Francis Bacon and the Reform of Natural Philosophy

Martin, Julian. Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1992.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

…the institutionalisation of the sciences and their practitioners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owes much to him [Bacon]

A Statesman’s Responsibility

‘reform’ was ‘in the air’—‘humanists’, men such as Erasmus, Thomas More and Thomas Elyot. This begs a series of questions for the historian, the principal one being the pressing matter of displaying concrete causal relationships between a ‘climate of ideas’ and known practical action…Erasmus, More or Elyot…were scholarly men who wanted ‘to restore’ rather than ‘to reform’… moralists: pious, intellectual and very conservative. Educated in Italy…By 1510…extended their operations from the universities to London and the royal court…patronage from…grandmother of …Henry VIII

Latin and Greek (and often in Hebrew), studying and translating the Scriptures in their ancient form, and reading classical secular authors (especially the historians and the moralists) were championed as the means to enhance the moral behaviour and intellectual profundity of those who were the ‘natural’ leaders of English society and its government

Cromwell’s radical vision of the reformed realm of England was inspired by Marsiglio

‘Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience…’

Cromwell’s achievement…subjugation of the Church, the destruction of independent jurisdictions in England, the restructuring of the central administration…

‘commonweal’ reforms

…continuing commitment to the reforms begun in the 1530’s, to the established Church and to the ‘commonweal’ programme. Richard Sackville, Thomas Smith, Thomas Gresham, Walter Mildmay, William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon.

Cecil…Secretary of State…1558…[Eliz] This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the state…’

…’commonwealth’ reforms of Queen Elizabeth’s early years were strikingly similar to those which Smith unsuccessfully voiced in 1549… close friends, Sir Nicholas Bacon, now the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Sir William Cecil, the Principal Secretary of State…responsible for preparing the new government’s legislative programme, and during the very difficult and dangerous early years – the ‘testing time’ of the new regime…foreign war,…succession…clash of conservatives and radicals over the queen’s religious settlement, Bacon and Cecil…economic and legal reforms…clearly bore the stamp of Thomas Cromwell.

Justices of the Peace were…nearly always the principal landowners of the county…

Bacon ordered in 1561…distribution of an ‘Abbreviate’ of the current statutes…

The Young Statesman

…treatises hoping to sway the queen away from full support of the archbishop…Whitgift’s former pupil, Francis Bacon…’A Letter of Advice to the Queen’…

The young Francis Bacon can be identified, then, with the principal men and the policies of the Puritan movement….the parliamentary patronage of the Earl of Bedford…rebuffed similar offers from his powerful conservative uncle [Burghley]….associated with Leicester’s celebrated nephew, Sir Philip Sidney,… Sidney in fostering connections with Henri of Navarre’s courtier-poets. …’Letter of Advice to the Queen’ was part of the great Puritan campaign of the 1584-5 parliament,…battle for a ‘Godly Church’ and for the destruction of the ‘papists’ was a principal part of their duty as statesmen.

Elizabeth made it abundantly clear that she detested Puritans and that she now was prepared to resist alterations in her established Church. Here began the rapid disintegration of…a broad alliance of reforming Protestants

…his noble patrons (and his mother as well) were setting themselves against the queen’s explicit wishes. Bacon could no longer expect their patronage to gain him office in government and certainly, when compared with the broad ‘commonweal’ aspirations he had learned from his father, their ambition now seemed narrowly sectarian.

…1586…Bacon declined the Earl of Warwick’s offer of a Commons seat in the Leicester House interest. He accepted instead a seat provided by the Bishop of Winchester

…Bacon began several years’ service in gathering domestic intelligence about Jesuits, seminary priests, their accomplices and their plots to foment recusant uprisings. Walsingham was the master of the government’s intelligence, ‘a most subtle searcher of hidden secrets’.

…’their Lordships’ desired the legal opinions of the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, and ‘Mr Francis Bacon, Esq.’, upon various enclosed examination reports of two Catholic prisoners.

1587…regularly involved in this grim and profoundly serious judicial work.

1589…’Clerkship of the Privy Council in Star Chamber’. The Court of Star Chamber…enforcing the royal peace and royal justice…central government’s principal instrument for impressing obedience to the strict rule of law upon the realm and for punishing all outbreaks of ‘riot and affray’.

…not only would he become a minor judge and a close associate of the principal statesmen of the realm, but the legal problems he would deal with were explicitly those concerned with the security and strength of the state.

Let none that is unlearned presume to admonish another in controversies of religion. Let not one that liveth alone and seeth not into the affairs of the world presume to advise others of their proceedings.

…’few follow the things themselves, more the names of the things, and most the names of their masters’.

‘leap from ignorance to a prejudicate opinion, and never take a sound judgement in their way…when men are indifferent, and not partial, then their judgement is weak and unripe through want of years; and when it groweth to strength and ripeness, by that time it is forestalled with such a number of prejudicate opinions, as it is made unprofitable: so as between these two all truth is corrupted.’

‘General affectations’ and ‘accidental emulations and discontentments’, Bacon believed, ‘together break forth into contentions, such as either violate truth, sobriety, or peace.’

…’sobriety’ and ‘peace’ (which were for Bacon, given his security work, political values), …nature, causes (and errors) of learning and knowledge were properly among the concerns of a conscientious statesman, and especially proper for a prospective Clerk of Star Chamber.

…Sir Nicholas prepared Francis Bacon…the essential duties of a royal servant were to provide the monarch with good counsel and to advance the commonweal of the realm.

Lady Anne Bacon, devoted to Puritan causes, encouraged Francis to seek his career through association with Puritan noblemen and to distance himself from Sir Nicholas’ old colleagues…when the queen rejected Puritan attempts to pressure her and the puritan leaders became increasingly radical, Bacon (then twenty-five years old)felt forced to make a serious choice…resembled his father both in their dedication to the queen’s service and in their cautious reforming instincts.

Nor was it surprising that Bacon should have come to believe the problems of knowledge were within the brief of a statesman-judge.

…Cambridge…wise men were guided by ‘sure proofs and certain knowledge’ and not by ‘affectation, opinion, and fancy’….French Academie du palais…direct parallels between the search for self-knowledge and an eventual personal virtue and harmony (on the one hand) and the search for vigorous royal governance and the rule of justice and order in the state (on the other). Sir Philip Sidney, whom Bacon knew well in London, had agreed with the Continental academicians…it was ‘poesy’ that best served ‘to…draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls are capable of.’

III

Business of State

Bacon’s earliest surviving statements about natural philosophy…display his reaction to developments he regarded as politically dangerous and a serious challenge both to the stability and to the ‘commonweal’ of the realm.

…it could be refashioned into a splendid support for the Tudor state.

…1590, Bacon’s future…thrown into doubt by Walsingham’s death

…known to be a reliable advisor in recusancy examinations and prosecutions…

…Bacon saw Essex as his obvious patron…widely regarded at the beginning of the 1590’s as the rightful successor not only to the Earl of Leicester, but also to Sir Philip Sidney and to Secretary Walsingham.

…a government dominated by Burghley seemed increasingly likely. It was thus as the standard-bearer of the court’s Puritan ‘war party’ and as a brake against Burghley’s pre-eminence that Essex swiftly became the object of many hopes.

Essex had gone in late 1585…fight the Spanish in the Low Countries…skilled and admired as a military captain…enamoured with the soldiering life

…1586…boldly beside Sir Philip Sidney…

…Protestant champion: Sidney bequeathed Essex his best sword…Essex had been anointed, as it were, by the dying hero himself.

…1591, Bacon was actively organising an intelligence network for Essex;…reactivating Walsingham’s networks and re-employing many of his clerks and informants at home and abroad…

…again receiving spy information on priests and Jesuits…Bacon’s political allegiances overlapped with those of the young Essex

…as concerned now with security and intelligence as he had been under Walsingham…now he was more in charge…directing a network of political ‘intelligencers’…Bacon had become a principal confidant and advisor of Essex.

After thirty years of successive good harvests, from 1585 onwards arable crops in general – not just the grain harvest – were damaged repeatedly…reflected in prices for grains, peas and beans vastly increased…1589 and 1590…peasants and urban labourers ate little wheaten bread, and prices for barley, oats, peas, beans…Hay and straw were similarly dear and precious livestock became more expensive to maintain.

…first failures since Queen Elizabeth had ascended the throne…explained as signs of divine anger at human wickedness…prince, the bishops, the landlords, the individual, or of mankind in general?

…1586…’our poore people are so hardilie distressed that we stand in great dowte of some mutinie or unlawfull attempte to aryse amongeste them, unles somme politique meanes be devised’.

In his ‘Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England’, Francis Bacon declared, ‘some will no longer be e numero, of the number’, and he condemned as false the knowledge of the ‘Godly’:

[They] think themselves led by the wisdom which is from above, yet I say with St. James, Non….

The Puritan voluntary community flew in the face of the official Tudor ideal of an all-embracing, national community – the common weal of all English people – bound together within a single state and Church and within an all-embracing hierarchical structure.

The ruling elite of Elizabethan England fully believed Thomas Cromwell’s argument that ‘England is an empire…governed by one supreme head and king…unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people…be bounden.’

By 1591, Essex’s flirtation with Puritan activists was over…

…1590 onward…lengthy imprisonments of leading Puritan controversialists smashed the radical movement…

How he wished to serve was ‘not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour; nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly)’.

…’I have taken all knowledge to be my province.’

…Bacon had decided that ‘knowledge’ should be a provincia of the state and that he should be its governor

“if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, wherof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province.’

The first (‘with frivolous disputations confutations, and verbosities’) may be taken to be the university ‘Schoolmen’…second sort (‘with blind experiments, auricular traditions, and impostures’) are ‘Hermetic magicians, and the Paracelsian ‘chemists’ and ‘Godly’ authors…

‘Another point of great inconvenience and peril, is to entitle the people to hear controversies and all points of doctrine. They say no part of the counsel of God is to be supressed, nor the people defrauded: so as the difference which the Apostle maketh between milk and strong meat is confounded: and his precept that the weak be not admitted unto questions and controversies taketh no place.’

…similar to those voiced by Puritan authors of ‘how-to-do-it’ books. Nevertheless, the intent is utterly different: Bacon is speaking of a state-led and state-controlled knowledge rather than a private one.

…’best state’ Bacon believed to be ‘philanthropia’ and , true to the ‘commonweal’ ideals and policies of his father, Burghley and others…

Bacon envisaged a hierarchical division of intellectual labour analogous to that which currently existed in the departments of state.

[1592 entertainment for the Queen in honor of Essex]…sixteenth-century humanist tradition of courtly literature known as ‘mirrors for princes’…moral virtues which the good prince should have, including his youthful attainment of them by (humanist) education…

…’fortitude’ and ‘love’ found, respectively, in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour (1531) and Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1514)

Castiglione’s Il cortegiano had been translated into English in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby…Bacon was familiar with the Courtyer, since Sir Thomas was one of his uncles.

…Bacon had introduced something unlooked-for into…speech ‘In Praise of Knowledge’…unexpected in a ‘mirror’…because Bacon praised natural philosophy.

‘All the Philosophie of nature which is now receaved is eyther the Philosophie of the Gretians or that other of the Alchimists. That of the Gretians hath the foundations in words, in ostentation, in confutation, in sectes, in Auditories, in schooles, in disputacions…That of the Alchimists hat the foundation in imposture, in auriculer tradicions, and obsucuritie…The one is gathered out of a few vulgar observacions, and the other out of a few experiments of the furnace.’

‘Now we governe nature in opinions but are thrall to her in necessities. But if we would be led by her in invention we should command her in accion.’

…explicitly political…’thrall’, of ‘governing’, ‘commanding’… ‘the soveraingtie of man’

…concrete and local reference: namely, the English monarch’s pre-eminence, supremacy or dominion over men’.

…contrast the potency of ’knowledge’ with what Bacon claims as the relative impotency of the means by which contemporary sovereigns were building states and empires.

…principal use of this novel instrument of state was state-building itself.

…added something he called ‘knowledge’ to the traditional ‘fortitude’ and ‘love’

…knowledge about the self had been displaced here by knowledge about the natural world

…same ‘active’ values and public ends as did the commonweal programme of his father’s generation.

…Gray’s Inn revels of Christmas-time 1594-5,…Privy Councillors, great nobles and royal courtiers were entertained by the lawyers.

…Bacon…’good counsel’…presenting a group of councillors each of whom argued for a different grand policy for their prince and his state.

A prince figure asked six of his Privy Council to give their advice ‘not of any particular action of our state, but in general of the scope and end whereunto you think it most for our honour and the happiness of our state that our government should be rightly bent and directed

‘Exercise of War’, the ‘Study of Philosophy’, ‘Eternizement and Fame by Buildings and Foundations’, Absoluteness of state and Treasure’, ‘Virtue and a gracious government’ and ‘Pastimes and Sports’.

…’the best and purest part of the mind, and the most innocent and meriting conquest, being the conquest of the works of nature…searching out, inventing, and discovering of all whatsoever is hid and secret in the world.’

…institutions, and Bacon is advocating their establishment because he firmly believed institutional ‘tools’ are required for discovering knowledge of nature.

…’monuments’ and the knowledge which they produce to be in the personal possession of the ruler of the state.

…the knowledge which results in ‘infinite commodities’, was to be generated on the monarch’s behalf by a bureaucracy overseen by a loyal philosopher-statesman

…same ‘active’ values and public ends as the commonweal programme of his father’s generation.

…believed in the same…Tudor bureaucracy.

…during a period in which he was involved increasingly in matters of security and political stability and during which he articulated his fears about the social and political implications of the new ‘voluntary’ approach to knowledge of the ‘Godly’ gentry.

Bacon’s advocacy in the early 1590s on behalf of a reformed natural philosophy was, in effect, a plea to resuscitate the ‘commonweal’ programme by reorienting and reorganising it.

Conclusion

172

…regarded himself as a statesman and a personal councillor to kings, rather than as a private person.

…legal career as an elite Crown servant,…his reform of natural philosophy, no less than his proposed reform of law, was always governed by his political perspective and his loyal ambition to create bureaucratic machinery with which his master could better govern and expand his kingdom…enhancement of the powers of the Crown was a great and necessary good…

…in Scriptural matters, men should accept the leadership of official experts, namely, the ecclesiastical hierarchy...

So, too, in natural philosophy: men should accept the leadership of official experts and a centralised organisation. Those who assumed otherwise were ‘willful’ and ‘voluntaries’.

…his physician, William Harvey, a celebrated voluntary…

…natural philosophy…sixteenth century expanded from the university and cloisters into the broader and more volatile public arena…

173

…artisans and gentlemen were asserting a right to pursue natural knowledge and to make public pronouncements…

…regarded…valuing official mediation in natural knowledge above liberality in its pursuit, as potentially dangerous to the structure of civil society…early 1590s when Bacon was making his first pronouncements…Doctor Faustus a frightening caricature of the aspiring and independent natural philosopher. Faustus sought secular power through philosophy.

Francis Bacon…translated Tudor strategies of bureaucratic state management, late-Elizabethan political anxieties and social prejudices, and a principal intellectual resource of the landed gentry – the science of the common law – into his ‘novum organum’ for the paternal governance of the ‘province’ of knowledge.