Novum Organum

Overview

An unfinished part of an unfinished project. Bacon planned six parts to his Great Instauration: a survey of existing knowledge, the new method, a natural history, examples of the method at work, provisional conclusions, and finally the new philosophy itself. He completed the first part in English as The Advancement of Learning, delivered this second part in Latin in 1620 while Lord Chancellor, and got no further before impeachment for bribery ended his public career in 1621. Book Two breaks off in the middle of the analysis of motion. The book you have is a method with one worked example and an enormous promissory note.

The form is aphorisms, numbered and short, and this is a deliberate choice. Bacon says continuous prose invites assent to a system, whereas broken pieces force the reader to judge each claim. Book One’s hundred and thirty aphorisms include some of a single sentence and some of several pages. Book Two’s fifty-two are longer and mostly technical.

The tone is worth preparing for. Bacon is polemical, grand and completely confident, and he is rude about almost everyone: Aristotle, the schoolmen, the alchemists, the magicians, Plato, and the universities, which he describes as places designed to prevent new ideas from being noticed.

The argument

Book One’s first move is diagnostic. Existing natural philosophy has produced arguments and not works, which for Bacon is the test, and it has stalled because men have taken the wrong route from experience to theory. The syllogism is useless for discovery: it manipulates propositions made of words whose meanings were fixed carelessly, so it can only spread existing error faster.

Then the idols, the section everyone remembers. Idols of the tribe are errors built into human nature as such: we see more order than exists, we notice confirmations and ignore exceptions, we are moved by what strikes the imagination, and we mix up how things are with how we wish they were. Idols of the cave are the private distortions of each individual, formed by temperament, education, reading and the accidents of one’s own history, so that a man who has worked long on one subject sees it everywhere. Idols of the marketplace come from language, which fixes words for things that do not exist and for distinctions that do not hold, and Bacon calls these the most troublesome of all. Idols of the theatre are the received philosophical systems, which he treats as stage plays, self-consistent and unreal.

Having established that the unaided mind cannot be trusted, Bacon argues for instruments and procedures, mental as well as physical, on the analogy of a lever. The point is not to sharpen the intelligence but to arrange the work so that ordinary intelligence suffices.

He then distinguishes his induction from the one the logicians knew. Their induction generalised from a handful of favourable cases. His proceeds by exclusion: you gather instances systematically, and then rule out every proposed cause that fails to fit, on the principle that negative instances are far more informative than positive ones. He is explicit that experiments must include cases nature does not offer, which is what experiment means for him.

Book One ends optimistically, with the claim that the printing press, gunpowder and the compass were all found by accident and yet transformed the world, so an organised search should do far more, and with a distinction between three grades of ambition: to extend one’s own power, one’s country’s, and the power of the human race over nature, of which the last is the soundest.

Book Two applies the machinery. The object of inquiry is the form of a nature, a term Bacon takes from the schoolmen and redefines as the law governing when the quality appears. His example is heat. He assembles a table of instances where heat is present, including the sun, lightning, quicklime and wool, then a table of closely related cases where it is absent, then a table of degrees. The exclusions eliminate light, rarity, celestial origin and much else. What survives is a tentative conclusion that heat is a kind of expansive motion in the small parts of a body, restrained and working upwards. He then begins to catalogue twenty-seven kinds of specially informative instance, the prerogative instances, and the text stops partway through the discussion of motion.

How to read it

Read the preface and the plan of the Great Instauration first, then Book One straight through. It is short, quotable and rarely difficult. Aphorisms 1 to 10, 19 to 26, 38 to 68 on the idols, 95 to 98 on experience, and 129 on what the enterprise is for will give you the whole of Bacon’s case.

In Book Two, read aphorisms 1 to 20 to see the tables actually built. You may stop there. The prerogative instances are interesting mainly to historians, and the section on motion is unfinished.

Judge the method by what he excludes rather than by his conclusion about heat, which happens to be roughly right for reasons he could not have known. The power of the procedure lies in the negative table, and in the insistence that a single counter-instance outweighs a hundred agreeable ones.

A caution against two readings. Bacon is not a naive collector of facts: he says plainly that experience without method is groping in the dark. Nor is he a modern experimentalist. He has no mathematics, no interest in hypothesis and test, and he dismissed Copernicus.

Questions it raises

• If the mind is as unreliable as Book One says, how can it be trusted to apply the method correctly?
• Does induction by exclusion ever terminate? What guarantees the candidate causes were all on the list?
• Bacon measures knowledge by works. Is there knowledge worth having that produces nothing?
• Are the idols really errors to be removed, or are some of them the conditions under which we think at all?
• What does Bacon’s silence about mathematics cost his account of what the new science would look like?
• He promises that the method will make discovery orderly and impersonal. Has any major discovery ever been made his way?