Francis Bacon Philosopher of Inductive Reasoning
The Age of Enlightenment and the Empirical Method of Science
Oct 22, 2009
A politician, playwright, philosopher and scientist, whose final experiment in refrigeration may have cost him his life, melded his experiences into concepts which would affect policy, thought and scientific experimentation for centuries to come.
"Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world."
A Life of Contradictions
The rumored child of Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) and Robert Dudley (1532 – 1588), Earl of Leicester, Bacon became Lord Chancellor in 1620 under King James I (1566 – 1625), only to be prosecuted for misuse of funds under twenty-three counts by Parliament. After spending a few days in the Tower of London, his fines were paid by the King who may have been guilty of the crimes.
Debt being a dark specter in an otherwise enlightened life, Bacon was befriended by and received financial benefits from Robert Devereux (1565 – 1601), Second Lord of Essex, only to become a member of the traitor’s prosecution. A man of great contradictions, Bacon wrote many volumes of works that not only reflected upon his experiences, but discussed his actions along with the basis for his reasoning and processes’.
Camps of Neo-Aristotelians and Neo-Platonists battled for their different philosophies in search of “a coherent cosmology,” an ultimate unifying theory for celestial and terrestrial worlds. Bacon’s Novem Organum, a section of the Instauratio magna published in 1620, promoted Aristotelian based concepts of observation and deduction of nature.
Bacon defined inductive reasoning by expanding upon and clarifying methodology initiated by observable phenomena, defining phenomena in all of its guises, and testing it for consistency before defining a conclusion. This became the basis for our modern scientific, empiricist, method.
As the Age of Enlightenment (ca. 1650 – 1790) opened, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) ushered both philosophical camps toward a peaceable coexistence utilizing Bacon’s scientific methodology, taking a core debate begun in the Renaissance (c. 1350 -1600) and laying the scientific key stone for the modern era.
Renaissance to The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment expanded beyond prior scientific theories connected with religious belief, focusing instead on universal truths. Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) inventions of scientific instruments for observation expanded exploration. He declared “the book of nature is written in mathematical characters,” essentially arguing that scientists “should only consider measurable qualities as opposed to simply relying on perception and intuition forming the laws of terrestrial motion.”
Nickolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) took this further using mathematization of nature to define force as a mechanical agent. These discoveries and theories influenced Bacon’s philosophy on inductive reasoning along with his ideas regarding god and man. While considering a belief in god important, he promoted the concept of man’s experience and reasoning in accordance with god’s wishes. That the observable world as a realm of man, eliminating religion from scientific research.
From Democritus’ Atomism to Newton’s Universal Laws
Supporting this concept, Democritus’ (450 – 370 bce) philosophy of atomism “matter in motion” influenced Galileo, Thomas Hobbes (1588 -1679) and Rene Descartes’ (1596 – 1650) mechanistic philosophy which re-imaged “nature as an intricate impersonal machine strictly ordered by mechanical law.” This concept is reflected in Bacon’s Novum Organum:
"… no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries (printing, gunpowder and the compass)."
With the support of Bacon’s philosophical approach, Newton ushered in the age of the modern science developing a set of physical laws that unified the concepts of mechanistic philosophy and Pythagorean tradition. The utopian world Bacon envisioned in The New Atlantis (1627) became an outline for a future of studies devoted to purely scientific thought.
Sources
Breisach, Ernst. Histiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. 3rd ed. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Matthews, Steven. Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis BaconHampshire, England. Ashgate Publishing, 2008.
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