely reversed. For the way the thing has normally been done until now is to leap immediately from sense and particulars to the most general propositions, as to fixed poles around which disputations may revolve; then to derive everything else from them by means of intermediate propositions; which is certainly a short route, but dangerously steep, inaccessible to nature and inherently prone to disputations. By contrast, by our method, axioms are gradually elicited step by step, so that we reach the most general axioms only at the very end; and the most general axioms come out not as notional, but as well defined, and such as nature acknowledges as truly known to her, and which live in the heart of things.”
Unlike most influential works, you don’t have to squint to tease out the specific arguments that later grew in the retelling2. Bacon comes right out and argues for inductive reasoning in explicit terms. It's suspiciously modern in places, like a particularly clumsy forgery. The central thesis of the book really is that if we start using inductive methods like experimentation, we can develop forms of science that will give us unprecedented control over the natural world. He even lays out some guidelines for publishing results that sounds a lot like the methodology section of any journal article published today.
“[...] in any new experiment of any subtlety, we should append the actual method used in the experiment, so that men may have the opportunity to judge whether the information it produced is reliable or deceptive, and also to encourage men to apply themselves to look for more accurate methods (if there are any).”
In order to replace the old way of doing things, he outlines a new methodology for doing science in the second half of the book. This part hasn’t aged as well, being the first in a long line of prescriptions for how science should be done that have little to no influence on the actual practice of science. He thought the best approach was to first write a comprehensive natural history of the world, listing everything known about it. With that foundation, he argued, it would then be merely the work of a few years to work out all of science3. The Nova Organon itself was only intended to be the prologue to this ultimate natural history. It ends with Bacon making a preliminary list of topics that will have to be covered. The whole thing is ironically very Aristotelian in nature, taking a concept and breaking it down into a long list of arbitrary distinctions given fancy names. Like a Moses of the Scientific Revolution, Bacon was able to foresee the path ahead and lead the world to it, but was ultimately unable to enter the promised land himself.
The second half still has some interesting moments, however, such as when he lists all the types and sources of heat that he can think of as an example of this new process. These include “flaming meteors”, “air shut up underground in some caverns, especially in the winter”, “quicklime sprinkled with water”, and “animals, especially internally, where they are constantly hot, though in insects the heat is not perceptible to the touch because they are so small”. It is tempting to chuckle at the random contents of the list4, but grappling with a highly subjective sensation like heat was legitimately challenging for early science. Bacon later describes a primitive thermometer5 in an attempt to make the categorization more objective. He even makes a surprisingly strong argument for heat being a form of motion instead of a separate substance.
Above all, he had the intuition that natural philosophy could remake the world by providing new tools and ways of harnessing nature. “[...] in our progress we shall walk the boundaries of the world.” This was described more fantastically in another book of his, The New Atlantis. Here he drew his inspiration not from Aristotle, but from Plato, particularly his Critias and its description of Atlantis. Bacon’s utopia was an island called “Bensalem” located somewhere in the north Pacific, as yet unknown to European explorers. There the reader finds an enlightened nation, ruled by philosopher-scientists straight out of The Republic. The heart of the land is “Solomon’s House”, home of the greatest savants. To the modern eye it is immediately recognizable as a research institute. By following inductive procedures, these wise philosophers have advanced science far beyond any other country. Many of the inventions of Solomon’s House, like the ability to project images and sounds long distances, “boats for going under water”, and “carriages without horses” sound, in retrospect, quite prescient.
Admirably, his commitment to experimental science wasn’t limited to theorizing in books, despite being frequently distracted by his political career. At 65 he had the idea to see if snow could be used to preserve meat. In the process of procuring a dead bird and stuffing it with snow, he contracted the pneumonia which killed him a few days later. Surely that’s an honorable death for anyone who wanted us to “perceive, as if awakening from a deep sleep, what is the difference between the opinions and fictions of mind and a true and practical philosophy, and just what it is to consult nature herself about nature.”
His influence proved absolutely enormous. Even though science didn’t end up using many of his proposed methods, the ideal of the natural philosopher he invented inspired generations. The Royal Society of Newton, Locke and Boyle was explicitly founded in imitation of Solomon’s House. A century later, the revolutionary government of France ordered his works to be reprinted, as part of their tragically doomed commitment to the ideals of the age of reason. It is not the goal of this book to make arguments regarding the “great man” theory of history, so it won’t be claimed here that the development of science would have been drastically different had he not existed -- but in our timeline, at least, he was essential.
[1] The original phrasing “needle’s point” was a pun on “needless points”.
[2] Hence the number of quotes in this section -- and the ones above are all from the first few pages!
[3] Those with a background in artificial intelligence might be reminded of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference where the field was born. The attendees were blithely confident of creating a machine with general human-level intelligence within 10 years, 20 at most. It turns out that predicting the difficulty of a research goal before doing any of the research is really hard.
[4] Which I’m guilty of doing myself, obviously.
[5] Along the lines of a barometer, using water.
In 1620, Francis Bacon published a bold challenge to the world to start over again on scientific investigations in his Nova Organum. The title was a reference to Aristotle’s Organon, the name given to his works covering logic and syllogism, including the Posterior Analytics. In his updated version, Bacon explicitly called for this old approach to be replaced by a natural science based on empirical observations and induction. This wasn’t the first time someone had advocated for a science based on experimentation, but it was by far the most influential. It came at exactly the right time, as the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were starting to diffuse through Europe. The old Aristotelian approaches were looking increasingly stale. Bacon saw stagnation in the intellectual world around him, and he wasn’t subtle in condemning it.
“For if you look closely at the wide range of books which are the boast of the arts and sciences, you will frequently find innumerable repetitions of the same thing, different in manner of treatment but anticipated in content, so that things which at first glance seem to be numerous are found on examination to be few. One must also speak plainly about usefulness, and say that the wisdom which we have drawn in particular from the Greeks seems to be a kind of childish stage of science, and to have the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything. For it is fertile in controversies and feeble in results.”
Yet this wasn’t inevitable, Bacon argued, because other areas of human activity had been making significant improvements. The contrast he saw between them was stark.
“In the mechanical arts we see the opposite situation. They grow and improve every day as if they breathed some vital breeze. In their first authors they usually appear crude, clumsy almost, and ungainly, but later they acquire new powers and a kind of elegance, to the point that men’s desires and ambitions change and fail more swiftly than these arts reach their peak of perfection. By contrast, philosophy and the intellectual science are, like statues, admired and venerated but not improved.”
Relying on syllogistic thinking was at the core of this stalemate. If you only reason with syllogisms -- deductively, that is -- then you can never discover anything new. You’re stuck endlessly drawing conclusions from the same set of assumptions. This was the era in which the medieval scholastics started to be openly mocked for their obsession with seemingly pointless questions. Bacon didn’t quite accuse them of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pen1, but that satire does date to the time when the Nova Organon was being written.
“[...] in ordinary logic almost all effort is concentrated on the syllogism. The logicians seem scarcely to have thought about induction. They pass it by with barely a mention, and hurry on to their formulae for disputation. But we reject proof by syllogism, because it operates in confusion and lets nature slip out of our hands.”
Bacon called for science to start over again from scratch, this time building in inductive ways. He thought that was the only way to stay firmly rooted in the truths of nature. Any other approach would inevitably end up mired in philosophical arguments, without any way of knowing who was right.
“For we regard induction as the form of demonstration which respects the senses, stays close to nature, fosters results and is almost involved in them itself. And so the order of demonstration also is completely reversed. For the way the thing has normally been done until now is to leap immediately from sense and particulars to the most general propositions, as to fixed poles around which disputations may revolve; then to derive everything else from them by means of intermediate propositions; which is certainly a short route, but dangerously steep, inaccessible to nature and inherently prone to disputations. By contrast, by our method, axioms are gradually elicited step by step, so that we reach the most general axioms only at the very end; and the most general axioms come out not as notional, but as well defined, and such as nature acknowledges as truly known to her, and which live in the heart of things.”
Unlike most influential works, you don’t have to squint to tease out the specific arguments that later grew in the retelling2. Bacon comes right out and argues for inductive reasoning in explicit terms. It's suspiciously modern in places, like a particularly clumsy forgery. The central thesis of the book really is that if we start using inductive methods like experimentation, we can develop forms of science that will give us unprecedented control over the natural world. He even lays out some guidelines for publishing results that sounds a lot like the methodology section of any journal article published today.
“[...] in any new experiment of any subtlety, we should append the actual method used in the experiment, so that men may have the opportunity to judge whether the information it produced is reliable or deceptive, and also to encourage men to apply themselves to look for more accurate methods (if there are any).”
In order to replace the old way of doing things, he outlines a new methodology for doing science in the second half of the book. This part hasn’t aged as well, being the first in a long line of prescriptions for how science should be done that have little to no influence on the actual practice of science. He thought the best approach was to first write a comprehensive natural history of the world, listing everything known about it. With that foundation, he argued, it would then be merely the work of a few years to work out all of science3. The Nova Organon itself was only intended to be the prologue to this ultimate natural history. It ends with Bacon making a preliminary list of topics that will have to be covered. The whole thing is ironically very Aristotelian in nature, taking a concept and breaking it down into a long list of arbitrary distinctions given fancy names. Like a Moses of the Scientific Revolution, Bacon was able to foresee the path ahead and lead the world to it, but was ultimately unable to enter the promised land himself.
The second half still has some interesting moments, however, such as when he lists all the types and sources of heat that he can think of as an example of this new process. These include “flaming meteors”, “air shut up underground in some caverns, especially in the winter”, “quicklime sprinkled with water”, and “animals, especially internally, where they are constantly hot, though in insects the heat is not perceptible to the touch because they are so small”. It is tempting to chuckle at the random contents of the list4, but grappling with a highly subjective sensation like heat was legitimately challenging for early science. Bacon later describes a primitive thermometer5 in an attempt to make the categorization more objective. He even makes a surprisingly strong argument for heat being a form of motion instead of a separate substance.
Above all, he had the intuition that natural philosophy could remake the world by providing new tools and ways of harnessing nature. “[...] in our progress we shall walk the boundaries of the world.” This was described more fantastically in another book of his, The New Atlantis. Here he drew his inspiration not from Aristotle, but from Plato, particularly his Critias and its description of Atlantis. Bacon’s utopia was an island called “Bensalem” located somewhere in the north Pacific, as yet unknown to European explorers. There the reader finds an enlightened nation, ruled by philosopher-scientists straight out of The Republic. The heart of the land is “Solomon’s House”, home of the greatest savants. To the modern eye it is immediately recognizable as a research institute. By following inductive procedures, these wise philosophers have advanced science far beyond any other country. Many of the inventions of Solomon’s House, like the ability to project images and sounds long distances, “boats for going under water”, and “carriages without horses” sound, in retrospect, quite prescient.
Admirably, his commitment to experimental science wasn’t limited to theorizing in books, despite being frequently distracted by his political career. At 65 he had the idea to see if snow could be used to preserve meat. In the process of procuring a dead bird and stuffing it with snow, he contracted the pneumonia which killed him a few days later. Surely that’s an honorable death for anyone who wanted us to “perceive, as if awakening from a deep sleep, what is the difference between the opinions and fictions of mind and a true and practical philosophy, and just what it is to consult nature herself about nature.”
His influence proved absolutely enormous. Even though science didn’t end up using many of his proposed methods, the ideal of the natural philosopher he invented inspired generations. The Royal Society of Newton, Locke and Boyle was explicitly founded in imitation of Solomon’s House. A century later, the revolutionary government of France ordered his works to be reprinted, as part of their tragically doomed commitment to the ideals of the age of reason. It is not the goal of this book to make arguments regarding the “great man” theory of history, so it won’t be claimed here that the development of science would have been drastically different had he not existed -- but in our timeline, at least, he was essential.
[1] The original phrasing “needle’s point” was a pun on “needless points”.
[2] Hence the number of quotes in this section -- and the ones above are all from the first few pages!
[3] Those with a background in artificial intelligence might be reminded of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference where the field was born. The attendees were blithely confident of creating a machine with general human-level intelligence within 10 years, 20 at most. It turns out that predicting the difficulty of a research goal before doing any of the research is really hard.
[4] Which I’m guilty of doing myself, obviously.
[5] Along the lines of a barometer, using water.