Francis Bacon, the Father of Experiments

Can you keep dead chicken fresh longer by stuffing them with snow? Don’t laugh! The philosopher Francis Bacon died because of this question. In April 1626, this problem haunted the then 65-year-old advocate of empiricism. Thinking alone did not get him an answer, so he approached the matter in a practical way. Although he had always been a supporter of scientific experiments, this was – as far as we know – the first one he carried out in his life, and it was also his last. Driven by his exploratory spirit, Bacon apparently paid too little attention to the freezing temperatures and caught a cold that developed into a pneumonia with a fatal outcome.

With works such as “The Advancement of Learning” of 1605, Francis Bacon was a pioneer of empiricism and can be considered the father of modern natural sciences. By doing so, he was clearly getting on the wrong side of the scholastics, who dominated the scholarly world; for the scholastics maintained that God basically made sure that we already knew everything …

After Bacon’s death, a wonderful edition of his treatise on learning was published in Latin in 1662 – and that’s the book we present here. As a bonus for loyal readers, the work explains a state-of-the-art encryption method that is still hard to crack today. But let’s start at the beginning.

Artikeltext:

Francis Bacon: Unscrupulous Statesman and Philosophising Visionary

Francis Bacon was born in London in 1561. His father held one of the highest judicial offices, and therefore, it was obvious which footsteps little Francis had to follow. At Cambridge, the gifted boy failed to appreciate the scholastic methods of eternally debating about trifles and the sex of angels. The medieval fug suffocated him and tormented his critical mind. He wanted to question, not to believe. When his father died, the boy quickly had to take up a profession and became a lawyer.

However, under Elizabeth I, Bacon became involved in intrigues at the court and was forced to accuse a good friend of his, which has damaged his reputation to this day. Opportunist and unscrupulous power seeker are among the most objective labels that can no longer be detached from the name of Francis Bacon.

The tide turned when Jacob I ascended the throne of England in 1603. Bacon experienced a meteoric rise and accumulated honours and titles: Knight Bachelor, Attorney General, Fiscal General and Lord Chancellor. You couldn’t get much more than that. He was raised to the peerage, i.e. the hereditary high nobility, given the title Baron Verulam and in 1621 Viscount St Alban. Then it happened: shortly after, he became caught in an alleged corruption scandal, was banished from court and spent the last five years of his life as a writer on his country estate.

And over the course of this politically explosive life, the powerful engine of Francis Bacon’s restless mind that was always thirsting for knowledge repeatedly had to let off steam.

Beyond Aristotle: How to Control Nature

Aristotle was the constant whetstone for Bacon’s mind. In his “Organon”, the “father of scholasticism” had laid the foundations of logical reasoning, which later philosophers considered to be indispensable tools, or rather the only acceptable tools for their work. Above all, academics did not want to hear anything about experiments. One was supposed to gain knowledge by brooding alone in a small room, just like Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Dupin did when he solved the first criminal case of literary history by relying solely on deductive methods.

Francis Bacon challenged this mindset in 1620 with his “New Organon”. Here we find the idea that knowledge is power. Man must understand nature in order to control it by means of this knowledge.

When experts in Venice think about huge technical projects that can control the acqua alta and how to predict avalanches in the Alps, the idea that we might be able to do such things one day goes back to Francis Bacon. We expand our knowledge through curiosity and questions, and get insights by means of experiments.

An invitation to all scholars: Have a look and see if you find yourself in one of the four “masks”. In Bacon’s ingenious analysis, each of these masks represents a particular type of prejudice or habit that we carry around with us every day – and that keep us from gaining insight. It’s an early critique of language and the strong advice to think about our own ideas in a critical way.

Does Science Make the World a Better Place?

In 1605, when Francis Bacon’s political success at the court of the newly crowned King James I started, he published his treatise “Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning”. In English! Bacon probably knew that the established so-called scholars – the scholastics – would only turn up their nose at the heavy tome and throw it in the trash. That’s why Bacon published his book in the form of a letter to the new king.

This was a very clever move, because Bacon incidentally explained right at the beginning why learned kings (and entire kingdoms, in which education was highly valued!) were superior to unlearned monarchs. A broad hint! The royal currency of the time wasn’t a swift blade but a sharp mind and education. And to give his arguments the air of religious authority, Bacon quoted the wise King Solomon as a prime example.

In his book, Bacon divides human understanding into history, poetry and philosophy. These areas are separated into further sub-chapters, in which he presents verified knowledge of his time. But he also outlines new fields with visionary power: psychology, history of diseases and history of trade. A brilliant description that could be used by anyone who wondered where there was still something new to be explored.

Here, too, Bacon rejected the idea of scholarly work that prevailed at his time. On the one hand, scholastics thought that all knowledge could be found in the Bible or in a few writings like those of the great Aristotle. On the other hand, there were modern empiricists who carried out experiments but did so in a methodically questionable way by overinterpreting their results with all kinds of hocus-pocus and introducing magical elements through the back door. Bacon strongly rejected both. One must be able to repeat experiments – an outrageously modern idea. Along the way, Bacon established the idea of falsification: at the beginning, all results are hypotheses that have not yet been disproved. However, Bacon believed that it was possible to achieve objective results. Another modern idea of Bacon was that the work of natural scientists was not less valuable than that of scholars in the humanities. By now we hear that every day – except from many humanities scholars …

Why It Was Good that Francis Bacon’s Works Were Worthless

So how did our Latin edition come about? When Bacon died in 1626, he had a lot of debts. His debtors tried to make money from his legacy, and they were right to do so. He had also left numerous sheets of paper filled with his ideas, many of them were not even ready for publication. In the eyes of the debtors, they could at best be used to light a fire. So they allowed Bacon’s confessor William Rawley to take the stack of paper with him. Rawley revised and published Bacon’s intellectual legacy for decades. Our edition of 1662 demonstrates that Bacon’s ideas also reached the scholarly world over the years. Rawley published it in Latin, the scholarly language of the time.

Oh yes, Bacon’s bonus! The Latin edition contains an extremely practical tool that Bacon probably used during his very dangerous political activities: an encryption method, click here to test it for yourself. If you manage to hide the result in a text as discreetly as Bacon did, it will be almost impossible to crack even today...

Apart from this useful gadget, we can witness the beginning of modern science in this Latin work and hold a milestone of epistemology in our hands. Whatever fascinates you most, the book is definitely worth a close look.

Other Things You Might Be Interested in:

A digitised version of the book is available at the Hathi Trust website.

Around the same time, another great thinker caused a sensation with his rigorous scientific experiments: Galileo Galilei.

At the time the Latin version of Bacon’s book was printed, the next genius of England was busy publishing his modern works: Thomas Hobbes, the bothersome pessimist.

By the way, to this day there is a society that maintains that Shakespeare did not write his works himself, they believe it was Francis Bacon. He might have been ingenious enough to do that …