Francis Bacon¡¯s
¡°Verulamium¡±: the Common Law
Template of The Modern in
English Science and Culture
Harvey Wheeler
verulan@msn.com
P.O. Box 704 Carpinteria CA
93014
805-684-4143
PREFACE
Several things unique to ¡°The Modern¡± in England were all ¡°unwritten¡± in origin: the common law, constitutionalism, scientific empiricism - and cricket; the ways of honor and courage. These ¡°ways¡± were not made out of either matter or transcendentals; rather out of special behavioral templates identified with being English, such as the unwritten obligation of the English to observe ¡°Right Form¡± and live by the code of the ¡°done thing.¡±. Every culture has its distinctive ¡°styles¡± and templates, though they vary in firmness and the scope of behaviors covered. English, French, American and German science, for example, possess highly distinctive styles even though they are mutually compatible. A cultural template is like the grammar of a language: a distinctive code or constitution that is mostly unwritten.
Many cultures have started out from pre-literate foundations similar to England¡¯s and moved beyond them to written laws and codes. The English did culture differently. One of the reasons they were able to produce an unusually strong and dynamic culture was because of a distinctive feature of their cultural template: the art of making the unwritten intelligible. The basis for this lay in their unique unwritten common law. The principles they developed for judging and discovering the dictates of the unwritten law were extended to nearly everything but especially to government and science: constitutionalism and scientific empiricism, two identifying emblems of The Modern in England.
Francis Bacon invented the new phenomenological element from which both were made. In the Latin of his basic theoretical writings Bacon called it schematismus, a term with many meanings in philosophy. Verulamium is the term used here for the new phenomenological element Bacon forged. First he gave a phenomenological reality to the law behind the rulings in the case reports made by judges when they applied the English unwritten common law. He refined that phenomenon and extended it beyond ¡°judicature¡± as he called it, to include the unwritten laws of both society and nature. Then, applying a ¡°Platonism of things rather than words¡±, he developed his new case method of law-finding into a generally applicable New Organon, Hooke termed it a logic engine, permitting the invention of a new scientific empiricism based on phenomenology rather than on the tabula rasa sensation psychology that Locke visited for a while on empiricism.
Isaac Newton¡¯s celestial mechanics is usually contrasted sharply with Baconian empiricism. But Newton said he was a Baconian. He explained in the Optiks how his adaptation of Baconian empiricism led to him to the foundations of modern physics.
The generally accepted philosophy of empiricism was Lockean until Kant. Inspired by Bacon¡¯s revolution in thought, Kant refined the logic of phenomenology and christened it as his own revolution in thought, providing the foundations for the philosophy of modern science.
The following is a summary of how Bacon invented the proto-phenomenology, the Verulamium, on which The Modern in England, and ultimately modern science, was to rest.
THE TRANSITIONAL SETTING
Seventeenth
century England was precociously Baroque and so was Francis Bacon. The rapidly
dying Gothic still shared quarters jealously with the upstart Modern, a
contradiction that is reflected throughout the times - the Lord Mayor of London
was buried twice; once as a guild master and once as a merchant. It is found throughout Bacon¡¯s
writings. He is one of the chief inventors of modern English prose. Plain-spoke thoughts leap from his
essays directly into the mind. Yet
like the ornamentation that decorates the rigorous formality of a Bach fugue,
the direct muscular force of a Bacon passage will lie embedded in a textual
setting of rhetorical flourishes. The Archimedal switch-block to the trackway
to the Modern was manned by many hands but the strongest was that of Francis
Bacon who after his impeachment, and with talented assistants like Thomas
Hobbes, ran Verulam like the ministry of invention called Salomon's House in New Atlantis (Wheeler, 1991).
Bacon¡¯s
career, post-mortem, has been as checquered as it was in the quick. Working the
¡°digs¡± of the Baconiana industry requires an applied cognitive archeology. With a Robert Boyle or a Rene Descartes
the things they did were known and have changed little since. Time has been
more whimsical with a few others; Goethe valued his contributions to science
above those to literature. Only
recently has his science been re-evaluated (Wheeler, 1987). Bacon's stature was high until the late
nineteenth century; low for the next few decades; recently somewhat
resuscitated. The reasons are
complex. The founding historians of science and philosophy seldom studied law,
and missed its role in the creation of British empiricist science. Until recently
most of them assumed that science was, or if not would like to be, Newtonian
mechanics, the optical theory of stars and atoms. They generally concluded that
Bacon¡¯s science was not science even though Newton said he was a Baconian;
accurately so, as will be seen below. More devastating, even the translator of
Bacon¡¯s scientific writings from Latin to English, Robert Ellis, (Spedding et. al. 1864) claimed Bacon was
scientifically naive and wrong-headed. Ellis, a conventional Victorian
mathematician, made several mis-translations and deletions that deprived later
scholars of access to the underlying subtlety of Bacon¡¯s scientific thought.
The mid-twentieth century Einstein-Bohr revolution led to more sophisticated
and actually more Baconian conceptions of science, as in the
"participant-observer" universe of scientists and philosophers like
John A. Wheeler and David Bohm. (D. Bohm, 1981; Yehuda Elkana, 1979; L.
Jonathan Cohen, 1977; Elsassser, 1982; 1986). Moreover, about 90% of the best work done in today¡¯s
experimental labs, especially those in biology, is performed much the way Bacon
prescribed. (Wheeler, 1990)
Bacon¡¯s
reputation has also suffered the scorn of scholars in the humanities. They have
taken the judgments of scientists at face value and have concluded it most
charitable to consider Bacon as a Renaissance rather than a Modern mind
(Martin, 1992). Paradoxically however, they then level the charge of positivism
against him; positivism being the social science version of classical
mechanics. Some in the humanities argue two rather preposterous things: that
positivist ("value-free") social science is both impossible and also
responsible for the moral bankruptcy of modern materialist society, and that
Francis Bacon started it all. (Skolimowski, 1983; Wheeler, 1983-a) Neither position
is tenable but it must be acknowledged that Bacon was an accomplice to his own
deprecation. Although his popular writings were models of clarity, many of his
philosophic and scientific works, especially their Latin versions, were
studiously opaque. His obscurantism was not like that found in a family recipe
whose secret ingredient is withheld, as was done in many hermetic writings.
Bacon¡¯s obscurity was deliberate. It derived directly from his philosophy of
science. He had concluded that one of the reasons for the failure of the
ancient philosophers and scientists was that their logic of inquiry was about
words rather than things. His logic of inquiry would correct that.
The
second problem flowed naturally from the first. The ancient sciences were
written in the demotic languages of their time and that doomed them to failure.
The laws of nature are not written in any people¡¯s vernacular - Greek, Latin or
English. Bacon concluded that if he tried to express his philosophical
conclusions in plain English, contemporaries might understand the words but not
their scientific meanings. He did not want the general estimation of the worth
of his scientific writings to be determined by the opinions of philosophical
incompetents. Bacon never resolved this quandary over how plain-spoke to make
his basic theory of scientific law. His fear was justified. Starting with Ellis
and including most modern philosophers of science, his work has been mistakenly
interpreted and mis-judged. He tried to solve the communication problem through
essays, myths and the novel, New
Atlantis. The paradoxical result was that foreign readers like
Voltaire(Voltaire, 1961) and Kant(Kant, 1929), who used Bacon¡¯s Latin versions
(he arranged Latin versions of even the articles he wrote first in English) understood
him better than did many English language scholars including especially the
translator of the scientific writings, Robert Ellis! Through a fortunate
accident, the present approach happened to begin, not with Bacon¡¯s philosophy
but with an intensive study of Bacon¡¯s legal and constitutional
theories.(Wheeler, 1947; Wheeler, 1949; Coquillette, 1992) That is the way he
himself started. To follow in his path from law to philosophy required
something like Foucault's archeology of ideas. But the approach was really
pre-structuralist, combining explication
de texte with conventional foot-slogging exploration.
BACON¡¯S INVENTION PROCESS:
Cognitive
inventions are "software" artifacts. Seeking them out is like looking
into the origin of an invention such as the plow or the stirrup, or symbolic
logic.(Wheeler, 1987-a) Success brings a similar excitement, as in the
discovery how Bacon invented a new ¡°artificial¡± logic of science, artificial in
the sense of artifact. It derived from his innovations in interpreting the
precedents embedded in common law case rulings. Bacon¡¯s new case method
provided the basis for the law-finding method he applied to science. But his
kind of law-finding could not get a sympathetic hearing prior to the late
twentieth century when the neoKantian approaches to post-modern science that
then appeared were akin to Bacon¡¯s logic of inquiry.(Heelan, 1983; Elsasser,
(1982; 1986)
Bacon¡¯s
chief science-related innovations were:
* ¡°Judging¡± -
analyzing - the case reports of the unwritten common law in search for a higher
law lying behind them. He hypostatized a meta-law as a ¡°thing¡± - a phenomenal
thing.
* Applying a
"reverse Platonism" to this hypostatized meta-law thing, he created
an empirical phenomenological substance he called schematismus. Here it is called Veralumium.
* This led in Novum Organum to the creation of a
¡°logic engine, Hooke¡¯s term for adapting his case method of law-finding to
phenomenological objects in general - to all unwritten laws.
* This logic
engine was extended to laws of nature, considered as empirical objects. This
permitted him to develop a phenomenology of scientific empiricism. It was a
precursor to the phenomenology of scientific empiricism later given full
philosophical expression by Kant.
* Printing
provided archival resources about society and nature similar to those the law
scribes preserved of case rulings of common law judges.
* His new logic
engine permitted him to process all archival information into an encyclopaedic
Republic of Knowledge that would be ¡°ever a democracy¡±.
* He christened
his scientific empiricism the third ¡°revolution in thought,¡± naming the two
prior ones as Greek philosophy and Roman positive law. These two also rested
upon revolutions in ¡°archival functions¡±.(Wheeler, 1990). When narrowed to
natural science, as a social institution, these revolutions are called
¡°paradigm shifts¡±.(Kuhn, 1962).
Kant, following
Bacon¡¯s lead, created his own revolution in thought - the invention of modern
phenomenology..
* Bacon described
the foundations of his revolution in Advancement
of Learning, Novum Organum, Insturatio
Magna, New Atlantis and most intriguing, the "Prometheus" essay
in Wisdom of the Ancients
THE LAW OF LAWS: FROM
UNWRITTEN LAW TO ¡°VERULAMIUM¡±
A
survey of Bacon's political, legal and jurisprudential writings, and of the
opinions of historians of the common law, people like Hale (M. Hale, 1667),
Holdsworth (W.S. Holdsworth, 1922-25), Maitland (W.F. Maitland, 1911),
Plunknett (T.F.T. Plunknett, 1936), and Coquillette (Coquillette, 1992) yields
the following:
England¡¯s
unwritten law was originally like that of most pre-literate societies: laws,
customs and lore were preserved in the memories of culture paragons and encoded
with runic markings by seers and magi.(Bohannan, 1967) Even after there were
copious written scrolls containing court judgments, reliance on culture
paragons as law-knowers persisted. A common law trial had been a "law
waging" process with parties bringing their law to court and juries
(law-sayers) acting as judges of the law, not of fact. The rolls containing
reports of court rulings in common law cases were in widely scattered archives.
They varied considerably in style and thoroughness. Lawyers used them to uncover rulings in cases a century or
more earlier. The quality of the archival skills of lawyers and judges also
varied considerably. Rule-finding
was by no means an exact science. Sir Edward Coke, Chief Justice of the Court
of Common Pleas, was the leading legal archivist of Bacon¡¯s time. He is known
as the father of the common law not so much for his jurisprudence as for the
antiquarian researches that gave lawyers rather than law-saying paragons,
monopoly over saying what was the unwritten law. Coke¡¯s influence resulted in the ascendency of the common
law over its other juristic rivals.
There
had already been a ¡°Reception¡± of the Roman Law through the Canon Law during
the Henrician Reformation. Richard
Hooker did part of the spade work of assimilating it in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Bacon¡¯s father was Lord Keeper of the Seal (and of the
Queen's Conscience). As head of the Chancery he presided over the Equity side
of the law. Equity, as the saying had it, corrected the law for the defects of
its one-size-fits-all virtue of generality. Chancery law grew out of pre-Reformation Canon Law
traditions and dealt with "oaths," which verged on contracts, and
with legal ephemera such as " uses": the abstract type of property
between feudal and freehold tenures.(Coquillette, 1992) Equity law employed maxims like pacta servanda sunt, contracts must be
obeyed. Social conditions had experienced so much change that stare decisis required dexterous
interpretive contortions to make the old rulings fit new institutional
developments.(Hudson, 1996) Jurists developed ingenious ways of using the law¡¯s
special language, Law Latin, to do this. Law Latin terms had their own
meanings, applied according to their own ¡°artificial reason,¡± as Coke called it
in a famous rebuke to King James I.
Jurists created a law-made virtual world that existed inside the
ordinary world. Lawyers entered
and lived and worked in that virtual domain when they joined the Inns of
Court. Prior to Bacon, the law¡¯s
artificial reason, like other branches of reason, was essentially an adaptation
of Aristotelian rhetoric.
Written
Gothic English had almost no punctuation. Sometimes it was hard to identify the
proper divisions between words, clauses, sentences and topics. Interpreting
archaic rulings was analogous to the problem molecular biologists faced in
decoding the ¡°words¡± in DNA chains though by no means as difficult. When common law jurists adjudicated
conflicts over the new social conditions of the seventeenth century they often
had to make their distinctions and rulings turn on inventive insertions of
punctuation and syntax. Holdsworth
called this method a kind of law Scholasticism. Particularly serious problems arose over the case rulings
that bore imprints from the residues of feudal tenures and fealties. It was
hard enough merely to tease the rulings of the unwritten Gothic law out of
their hiding places in the archival repositories of their feudal applications;
it was next to impossible to apply those archaic rules to the novel conditions
of the Modern. Fee simple property
ownership co-existed with feudal uses; national citizenship with feudal
allegiance. Gothic rhetoric was
incapable of resolving the legal conflicts that accompanied England¡¯s
institutional transformations.
Bacon
possessed a superb mastery of the common law - he lived in Gray's Inn, one of
the law guilds, and gave "readings" there. But as a student of comparative law and philosophy he
brought new resources to the common law. He grew up on his father¡¯s
"equity side" of the law. As a toddler young Francis enjoyed the run of
Elizabeth's Court and Queen Elizabeth I referred to him as "my young Lord
Keeper¡±.
The
work of the antiquarians, an honorific term in those days, plus printing
expanded legal resources and made them more widely available but this also made
judging the law more difficult. A
new archival, information processing technology was sorely needed. Bacon had
early on sensed the acuteness of this problem and advocated that the Queen
appoint a commission to bring order to England¡¯s trackless juridical wilderness.
He did not mean a Roman Law type of codification, a code civile. The
data was not ¡°laws¡± or statutes but rulings under the unwritten law. This meant
that an entirely new approach was needed but neither the Queen or anybody else
agreed. After the death of Bacon¡¯s father and the ascendency of the Cecils,
Bacon¡¯s career was stymied. He turned more to philosophy - what he meant by
philosophy. When the Queen rejected his proposal, Bacon looked for a shortcut;
a way of going beyond the records of individual case applications of the
unwritten law in search of a higher level of hidden law that would possess a
more universal application.
Things
changed with the ascension of James VI of Scotland as James I of England
.Bacon¡¯s career blossomed. As the king¡¯s new Attorney General, Bacon was
appointed as England¡¯s representative on the Commission on the Union of England
and Scotland. Scottish law had a Roman Law foundation and this brought to a
head further awareness of the inadequacies of legal research based on rhetoric.
The two legal systems did not speak the same language but some form of unity
within diversity was necessary. The Commission was explicitly charged with
studying, ¡¯judging¡¯, the laws of
kingship shared in common by England and Scotland. The King wanted the Commission to find a common realm of law
that could be attributed to the new dualistic nation, unified under the joint
¡®crown¡¯ he wore as James VI and I. This turned out to be a very creative
charge. In effect, it was a royal order to discover a hitherto unknown domain
of British kingship, the constitution of an imperial crown.(Wheeler, 1947;
Wheeler, 1949). Bacon¡¯s brief was one of his most brilliant achievements,
acclaimed even by his life long rival, Coke. In producing it he perfected the
new kind of law-finding that was to develop into scientific empiricism. Beyond
this, that strange legal case lying in the juridical wilderness between the
Elizabeth and William & Mary, became the spiritual godfather of both
England¡¯s unwritten constitution of 1688 and the Federal system of dual
sovereignty that was later invented by the Americans in 1789. (Wheeler, 1975)
¡°The Case of the Post-Nati¡± can fairly be called the leading case in the
constitution of The Modern; Anglo-American subdivision.
Bacon¡¯s
new logic of analysis sought to find the unwritten law¡¯s own unwritten law by
dialectically comparing and judging past applications of it. This required a new archival technology
to decode the meanings hidden behind the language in the scrolls of archaic Gothic
case reports; and then a way of processing that information into more general
principles that could be applied to the Modern Age conditions then arising. In
his law briefs, especially the ¡°Case of the Post-Nati¡± (¡°Calvin¡¯s Case¡±) and
the ¡°Reading on the Statute of Uses,¡± Bacon searched both the case precedents
themselves and also the unwritten Gothic law that lay behind them: a way of
delving further behind the unwritten Gothic law to a still deeper common law in
search of principles that could be applied to post-Gothic conditions. It was quickly apparent that the
Aristotelian identity of the form and matter of law would not work. Rather, it was precisely their separation,
their atom splitting so to speak, that he needed.
The
unwritten common law is not a ¡°brooding omnipresence in the sky¡±; It is a
thing. The text of a ruling does not express it, but contains only a ruling
under it, which may or may not be confirmed on appeal. In Bacon¡¯s terms this is
a phenomenological ¡°Form¡± that exists independently of the imperfect and
transitory concrete expressions of it in common law rulings. Uncovering this
ontological legal substance required a logic of dialectical inquiry, not a
logic of rhetoric. He needed an ontological mechanics; a logic engine to uncover
the ¡°deep structure¡± of a form of law whose validity was independent of its
specific temporal applications: the Form of the law, of the law of laws:
Verulamium. How
was this different from the approach of the other great lawyers of the day?
Coke¡¯s artificial reason produced meticulous archives of case precedents and
they were a crucial database, but his notion of law was entirely too narrow and
superficial. By contrast, Bacon studied comparative law like a structuralist
anthropologist. In addition, he evaluated different ways of reasoning:
Platonic, Ramist, hermetic, rhetoric, deductive, inductive, experimental and
Aristotelian. He rejected all but
one for being concerned with words rather than forms.
Sometime
around 1608 and while still at Grays Inn Bacon had begun to reinterpret Plato¡¯s
ontological schematismos, applying it
to the empirical law-stuff residing behind common law rulings, rather than to
an eternal Form residing in the Logos.
This permitted treating cases as precedents; as "evidences" of
the unwritten law. It was a new approach to law-finding. Bacon¡¯s legal
briefs, the above constitutional law case in particular, (Wheeler, 1947)
illustrate his new law-finding method and how it was later generalized for
law-finding in other fields. Writings such as "Reading on the Statute of
Uses¡± (Works, XIV) show the change
from applying stare decisis to find
an applicable RULE to fit new facts, into using case precedents as EVIDENCES of the phenomenological law
stuff residing behind the unwritten law.
It is the difference between a matched fit and a phenomenon; the kind of
¡°phenomenon¡± that goes with ¡°noumenon¡±. This explains why legal historians have
called Bacon¡¯s "the first modern scientific approach to the
law(Holdsworth, 1924) In his briefs and writings Bacon created,
"invented", the distinguishing features of the modern common law
system:
* Using cases as repositories of evidence
about the "unwritten law¡±;
* Determining the relevance of precedents
by exclusionary principles of evidence and logic;
* Treating opposing legal briefs as
adversarial hypotheses about the application of the "unwritten
law" to a new set of facts.
As
late as the eighteenth-century some juries still declared the law rather than
the fact but already before the end of the seventeenth century Justice Sir
Matthew Hale (Hale, 1667) explained modern common law adjudication procedure
and acknowledged Bacon as the inventor of the process of discovering unwritten
laws from the evidences of their applications. The method combined empiricism and inductivism in a new way
that was to imprint its signature on many of the distinctive features of modern
English society:
* Making manifest the law behind the
unwritten common law;
* Applying to manners and social behavior
the unwritten gentleman's code of honor of things "done" and
"not done¡±; of what is and is not ¡°cricket¡±. The playing fields of Eton
observed the code of the master of Verulam.
* Observing the
"conventions" of Britain's unwritten "working"
constitution;
* The tradition
of the scientific naturalist: meticulous empirical observations in search of
the laws of nature.
The
old organon, Aristotle¡¯s logic, was a
rhetoric engine for investigating and explaining alphanumeric literacy,
post-mythic discourse. It involved an ¡°archival revolution¡±(Wheeler, 1987-a) in
the encoding, storage, retrieval and information processing functions and was
made possible by the invention of the quill and scroll.(Wheeler, 1990) Bacon¡¯s
time saw a database explosion produced by optics, ships, mechanisms and print,
and it had to be assimilated using a new investigative and explanatory logic
engine; a novum organum. The modern
mind wants naturally to jump from Aristotle to Descartes and Newton - to the
Descartes who separated mind and matter and invented a way of describing a
mechanical watch-works world; and to the Newton who invented a calculus of
linear relationships in a closed causal system. But Bacon¡¯s empiricism came in
between. He invented a new phenomenology of law-finding: an investigative and
explanatory logic engine, a novum
organum, for law. As will be
seen later, Newton used it to invent his own new mechanics of causal relations.
"Law"
is used here to mean invariances associated with the relationships between
things in a system or structure which, if those lawful relations are changed
the system is either changed or dissolved. "Cause" is used to mean things associated in an
invariant linear time sequence.
This distinction is useful
not only because of the juridical foundations of Bacon's philosophy but also
because it helps distinguish Baconian law-finding from Cartesian cause-finding.
It also helps identify the origin of both modern phenomenology and of modern
Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
Bacon¡¯s
main research database was always the book. He created a new archival
technology made possible when arcane scroll and codex repositories of knowledge
became widely accessible through printing. A collection of similar rulings could be inspected, not to
make a better shoe horn for forcing a fit but for abstracting common underlying
general principles. The element that then emerged was not a ruling but an
analytically discovered law that ¡°must¡± be the juridical foundation for a set
of related case rulings: judging the rulings to find the rule they jointly
express. The process is like what
in artificial intelligence programming is called back-chaining and is the
foundation for computer-mediated searches for roots and causes, as in medical
diagnosis. It is also the empiricist process of that supreme Baconian, Sherlock
Holmes.(Sebeok 1981) One begins with the presenting symptoms, perhaps a
syndrome, and works from them back to a set of probable sources or causes. The
¡°cause¡± or ¡°law¡± is not a time-sequential cause in the sense of classical
mechanics but is rather the explanation that remains after evidence and logic
eliminate every other possibility. It is not static and final; it is dynamic
and subject to correction on the basis of new evidence that may later appear.
Such
a process preserves stare decisis as
a principle but makes it dynamic and incorporates into it principles of change
and growth. No individual ruling now or in the future could express concretely
the unwritten law, any more than had individual rulings of the past. The
unwritten common law of England remains forever ineffable, uncaptured in any
given ruling, and capable of further growth and application as knowledge and
conditions change. More important, the collection of all such deeper laws
(rather than their applied rulings) amounts to a general system of fundamental
law.(Wheeler, 1975) an unwritten "constitution," whose first
tentative expression was in ¡°The Case of the Post-Nati.(Wheeler, 1947; 1949;
1956; 1975) This potential for
submitting government to the rule of law under an unwritten constitution later
came to be called constitutionalism.(C.H. McIlwain, 1940; F. Wormuth, 1949) It
was not finally realized until after the "Glorious Revolution" of
1688 but Bacon¡¯s earlier case reports and law briefs exhibit the potential.
This happens also to be the conception, or paradigm, of scientific law
characteristic of postmodern science. Bacon explicitly made allowance for
carrying the same kind of dynamism into natural science through his Aphorism,
Apothegm and Maxim styles of stating a scientific law. Bacon's
phenomenology of law imported into the English unwritten common law an
artificial and abstract logos-like domain that was ¡°real¡± in the way the Roman
Law described a real, though impalpable, domain. He processed information in
this phenomenal domain using his own new "grammar", a
"philosophical grammar" he called it. He contrasted this with both
"literary grammar" and rhetoric, which deal with language rather than
with what he called philosophy. By philosophy Bacon meant "science¡±. It was long called natural philosophy and today we would
probably call it semiotics or phenomenology. In Book Six of the De
Augments Bacon described it as:
"...a
kind of grammar which should diligently inquire, not the analogy of words with
one another, but the analogy between words and things, or reason; not going so
far however as that interpretation which belongs to Logic¡±.(Works, De Augmentis, VOL IX, pp 111-112)
Bacon outlined a new
comparative semiotics designed to lead to a general grammar like Chomsky¡¯s
¡°Transformational grammar,¡± and to a theory of signs like that of Peirce.. He went on to devise a binary
alphabetic code of "A"s and "B"s that is remarkably similar
to today's binary digital code on the one hand and to our character based
genetic code on the other.
FROM VERULAMIUM TO
EMPIRICISM:
Bacon¡¯s
law judging and law finding researches led to the invention of the new
phenomenological element I¡¯ve named Verulamium. He refined it for application
to fields outside the common law and expressed it through a new meaning given
to the Maxim. Bacon was born into a rich environment of equity law maxims. His father collected and composed them
and displayed a special selection of maxims on plaques above the wall panels of
the great hall in the mansion where Francis grew up. They made a lasting impression. After becoming Lord Chancellor (his father never made it
from Lord Keeper of the Seal to Lord Chancellor), Francis used the maxim
approach to give equity law a foundation that was to last two centuries, until
equity was absorbed into the common law.
His interest in the maxim genre led to a life-long search for other ways
of condensing large amounts of related information into succinct
summaries. Nine collections of his
law like expressions have been identified, falling into seven categories:
Sophisma, Parabola, Aphorismus, Optataiva, Canones, Antithetorum and
Maximes.(J.C. Hogan & M.D. Schwartz, 1983). Although the Rules and
Maximes of the Common Law and
the Elements of the Common Law (J.C. Hogan & M.D. Schwartz,
1983) were not published until 1630, after his death. Bacon had worked at those
projects during his entire adulthood.
Only 25 of his 300 maxims still survive. The Maxim became the model for the generalized idea of unwritten
law - juristic and natural - that was later turned into the scientific
Apothegm. He was convinced that if he could perfect the process of making
maxims out of law cases he could adapt that process from the finding of a rule
of law to the finding of a rule of science. He could then define the structure,
or protocol for conducting research in quest of a rule of science. Bacon's protocol of law extraction to
uncover rules or maxims out of the seeming chaos of the unwritten law was a
little like a System Theoretic protocol: He said the structure of a rule of law
in science should:
*
Have clear and perspicuous exposition
*
Make precise distinctions
*
Lead back (back-chain) readily into its foundation cases (examples)
*
Display the (tri-modal) logic chain between the foundations and the maxim or
rule
*
Show relations to other maxims and rules(Hogan & Schwartz, op cit.)
The first systematic
explanation of this logic engine was the Aphorisms. They were designed to cover, as he said, all provinces of knowledge,
social and natural. Aphorism 85
says of a scientific rule that it should serve as a "magnetic needle (nautica polos) that points to the law
but does not settle it. 'Non ex regula
jus sumatur, sed ex jure quod est regula fiat' - The law should not be taken from maxims, but maxims from the
law¡±. Again, the law he referred
to is unwritten, in both the common law and in nature. This means the law is phenomenal, made
out of Verulamium; maxims are its operational hypotheses. We are at the origin
of modern phenomenological analysis.
At
this point the master of Konigsberg must be introduced. In the Preface to the
second edition of Critique of Pure Reason(Kant,
1924). Kant acknowledged his indebtedness to Bacon and followed
a line of thought similar to that in Novum
Organum. He said the human mind thinks naturally in terms of dyadic,
linear, time sequential relationships: post
hoc ergo propter hoc. He described a triadic logic to account for how this
arises in the Newtonian universe, and helps explain the isomorphism between
mind and classical mechanics; Kant identified the latter with nature. Then, by axiom and argument, Kant
created three new philosophic components that were very similar to Bacon¡¯s own.
This permitted a new understanding of both the outer world and of the inner
world, through the use of a special new ratio
able to mediate between them transitively. The ratio could do this because its own structure was homologous with
the structures of both nature and mind.
This was the famous triad of phenomenon,
noumenon and schematismus. The model seemed at the time to have
the added virtue of dispelling the accumulated paradoxes of British empiricism
and French rationalism, Hume and Descartes, by incorporating both into a larger
domain of lawfulness.
Admittedly
nature¡¯s lawfulness and its mechanics are closely connected in much philosophic
writing. However, a distinction by
Charles Sanders Peirce is useful.
He claimed that what he called dynamical systems are dyadic. By contrast, his own ¡°pragmaticism¡± was
triadic. Triadic systems, he said,
do not self-destruct into pairs.
It is the difference between linear and structural (systemic)
relationships. Peirce was a
neoKantian though he also like to go by several other philosophic aliases. He developed a model of tri-modal
transitivity, similar to Kant¡¯s, and promulgated it as the basic law of
semiosis:
...by
"semiosis" I mean,... an action, or influence, which is, or involves,
a cooperation of three subjects, such as sign, its object, and its interpretant,
this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions
between pairs.(Peirce, 1966)
Peirce was talking about
what today is called cognitive science. His protocol was like the one Plato
developed using Pythagorean harmonic ratios to mediate between the "master
circles" of the universe and the harmonic perceptions of the human
mind. This permitted Peirce to
create a tri-modal transitivity such that the findings of any one domain could
be confirmed in the other two(Wheeler, 1982; McClain, 1982).
Francis
Bacon's philosophy was empiricist.
It dealt with actual things but those things were made out of
law-stuff. The consequence, almost
automatically, was a new kind of phenomenological empiricism. It was more primitive than the later
phenomenologies of Kant and Peirce but was of their same general type. A good way to illustrate this is to
begin with Bacon¡¯s assumption that the English unwritten common law possesses
¡°thingness¡±. This is not a concrete thing like a chair but is what we now,
following Immanuel Kant, call a phenomenological thing. All the elements of culture from
folkways to styles possess thingness. Things have discoverable empirical
properties. They hurt the people who violate them; ¡®sticks and stones may break
my bones but only names can hurt me¡¯; and law is the firmest and harshest of
them all. Bacon identified the thingness of the unwritten law as having the
binary properties of processus and schematismus: process and form. If those
properties could be made accessible to the human mind, a ratio - a logic machine could be created capable of mediating
between them. The result would be a new scientific empiricism; an Instauratio Magnum. These conclusions
follow:
1. Bacon's scientific empiricism had a
semiotic foundation;
2. It was based on a
tri-relative model analogous to those of Kant and Peirce, especially
Peirce;
3. The three components were:
I. The outside world, dealt with through a
binary ontology of law comprised of processus
and schematismus
(Kant's
binary assumption about cognition was different);
ii. The inside
world was dealt with through a theory of Judgment based on the idola and providing an analogous model
of perception and understanding;
iii. Mediation between them was by a ratio
(the new logic of inquiry) whose "adminicle" inductivism provided a
tri-relative transitivity between the inside and outside worlds.
The juridical foundations
for items [3.I] and [3.iii] (Wheeler, 1983) have been explored previously and
will not now be discussed.
(3.ii),
the theory of Judgment deals with the way Bacon created a view of the inside
world that was compatible with:
* The outside
world,
* His ontology of
Form,
* And also with
his instrument of analysis, the new ¡°adminicle¡± logic of inquiry.
Note the juridical flavor of
the term ¡°judgment¡±. Baconian
science never loses its quality of law-finding and promulgating. This is made
explicit in New Atlantis by the way
Salomon¡¯s House, the R&D institution, runs Bensalem and administers
science.(Wheeler, 1991)
The
semiotic aspect of Bacon's theory of Judgment is emphasized in several places
in his scientific writings. Most
explicit, perhaps, is his claim that the ultimate aim of the New Organon, the new logic engine of
inquiry, was to uncover nature's hidden "abecedarium¡±; to break the code
in which nature¡¯s constitution was written so that the words, clauses and
sentences of her encrypted laws could be deciphered.(Works, Vol III, 306-311).
However, the theory of Judgment also puts the reciprocal question about
how thoughts are encoded in the mind.
Bacon
asked over and over why the ancients had failed to produce scientific
empiricism. They had produced the two revolutions in thought that were
prerequisites to his own third intellectual revolution: Greek philosophy and
Roman Law. If he could go beyond them to produce empirical science, why had not
the human mind discovered it ages before?
The
answer Bacon gave derived from his conception of the archives of unwritten laws
and the nature of their archival encodings; their own native languages and
words. Words, he said, stand as the footprints of thoughts. Words and languages must facilitate the
communication between all people, including the most doltish as well as the
most brilliant, the Gothic as well as the Baroque. Hence they are intrinsically demotic; popular. He concluded that this intrinsic
vernacular defect predetermines that word-based analysis must always remain
constricted to a demotic level.
Words, wrote Bacon, are:
...commonly
framed and applied according to the capacity of the vulgar [and] follow those
lines of division most obvious to the vulgar understanding. And whenever an understanding of
greater acuteness or a more diligent observation would alter those lines to
suit the true divisions of nature, words stand in the way and resist the
change.(Works, Novum Organon, Aphorism LIX, vol VII, p. 78)
This was not merely, or even
chiefly, a matter of vocabulary.
¡°Divisions" was one of the main problems; not only literally for
texts possessing few internal markers but also substantively. What was the
unwritten law¡¯s true and proper taxonomy?
And beyond its apparent divisions and partitions and classifications,
what was its underlying cladistics - its homogenic phyla and orders? As the New Organon explained, this discovery was necessary because no
demotic (vulgate) language could express the processus and schematismus
of any natural laws. That was why the ancients, for all their genius, had never
been able to produce science. It
was the main reason Bacon was more complimentary to Plato than to
Aristotle. He thought Democritus
had been on the right track and believed that there might have been some chance
for the ancient emergence of empirical science until Aristotle forestalled it
completely by his word-&-language, mind-&-nature based logic. That original flaw determined that all
Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy would forever remain imprisoned within
the confines of demotic discourse, in Bacon's special analytic meaning of that
term. He acknowledged that
mathematical reasoning was somewhat better than reasoning by formal logic but
even it possessed the germ of the fatal demotic defect because its basic
definitions were framed in with words.
Accordingly, they led to the wrong "divisions¡±. All such demotic systems made the world
"the bond-slave of human thought, and human thought the bond-slave of
words"(op. cit. Aphorism LXIX) -
a maxim Newton was to take seriously. Bacon set his New Organon the problem of creating a non-demotic logic of
law-finding.
The
analytic solution was to find a way to create reciprocal alignments, an
¡°assembly language¡± so to speak, between what we might call the ¡°machine
language¡± of nature and the encoding language innate to human thought. That is the way Von Neumann would have
expressed it if he¡¯d been Bacon and it is exactly what Bacon meant. The most
familiar parallel is to Noam Chomsky¡¯s innate, as distinguished from genetic,
Transformational Grammar. Bacon¡¯s scenario called for conducting a set of
recursive tests, alpha, beta and so on; his term was ¡°trials;¡± trials of
particulars. Nature would be arraigned in a laboratory that he called an
¡°inventory¡± (pronounced inVENtory), meaning an invention making workplace, and induced to testify in her own
natural language, uncorrupted by the inadequacies of human demotic
language. It was a phenomenological
inquisition applying ¡®ways of making nature talk.¡¯ This would permit framing preliminary axioms, what we would
call provisional hypotheses, to account for nature¡¯s known behaviors. These in
turn would be used for the design and conduct of new trials, using improved
inquisition, investigation, methods, and successive approximations. The process
would generate new and better axioms; and so on recursively to ever better
axioms and inquisitions, and progressively better decodings of ¡°divisions,¡± at
progressively higher levels of abstraction. This applies the processus and schematismus approach to avoid the demotic flaw. Newton¡¯s
¡°fluxions¡± will later adapt this recursion to mathematics. There is a
rudimentary flow-chart description of the process in New Atlantis.
It
is fruitless, Bacon insisted, to seek causes and concrete results overtly. The object of inquiry must instead be
"abstract natures¡±. These
will constitute the "alphabet or simple letters, whereof the variety of
things consisteth¡±.(Works VI, p.
63) He is thinking neither as a
geometer nor as a simple inductivist.
Rather the processes and images he has in mind are juridical; trials:
inquests, discovery of facts, and taking depositions. The New Organon was an instrument of empirical
investigation just as the new telescopes were instruments of empirical
observation. Although Bacon
occasionally speaks of ¡°cause,¡± his tendency is rather to seek the ¡°laws¡± of
nature. His theory of Form, when
it leaves ontology and turns into science, becomes law, not cause; but law in
the English sense. The
"instances" that provide the constitutive units of evidence in the New Organon are like the case precedents
of the common law, after he had developed the new phenomenological empiricism
for using them effectively. The instances stand out as what he called
"fingerposts¡±, direction pointers, markers that like a compass needle,
help the scientist keep on the right path to the unwritten laws of nature. On other occasions, when
direction-finding is described as the "freeing of a direction," Bacon
seems to have been thinking like an explorer mapping uncharted domains. He appears then to imagine nature as an
undiscovered continent to be searched out by following signs and clues;
analogues of weather portents.(Ibid, p.
59)
Just
as the processes of nature were misleading if one tried to deal with their
overt manifestations, so also with the processes of the human mind if one
worked only with its demotic concepts. The mind was, by its truest and deepest
nature, the "form of forms"; Bacon¡¯s Form, not Plato¡¯s. Hence if
properly operated it was potentially capable of decoding nature's hidden
abecedarium even though its ordinary and superficial operations made it ill
suited for scientific analysis.
Its perceptual faculty was like a lens but it was far from being a
"clear and equal glass" and instead produced the distorting effects
of an "enchanted glass¡± (n.b.,
Isaac Newton). Special correctives
were needed to compensate for the mind's built-in sources of error and
distortion. That was where the
Idols of the Mind came in. They
were instruments, prisms, for detecting, diagnosing and correcting the inner
processes of the mind. Just as
prisms permitted measuring optical distortions, which could be used to make
corrective spectacles, one could use the idola
to fashion a corrective logical engine, an organon,
for performing accurate analysis.
The
four Idols of the Mind are often understood as false idols, as in the biblical
prohibition against setting up graven images and following false gods. However, this meaning is valid only in
a round about sense. Idolum comes
from the Greek eidolon. Plato used it to mean appearances:
false perceptions. He contrasted
it with idein, to see truly. Originally Idein had possessed the sense of the ritual thing seen, as in a revelation that occurs after the proper
ritual preparation, and by means of which an inner truth can be disclosed to
and perceived by the initiates.
Both meanings, the true and the counter-intuitive, are present in
Platonic Idea, or Form. They are
also part of the meaning of Bacon's idola:
the erroneous structures and divisions that must be eliminated from the
world inside before one can understand the Forms (Baconian) of the world
outside. The idola showed how sensations mislead perceptions, distort the
understanding and lead to mistaken judgments. They have been confused often with Roger Bacon's four "offendicula¡±, (stumbling blocks). These
were sociological, rather than semiotic and analytic, "hindrances" to
truth such as authority, custom, popular opinion and ignorance. It seems likely that with his own idola, as he did in many aspects of his
philosophy, Bacon started from an earlier conception and transformed it into a
new principle. He did that with
Plato, standing him on his head, as the later idiom would have put it.
Bacon's
distinction between sensation and perception is the same as Leibnitz's
distinction between perception and apperception. The idola showed
how sensations mislead perceptions, distort the understanding and lead to
mistaken judgments. This analysis
of judgment was directly involved in Bacon's design for the stages of
experiment and exclusion in the New
Organon. In thinking out this
tri-modal relationship he seems to have had in mind the way Plato worked out
the dialectical component of his own tri-modal system in Gorgias.
Baconian
probability is not Cartesian certainty.
It is systemic probability rather than linear closed causal determinism.
L. Jonathan Cohen of Oxford (L.J. Cohen, 1977 et seq.) is a leading theorist of probability; a Baconian type of
probability. He calls Bacon's
logic of inquiry an ¡°inductive support¡± system and has patterned his own
influential theory of scientific probability after it. Cohen¡¯s is a
non-Pascalian, meaning a non-statistical, type of probability. The probability
involved in B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning is similar. Operant schedules
of positive reinforcement also rest on a non-Pascalian theory of
probability.(Wheeler, 1973)
Bacon¡¯s
preferred term was ¡°Adminicle¡±. Why? His first reference in the New Organon to the kind of evidence that
confers probability employs the term fide-jussio. It is a legal term, of course, and
denotes oral evidence in support of a
legal claim, as with statements made in support of a claim to title in a suit
at property law. Hence,
"inductive support¡±, as Cohen and succeeding inductivists, Von Wright in
particular,(Von Wright, 1960) termed Bacon¡¯s theory of probability. Further
on, Bacon prefers the term
adminicle: adminicle inductivism.
Adminicle had two prior meanings: in law, especially Scots law; recall
Bacon¡¯s membership on the Commission on the Union of England and Scotland. It
meant a documentary support for a
claim to title. Hence it was an
empirical evidentiary confirmation. Bacon preferred adminicle to fide-jussion because when applying an
essentially juridical inductivism to scientific applications, it would not do
to rely on oaths, opinions and the like; shades of Gothic magic, which he
castigated as evidence. Hence he
chose a term from the law that had a more "material" import, as in
¡°material evidence¡±. The second
meaning of adminicle was also important. Historically, it referred to the
architectural support added at the top of a structure to hold it up more
securely, like a ¡°flying buttress¡±.
This ¡°at the top¡± feature worked well with Bacon's hierarchical notion
that confidence in the probability of a scientific conclusion strengthens as it
rises up the successive stages of the "prerogative instances¡±. The prerogative instance in science is
analogous to the "leading case" in law. Both "fingerposted¡±, Bacon¡¯s term, the hidden law but
did not state it concretely. In law it meant the support put in evidence to
buttress the structure of an argument, leading to an irrefutable ¡°conviction¡±.
The New Organon contrasts adminicular
induction with ordinary ¡°empiric¡± induction, of which Bacon was unstintingly
critical. Adminicle induction was a process of collecting circumstantial
evidence that led cumulatively to the high probability of the accuracy of the
result of the law-finding process. Adminicular inductions lead through a series
of exclusions of ¡°particular
instances¡± to a latent "schematismus"
or Form, the ultimate properties of which constitute what he means by
scientific law. The process was
derived from the method of exclusion in the law-finding process that used
English case rulings to derive what ¡°must¡± with high probability, be the
unwritten common law¡¯s application to a set of new facts.
Bacon
described four logical tools, ¡°arts¡±, to use in following nature¡¯s leads:
¡°Invention, Judgment, Memory & Transmission¡±.(Works, vol IX, De Augmentis, Book 56, P. 63) Note two things:
These processes are close to the archival functions associated today
with information processing.(Wheeler, 1990). Secondly, they describe for empiricism
the hermeneutic circle of confirmation in textual analysis; the process called
neo-hermeneutics in today¡¯s postmodern philosophy of science. (Hacking,
1983)
It
was but a short step to extend that approach to other database archival
resources: If one used the proper logic engine, evidences of the law could be
extracted from archives of common law rulings. Hence the same method would
yield laws of science when applied to archives of natural history, as science
was called in England until well into the twentieth century. Neither kind of
archive contained laws. To find the unwritten laws of nature required a theory,
a philosophy, for processing book-borne information into science. Bacon was the philosopher of scientific
research: how to process information out of its database repositories; law,
experiment, exploration and print
- the Gutenberg Galaxy - into knowledge: The
Advancement of Knowledge.
Bacon¡¯s innovations in law-finding grew out of his innovative way of
exploiting the archival resources in books. What was happening in the
pre-Gutenberg archives of the common law was also spreading to the other scroll
and codex repositories of knowledge, which were all just as chaotic as were the
common law reports.
Bacon¡¯s
approach did not rest upon a distinction between book-based and experimental
information; rather upon a general theory of processing evidence out of
database resources. The book based archival revolution was turning all human
knowledge into an information database. The world of books was an uncharted continent. Bacon is the first to treat the book
the same way today's research labs do. His new logic machine performed on
printed data the functions of the information processing computer. If used critically with the aid of his refinement processes and if purified
by his data cleansing idola, printed
books could be made into resources for scientific research. By developing archival exploration,
navigating and processing tools he could become the Columbus of the new
continent of information and ¡°take all knowledge for his province¡±, illustrated
by the ship sailing past the Pillars of Hercules on the fronticepiece of The Advancement of Learning. They are
the portico pillars to a research library; not for deduction, nor induction,
and not realism, but a new kind of evidentiary empiricism whose source data is
not matter and mechanics but impalpable Verulamium law stuff phenomena. When
Bacon proposed the codification of common law resources he did not mean, as is
usually assumed, a Roman Law Code Civile;
rather he visualized an organization of maxims, and of rule of law
classifications. He wanted to create an arrangement of them by their leading
headings, to facilitate something like what is now possible when
"Shepardizing" a case.
In effect, Bacon wanted to be able to ¡°Shepardize¡± scientific evidence;
something only now becoming possible.
Taking
title to all knowledge was shown to be theoretically possible by the Instauratio Magna. Its design specifications told how to process
archives of printed information into knowledge, whose generic name until the
nineteenth century was science, and to make it handily available in an
encyclopaedia. Although Novum Organum discusses pure science,
its primary concern is operational science; applied science made into a kind of
pre-computer "software" operating system for an entire culture. That
is the way science was portrayed in the Advancement
of Learning, later enlarged into The
Augmentation of Science. It was illustrated concretely in New Atlantis. The basic intellectual revolutions
of the early seventeenth century rested on innovative computer-like
"archival functions"(Wheeler, 1990) and were thought of as book-based
"software applications" required to design and operate a modern
society.
BACON¡¯S ¡°INVENTARY¡±; THE
INVENTION OF INVENTION
Very
little experimental data was available to Bacon. Most of it was highly
unreliable. There was some experimentation in medicine by contemporaries like
Harvey and in magnetism by Gilbert; little else. Science, like the common law,
was burgeoning, but there was no way of evaluating the results. Bacon himself
did much more scientific experimentation than is usually acknowledged. The
Verulam experiments in a post-Pythagorean sound physics have been largely
ignored but were not surpassed for decades. Bacon¡¯s table of specific gravities
while awkwardly prepared was the most extensive one of the times. Giovanni
Porta had published a twenty volume encyclopedia of science, Magia Naturalis, and Bacon made copious
use of it throughout his writings, but it was too much like Coke¡¯s Institutes to be used uncritically.
Empirical science at that time was like biology before Linnaeus and evolution
before Darwin, both of whom acknowledged their debt to Bacon. There was simply no logic engine for
studying and analyzing phenomena until one was invented in the Novum Organum. Peter Ramus, the French Reformation philosopher, had pointed
out that Aristotle's logic would not do for science; it was about words for
things. Ramist dialectical chain reasoning was useful but was still rhetoric
rather than empiricism. Bacon surveyed the available alternatives and in the
spirit of his logic engine, rejected all but one.
Modern
Times, as Charlie Chaplin illustrated, are addicted to invention. Invention "sells" even when
it masks mere "style obsolescence"; cars repackaged in different
encasements every few years.
People did not always take kindly to invention; not until after it was
invented. The word invent, from invenire, means to come upon; to
discover. Toward the middle of the
sixteenth century it had begun to mean inventing new ideas, not just
words. It is used often in Bacon¡¯s
publications and usually means modern science and technology. A chapter heading in one of the early
books is "The Inventary¡±. The word is used like the word
"labor-atory" to mean an institutionalized activity, as is described
in "Of The Interpretation of Nature¡±. That chapter contains "an
enumeration and view of inventions already discovered" It goes on to describe Bacon¡¯s newly
invented system of inquiry, designed for the conduct of an
"inquisition" of knowledge even more than of nature: an invention-making logic
engine. The Inven-tary was explicitly for the "revealing and discovery of
new inventions¡±.(Works, vol VI, p.
52; Works, XIII, 144) The invention
of invention was one of Bacon¡¯s leading inventions. It is described technically
in his legal and philosophical writings. It was designed to do for science what
Thomas Edison¡¯s New Jersey ¡°Invention Factory¡± did for technology, and what
Jonas Salk dreamed of for the Salk Institute. The New Atlantis, one of his last publications, presents a practical
plan for nothing less that the complete science-based re-invention of
seventeenth century English culture. That aim was latent in many other of his
writings.
REVERSE PLATONISM:
Coleridge
called attention to Bacon's Platonism.
At first thought the idea seems rather silly. The Bacon that resides in
professors¡¯ lectures is at the materialist opposite pole from Plato's idealism. But problems over what Bacon means by a
Platonic term, "Form" occur throughout the translations from Latin to
English. "Form" is the
forcing bed of Baconian science.
Because it is so often debated and so much denigrated one must trace it
back to its original Latin. There
lies a surprise. Form is described
in terms of the Latin schematismus, a
word adapted from the Greek schematismos
- in Plato! English has no good
translation for it. Schematism is
pedantic and conveys little.
Schema has acquired some currency but mainly under the intellectual
patent of one particular neurophilosopher. But the mere sight of the word in the primordial versions of
Bacon¡¯s thought ignites another even brighter intellectual flare: Immanuel
Kant. First Plato and then
Kant! Kant's use of schematismus in developing the
philosophy of phenomenology comes vividly to mind. Coleridge was right. There
are indeed signs in the Latin versions of what seems to be a kind of Platonism:
a reverse Platonism.
What
was Bacon's reverse Platonism? What
did he mean by calling his logic machine a Platonism of things rather than
words? What had Plato done that
Bacon wanted to do the opposite or the upside down of? Again, what had Plato
invented which if reversed could be used by a Francis Bacon to invent
scientific empiricism? Figuring
out how Plato had invented political philosophy though daunting would help
explain Bacon's science(Wheeler, 1963).
The classicists who have studied Plato as an inventor are almost
countless. Academe is full of Foucaultian archaeologists of Platonism: Gilbert
Murray (G. Murray, 1957) and the "Cambridge Ritualists¡±, (G.S. Kirk, 1982)
Ernst Cassirer's "symbolic transformation¡±, (E. Cassirir, 1975), Sir James
Fraser (J. Fraser, 1959), Edward Sapir, (E. Sapir, 1949) Marcei Eliade. (M.
Eliade, 1955) and Weston LaBarre (W. LaBarre, 1972). They show how Plato
invented philosophy:(Wheeler, 1963) how Plato converted the attributes of the
traditional deities into abstractions; purged them dialectically of their
contradictions and inconsistencies; and then combined them into dialogues on
political wisdom. Charles S. Peirce describes it as a projectivist model of
invention (C.S. Peirce, 1966) that combines the analytical structure of the
Platonic dialogue with metaphor making. One figuratively "throws" a
known thing onto an unknown thing and identifies the first as the metaphor of
the second. Then the properties of the unknown thing are explained by the
properties of the metaphor.
Plato's
dialectics was about the fundamental Logos-words and concepts behind every day
appearances. An approach like that
would obviously be congenial to someone trying to deal more fundamentally with
the law behind the appearances of it in the rulings about the unwritten English
common law. The process was summarized in The
Advancement of Learning as requiring the performance of four information
processing operations. They were named: *Invention*, *Judgment*, *Storage* and
*Transmission*;(Works, Vol XI, Advancement of Learning, pp 300ff). They
are uncanny anticipations of the protocols of the computer¡¯s information
processes: Encode, Store, Recall, Display, Process and
Communicate(Wheeler,1990).
THE INVENTION OF SCIENTIFIC
EMPIRICISM:
Today's
English speaking academics use the term science in a highly specific way and
restrict its meaning to essentially the mathematical and experimental
sciences. Not all
"sciences" can pass this muster. For ages prior to the "modern synthesis" the term
¡°naturalist¡± emphasized the equivocal status of biology, conjuring up an image
of the weekend amateur gentleman bird watcher. James Hutton based geological
theory on the Baconian principle of a an underlying uniformitarianism. Taxonomy
has been Baconian from its birth and Cladistics, its most productive offspring,
has strong Baconian foundations, including versions of his "adminicle
support" theory and of Goethe¡¯s formenslehre.
(Wheeler 1987) New Atlantis describes
the inauguration of both science,
and science as a profession. Science is the institutionalized revolution in knowledge
of the Modern Age. In today's terms Bacon's inventions were like the invention
of Systems Theory. Coleridge was right in calling Bacon "the British Plato
[who] describes the Laws of the material universe as the Ideas in nature¡±.
(Brinkley, 1955) He was right and
he merely paraphrased Bacon's own statement that his new method was a Platonism
of things rather than ideas.
Indeed, the structure of Plato's process of invention was in fact very
similar to Bacon's, (Wheeler, 1982), as
was that of St. Augustine (Wheeler, 1997). Bacon's revolution in thought
consisted of powering Plato's dialectic with his own new law-finding logic
engine, resulting in scientific empiricism.(Wheeler,1983; 1983-b)
Why
has this been missed? The main
explanation derives from a defect of the otherwise superb Spedding edition of
the Works. It was such an impressive
achievement that historians and philosophers ever since have taken it as
gospel. While this may be justified in the non-scientific writings, its
translations of the scientific writings have conveyed a crippled understanding
of Bacon¡¯s contributions to the philosophical foundations of scientific
empiricism. Robert Ellis, the
editor and translator of Bacon's scientific writings, distorted and excised
crucial passages in several of the scientific and philosophical works. He found
"Baconian Form" difficult to understand and thought the result did
not repay the effort. He abridged and shortened many of the Latin phrases and
passages that he deemed obscure and unscientific, especially those dealing with
the concept of schematismus. As a result, generations of scholars and philosophers who
used the Ellis English translations were seriously misled about the new logic
engine explained in the Latin originals.
Ellis removed completely from the English translations Bacon's
application of Plato's schematismos in
the development of his own quite un-Platonic concept of "Form¡±. Ellis even denied the relevance of Form
to an exposition of Bacon's logic of inquiry. Actually, the situation is even worse than this. Due to his final illness Ellis was not
able to complete translating the philosophical and scientific works and was not
even able to finish editing the translations he had already done. Ellis tended
to play fast and loose with the Latin originals of Bacon¡¯s arcane terms.
Spedding, the chief editor, was a much sounder scholar and states he would have
argued with Ellis about his translations if a discussion of them had been
possible. A fascinating running
debate is conducted by Spedding with Ellis post
mortem in the prefaces, addenda and footnotes to the Latin originals.(Works, I, 133; 177, et. seq.) They make an important dialogue on Bacon¡¯s science. Morris R. Cohen and Karl Popper
philosophers of science in the positivist (classical mechanics) tradition were
Bacon's most egregious detractors; Immanuel Kant his most appreciative
follower. A retranslation of the passages containing Bacon¡¯s schematismus arguments shows that it was
used in much the same sense Immanuel Kant did a century and a half later.
(Wheeler, 1983)
WAS KANT A BACONIAN?
What
Plato called schematismos is called
Form in English, and in back of what is called Form in Bacon¡¯s English texts
lies schematismus in the Latin
originals. Schematismus is also the
key term in the phenomenology Kant used in Critique
of Pure Reason to perform the "revolution in thought" that
accommodated Hume¡¯s criticism of Locke¡¯s empiricism. Consult Kant¡¯s Second
Edition. Its Preface memorializes Baco de
Verulamio and quotes in Latin the entreaty in Bacon¡¯s Preface to the Great Instauration: science is not a
dogma to be embraced but a calling to be pursued. Further along, Bacon¡¯s role
in the intellectual revolution of modern science is acknowledged.(I. Kant [N.K.
Smith] 1933; especially Kant¡¯s ¡°Preface¡±.) It is too bad Ellis did not try to understand Bacon¡¯s
protest against the ignorance of intellectuals, and also Bacon¡¯s decision not
to make his theories easy to understand: ¡°I cannot be fairly asked to abide by
the decisions of a tribunal which is itself on trial¡±. Bacon was talking about people just
like Ellis, his translator!
One
cannot prove beyond any doubt that Bacon¡¯s proto-phemenological schematismus led Kant to his own
phenomenological schematismus but the
thematic development of the first part of Critique
of Pure Reason is like that in Novum
Organum; not an identity but a similarity of terms and paradigms, and it
develops according to an analogous analytical progression. In short, Kant
appears to have used leads from Bacon to correct Descartes and Locke and to
resolve Hume's paradox. Bacon¡¯s ¡°idola¡± for decontaminating sense data is like
Kant¡¯s idea of ¡°critique¡±. Bacon¡¯s schematismus
as a phenomenology of things rather than words, was the nascent phenomenology
of science at the heart of the revolutionary Novum Organum,(see generally Wheeler, 1983). In the Advancement Bacon explicitly called this
a revolution in thought and, as mentioned earlier was called the third in
history after Greek philosophy and Roman Law; a fact missed by even so fine a
scholar as I. Bernard Cohen in his history of revolutions in thought.(I.B.
Cohen, 1985) Kant¡¯s own "revolution in thought¡±. turned on the use of schematismus to convert Locke¡¯s sense
data empiricism into scientific phenomenology. With the appearance of post-modern paradigms like John A.
Wheeler's "participant-observer" universe it was possible to see that
today¡¯s neoKantian¡¯s talk science almost the same way as did Francis Bacon.
(Wheeler, 1975) So did Einstein's
associate, David Bohm, (D. Bohm, 1981) and so also did Einstein himself,
according to Yehuda Elkana (Y. Elkana, 1979; Patrick A. Heelan, 1983) Kant said
he was a Baconian and he was right.
WAS NEWTON A BACONIAN?
Here a caution is in order. Novum Organum was
written in 1620. It explains the ¡°logic engine¡± that Hooke, probably Bacon¡¯s
best interpreter, found so impressive. Prior science research, especially that
done before 1603, was highly conventional. Most later criticism of Bacon¡¯s
science is based upon his early writings about that work. De Interpretatione
Nature Proemium,(Works, Vol VI, 431ff) for example,
was written before 1603, as were many of his speculations about motion,
gravity, heat, etc. The earlier explorations cannot be used to evaluate the
¡°philosophical algebra¡± (Hooke¡¯s term) of the later organon.
Newton
said he was a Baconian. Was this merely a reverential nod toward the founding
spirit of the Royal Academy? Or was there a deeper affinity? Not according to
the conventional view of the sharp contrast between Bacon¡¯s philosophy and
Newton¡¯s mechanics. Recent publications dull that contrast. (I..B. Cohen &
R. Westfall, 1995; B.J.T. Dobbs, 1991). The fuller view of his newly found
manuscripts, especially those on alchemy and religion, make it clear that he
adapted Bacon¡¯s phenomenological law-finding to mechanical cause-finding.
Maynard Keynes, who had an accurate understanding of Bacon¡¯s logic, wrote of
Newton that he ¡°...was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians¡±.
Keynes bought many Newton alchemy manuscripts at a 1936 auction and they
support his quip. But Newton, like Bacon, was actually more Baroque than
Gothic. Bear two factors in mind while reading the following:
First, it applies the
structure of Bacon¡¯s logic of inquiry to mechanics. Consider Bacon¡¯s recursive
search for a law that is incrementally approached but never concretely grasped.
Newton¡¯s is not a word-based mathematics. His ¡°fluxion¡± is an adminical
approach to a Verulamian phenomenon - ¡°gravity.¡±(Spedding, Works, Vol IV) Second, notice the metaphysical extension Newton
gives to ¡°Cause¡± at the end. The passage that follows is from the ¡°Method of
Analysis¡± in ¡°Quest. 31" of the 4th edition of the Optiks:
The Investigation
of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method
of Composition. This Analysis
consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general
Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the
Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain
Truths. For Hypotheses [rhetoric;
] are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from experiments and Observations
by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way
of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so
much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no
Exception occur from Phaenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any
Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with
such Exceptions as occur. By this
way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions
to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and
from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most
general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming
the Causes discover¡¯d and establish¡¯d as Principles, and by them explaining the
Phaenomana proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.... And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length
be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural
Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what
Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that
towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature..
This is one of the best
explanations ever written of Bacon¡¯s Adminicle support process; ¡°inductive
support¡±, and concludes with the structural probability theory that 20th
century philosophy of science has expressed as neohermeneutics.(Heelan,
1983)
Newton
queried nature the way one investigates a case for which there is no direct
evidence. Where there is only circumstantial evidence one investigates to
exclude. This is the way today¡¯s disverifiability theory of science works and
it is also the way Newton¡¯s Method of Analysis worked. In May 1666 he wrote:
"I had entrance into the inverse method of fluxions¡±. The inverse method was the exclusionary
method of "analysis by experiment¡±. The best illustration is in his
discovery that if one used a prism to isolate a beam of light and showed it through
a second prism it did not split up but retained what he called its
"homogeneal" character.
Using prisms in an adminicle support process explains not only how he
came to his correct conclusions but also how he came to the incorrect ones. The
conclusion that it is impossible to make a lens completely free from chromatic
aberrations later proved to be in error.
Now
take a look again at the conclusion of the Optiks
quotation above. Having taken
all nature as his province, Newton assumed naturally that the approach that
worked for nature would also unravel the secrets of the metaphysical world, and
even those of God¡¯s own mind. That
effort occupied him throughout his entire career, most intensively toward its
end. Newton said he was a Baconian and he was right.
A
final comment on contemporary mis-readings of Bacon¡¯s New Atlantis. A long
line of erroneous interpretations of the New
Atlantis contribute to persisting misunderstandings about Bacon's
science. The error dates from
Benjamin Farrington's impressive and well meaning Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (B. Farrington,
1949) . Farrington applied a generic Marxist historicism as was
common in his time. New Atlantis was
the prime illustration of his claim that Bacon's work prefigured Victorian
British capitalism. Farrington was
writing at the height of industrial capitalism and his story is highly
plausible. The late
twentieth-century scientific revolution; the breaking of the nuclear, genetic
and binary codes; still lay ahead. But Bacon was a mercantilist, not a
protocapitalist. He ran the executive offices of British mercantilism, the
Chancery, like a present-day Japanese Prime Minister. New Atlantis, one of Bacon's last works, summarized his philosophy
of science. It illustrated the constitutionalization of science in prescient
Baconian Inns of Science under a science chancery called Salomon's House - the
book's crowning institution. The king is never mentioned. Parliamentary and
court functions are described fairly close to the way the cabinet government of
the British "working constitution" actually turned out (Wheeler,
1991). Today, Scandinavian welfare
states maintain modernized mercantilist economic systems that are like what
Bacon proposed. The most vivid available understanding of New Atlantis, fatally flawed however by the absence of a ¡°Salomon¡¯s
House¡±, is the sciential mercantilism of postmodern Japan.
Salomon's
House in New Atlantis, named for the
Old Testament law-finder, heads an elaborate science establishment that does
well for the mythical Bensalem what finance capitalism does poorly for today¡¯s
post-industrial economies. It searches for evidences that
"fingerpost" nature's unwritten laws. The science appeals courts
evaluate science innovations and constitutionalize them. It runs, on a national
scale, something like the way Bell Labs did at its prime. New Atlantis is more relevant today than at any time in the past.
THE MODERN AGE:
The
Baroque was still vibrant in 1603 but that is when, with the publication The Advancement of Learning, the Modern
Age was heralded. Its first Latin expansion, The Augmentation of Science, discusses explicitly how to invent new
culture making sciences. Most of Bacon¡¯s books were rewritten three or four
different ways for final inclusion in the Instauratio
Magna. Large as it is, we have only one twentieth of what was planned. "Great Instauration" in English fails to convey
the Olympian grandeur of the magistral reconstitution the author intended by
the original Latin. The titles of the other chief books inspire Blake like
images of a great secular messiah; a bringer of a Promethean gnosis. Hooke and Newton were the best
expositors of Bacon¡¯s science. Hooke, the first inventor of celestial mechanics,(Koyre,
1965) called Novum Organum a logic
engine. It was: a user's how-to
manual for the operation of a system of applied inventionology.
The
Resuscitatio was not a mere revival
as the English implies; it was more like a clarion call for the full
rejuvenation of a senescent giant.
The
Redargutio was not merely a
refutation of archaic philosophy, rather a chewing up and spitting out.
The
Instauratio! Although it is the
inspiration for this treatment, I have failed to convey the audacity of the Instauratio. A complete cultural revolution was
called for.
The New Atlantis tells how to pull it off.
Invention
is the emblem of The Modern: the first human culture to institutionalize
invention. That is why the Prometheus chapter in De Sapientia Veterum (Works, Vol
XIII, loc cit.) is important; and why
today's Bacon scholars who see him only as the Man of the Renaissance miss that
chapter entirely. The Prometheus
essay was a carefully crafted prescription for the transition from Gothic to
Modern.
References:
[References to
Bacon¡¯s Works refer to The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of
Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High Chancellor of England,
Collected and edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon
Heath, 15 vols, Brown and Taggard, Boston, 1860-64. This is somewhat improved
over the earlier British edition. Spedding¡¯s Letters and Life of Francis Bacon must also be consulted.]
Bohannan,
Paul, ed. (1967) Law and Warfare; Studies
in the Anthropology of Conflict, ¡°The Differing
Realms of the Law¡±, Natural History Press, Garden City, New York.
Bohm, D (1981; 1995) Wholeness and the Implicate Order,
Routledge, London, New York,
Brinkley, R. (1955) ed. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century
Duke Univ Press, Durham
Cassirer, E. (1975) Philosophy of Symbolic Form, Yale Univ
Press, New Haven
Cohen, I.B. (1985) Revolution in Science, Belknap Press,
Harvard
Cohen, I.B. & R.S.
Westfall, eds., Newton, WS.W. Norton,
N.Y., 1995
Cohen,
M. (1953; 1959) Reason and Nature; an
Essay on the Meaning of the Scientific Method, 2nd ed. Free Press, Glencoe
Cohen, L. Jonathan (1977)_The Probable and the Provable, Oxford
Univ Press, London
Coquillette,
D.R. (1992) Francis Bacon, Stanford
U. Press, Stanford. This is a superb work, not the least for its essay-like
notes at the end.
Dobbs,
B.J.T.,(1991) The Janus Faces of Genius;
The Role of Alchemy in Newton¡¯s Thought, Camb Univ Press, Cambridge
Eliade, Marcea (1955) The Myth of the Eternal Return, Pantheon
Books, New York
Elkana,
Y. (1979) ¡°Transformations in Realist Philosophy of Science, etc.¡±, Van Leer
Jerusalem Foundation.
Elsasser,
Walter M., (1982) Biological Theory on a
Holistic Basis, Johns Hopkins Dept of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Baltimore.
Elsasser,
Walter M. (1986) The Natural Philosophy
of Holism, Johns Hopkins Dept of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Baltimore.
Farrington,
B. (1949) Francis Bacon: Philosopher of
Industrial Science, Henry Schuman, New York
Fraser, Sir James (1959) The New Golden Bough, ed T. Gaster,
Criterion Books, New York
Hacking,
Ian (1983) Representing and Intervening;
Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge Univ
Press, Cambridge. Hacking has remained one of Bacon¡¯s most discerning and
perceptive interpreters.
Hale,
Sir Matthew (1667; 1971) History of the
Common Law of England, Univ of Chicago Press, Chicago
Heelan,
Patrick A. (1983) Space-Perception and
the Philosophy of Science, , Univ of CA. Press, Berkeley
Hogan, J.C., & Schwartz,
M.D.(1983), ¡°On Bacon¡¯s ¡®Rules and Maximes¡¯ of the Common Law¡± Law
Library Journal, 76:48-77
Holdsworth, W.S. (1938) A History of English Law 6th
edition, Little Brown, Boston
Kant, Immanuel (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (N.K.
Smith, trans) St. Martins
Kirk, G.S. (1982) The Nature of Greek Myths, Pelican
Books, New York
Koyre, Alexandre (1965) Newtonian Studies, ¡°Hooke on
Gravitational Attraction,¡± p 180, ff,
Phoenix Books,
Univ of Chicago Press, Chicago. Koyre¡¯s studies of Platonism and science are
invaluable. Had he understood Bacon¡¯s reverse Platonism, he would have seen the
Baconian foundations of classical mechanics.
La
Barre, W. (1972) The Ghost Dance; the
Origins of Religion, Delta Books, Dell Publishing Co., New York
Maitland,
W.F. (1911) The Collected Papers of
Frederick W. Maitland, 3 vols Cambridge Univ Press,
Cambridge.
Martin, Julien, (1992) Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of
Natural Philosophy, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
McIlwain, C.H., (1940) Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern, Cornell
Univ
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The Structure of Ancient Wisdom;
Symposium, Jour Soc & Bio Structs,
vol 5, No 3
Wheeler, Harvey, (1983)
¡°Science out of Law¡±, Toward a Humanistic
Science of Politics, D.H.
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Wheeler, (1983-a) ¡°Power and
Positivism - Baconian Positivism¡±,
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Wheeler, Harvey (1983-b)
¡°The Invention of Modern Empiricism: Juridical Foundations of Francis Bacon¡¯s
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Wheeler, Harvey (1987-a) The Virtual Society, book on disk, The
Martha Boaz Foundation,
University
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theory and the distinctive ¡°Archival Functions¡± of the Information Age.
Wheeler,
Harvey (1990), ¡°The Archival Function: Knowledge Processing from the Mandalic
to the Omnificent¡±, ed. Michael
Gorman, Convergence, American Library
Association, Chicago London
Wheeler,
Harvey (1991) ¡°Francis Bacon¡¯s New
Atlantis,, etc., ed W.A. Sessions, Francis
Bacon¡¯s
Legacy of Texts, AMS Press, New York
Wormuth, Francis (1949), The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism, Harper & Brothers, New York