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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter III, Section 6 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below is linked to the original materials.

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VI. Epilogue  

“Men in great place are thrice servants; servants to the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business, so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons nor in their action, nor in their time. … The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse.” What a wistful summary of Bacon’s epilogue! 

Francis Bacon was a man of his time.

“A man’s shortcomings,” said Goethe, “are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.” This seems a little unfair to the Zeitgeist, but it is exceptionally just in the case of Bacon. Abbott, after a painstaking study of the morals prevalent at Elizabeth’s court, concludes that all the leading figures, male and female, were disciples of Machiavelli. Roger Ascham described in doggerel the four cardinal virtues in demand at the court of the Queen: 

Cog, lie, flatter and face,
Four ways in Court to win men grace. 
If thou be thrall to none of these, 
Away, good Piers! Home, John Cheese!

In those times, man were beholden to their status.

It was one of the customs of those lively days for judges to take “presents” from persons trying cases in their courts. Bacon was not above the age in this matter; and his tendency to keep his expenditure several years in advance of his income forbade him the luxury of scruples. It might have passed unnoticed, except that he had made enemies in Essex’ case, and by his readiness to sabre foes with his speech. A friend had warned him that “it is too common in every man’s mouth in Court that … as your tongue hath been a razor to some, so shall theirs be to you.” But he left the warnings unnoticed. He seemed to be in good favor with the King; he had been made Baron Verulam of Verulam in 1618, and Viscount St. Albans in 1621; and for three years he had been Chancellor.

Bacon was extravagant and accepted bribes to support his lifestyle. He was caustic and had made enemies.

Then suddenly the blow came. In 1621 a disappointed suitor charged him with taking money for the despatch of a suit; it was no unusual matter, but Bacon knew at once that if his enemies wished to press it they could force his fall. He retired to his home, and waited developments. When he learned that all his foes were clamoring for his dismissal, he sent in his “confession and humble submission” to the King. James, yielding to pressure from the now victorious Parliament against which Bacon had too persistently defended him, sent him to the Tower. But Bacon was released after two. days; and the heavy fine which had been laid upon him was remitted by the King. His pride was not quite broken. “I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years,” he said; “but it was the justest judgment that was in Parliament these two hundred years.”

Bacon was finally dismissed for something not so unusual under the pressure of his enemies.

He spent the five years that remained to him in the obscurity and peace of his home, harassed by an unwonted poverty, but solaced by the active pursuit of philosophy. In these five years he wrote his greatest Latin work, De Augmentis Scientiarum, published an enlarged edition of the Essays, a fragment called Sylva Sylvarum, and a History of Henry VII. He mourned that he had not sooner abandoned politics and given all his time to literature and science. To the very last moment he was occupied with work, and died, so to speak, on the field of battle. In his essay “Of Death” he had voiced a wish to die ”in an earnest pursuit, which is like one wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt.” Like Caesar, he was granted his choice. 

Bacon lived the last five years of his life in poverty but happy in the pursuit of philosophy till his last breath.

In March, 1626, while riding from London to Highgate, and turn.ing over in his mind the question how far flesh might be preserved from putrefaction by being covered with snow, he resolved to put the matter to a test at once. Stopping off at a cottage, he bought a fowl, killed it, and stuffed it with snow. While he was doing this he was seized with chills and weakness; and finding himself too ill to ride back to town, he gave directions that he should be taken to the nearby home of Lord Arundel, where he took to bed. He did not yet resign life; he wrote cheerfully that “the experiment … succeeded excellently well.” But it was his last. The fitful fever of his varied life had quite consumed him; he was all burnt out now, too weak to fight the disease that crept up slowly to his heart. He died on the ninth of April, 1626, at the age of sixty-five. 

He had written in his will these proud and characteristic words: “1 bequeath my soul to God. … My body to be buried obscurely. My name to the next ages and to foreign nations.” The ages and the nations have accepted him. 

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter III, Section 4 (Part 3) from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below is linked to the original materials.

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IV.3 The Utopia of Science

To perfect science so, and then to perfect social order by putting science in control, would itself be utopia enough. Such is the world described for us in Bacon’s brief fragment and last work, The New Atlantis, published two years before his death. Wells thinks it Bacon’s “greatest service. to science” to have drawn for us, even so sketchily, the picture of a society in which at last science has its proper place as the master of things; it was a royal act of imagination by which for three centuries one goal has been held in view by the great army of warriors in the battle of knowledge and invention against ignorance and poverty. Here in these few pages we have the essence and the “form” of Francis Bacon, the law of his being and his life, the secret and continuous aspiration of his soul. 

Bacon’s utopia was to perfect science so, and then to perfect social order by putting science in control.

Plato in the Timaeus had told of the old legend of Atlantis, the sunken continent in the Western seas. Bacon and others identified the new America of Columbus and Cabot with this old Atlantis; the great continent had not sunk after all, but only men’s courage to navigate the sea. Since this old Atlantis was now known, and seemed inhabited by a race vigorous enough, but not quite like the brilliant Utopians of Bacon’s fancy, he conceived of a new Atlantis, an isle in that distant Pacific which only Drake and Magellan had traversed, an isle distant enough from Europe and from knowledge to give generous scope to the Utopian imagination. 

Bacon though of America as the place where his utopia could be fulfilled.

The story begins in the most artfully artless way, like the great tales of Defoe and Swift. “We sailed from Peru (where we had continued for the space of one whole year), for China and Japan by the South Sea.” Came a great calm, in which the ships for weeks lay quietly on the boundless ocean like specks upon a mirror, while, the provisions of the adventurers ebbed away. And then resistless winds drove the vessels pitilessly north and north and north, out of the island-dotted south into an endless wilderness of sea. The rations were reduced, and reduced again, and again reduced; and disease took hold of the crew. At last, when they had resigned themselves to death, they saw, almost unbelieving, a fair island looming up under the sky. On the shore, as their vessel neared it, they saw not savages, but men simply and yet ‘beautifully clothed, clean, and manifestly of developed intelligence. They were permitted to land, but were told that the island government allowed no strangers to remain. Nevertheless, since some of the’ crew were sick, they might all stay till these were well again. 

The story starts with a long sea voyage, when the desperately lost crew suddenly comes upon this fair island inhabited by intelligent people.

During the weeks of convalescence the wanderers unraveled, day by day, the mystery of the New Atlantis; “There reigned in this island about nineteen hundred years ago,” one of the inhabitants tells them, “a King whose memory above all others we most adore. … His name was Solamona, and we esteem him as the Law-giver of our nation. This King had a large heart . … and was wholly bent to make his kingdom and people happy.” “Among the excellent acts of that King one above all hath the preeminence. It was the creation and institution of the Order, or Society, which is called Solomon’s House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that was ever upon the earth; and the lantherne of this kingdom.” 

Nineteen hundred years ago, an institution of the Order, or Society, called Solomon’s House was created.

There follows a description of Solomon’s House, too complicated for a quoted abstract, but eloquent enough to (draw from the hostile Macaulay the judgment that “there is not to be found in any human composition a passage more eminently distinguished by profound and serene wisdom.” Solomon’s House takes the place, in the New Atlantis, of the Houses of Parliament in London; it is the home of the island government. But there are no politicians there, no insolent “elected persons,” no “national palaver,” as Carlyle would say; no parties, caucuses, primaries, conventions, campaigns, buttons, lithographs, editorials, speeches, lies, and elections; the idea of filling public office by such dramatic methods seems never to have entered the heads of these Atlantans. But the road to the heights of scientific repute is open to all, and only those who have traveled the road sit in the councils of the state. It is a government of the people and for the people by the selected best of the people; a government by technicians, architects, astronomers, geologists, biologists, physicians, chemists, economists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers. Complicated enough; but think of a government without politicians! 

Solomon’s House is the home of the island government; but there are no elected politicians there. only those who have traveled the road to the heights of scientific repute sit in the councils of the state. 

Indeed there is little government at all in the New Atlantis; these governors are engaged rather in controlling nature than in ruling man. “The End of Our Foundation is the Knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This is the key-sentence of the book, and of Francis Bacon. We find the governors engaged in such undignified tasks as studying the stars, arranging to utilize for industry the power of falling water, developing gases for the cure of various ailments, experimenting on animals for surgical knowledge, growing new varieties of plants and animals by cross-breeding, etc. “We imitate the flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water.” There is foreign trade, but of an unusual sort; the island produces what it consumes, and consumes what it produces; it does not go to war for foreign markets. “We maintain a trade, not of gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor for any other commodity or matter; but only for God’s first creature, which was light; to have light of the growth of all parts of the world.” These “Merchants of Light” are members of Solomon’s House who are sent abroad every twelve years to live among foreign peoples of every quarter of the civilized globe; to learn their language and study their sciences and industries and literatures; and to return, at the end of the twelve years, to report their findings to the leaders of Solomon’s House; while their places abroad are taken by a new group of scientific explorers. In this way the best of all the world comes soon to the New Atlantis.

The goal of the government is defined by this key sentence: “The End of Our Foundation is the Knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

Brief as the picture is, we see in it again the outline of every philosopher’s utopia—a people guided in peace and modest plenty by their wisest men. The dream of every thinker is to replace the politician by the scientist; why does it remain only a dream after so many incarnations? Is it because the thinker is too dreamily intellectual to go out into the arena of affairs and build his concept into reality? Is it because the hard ambition of the narrowly acquisitive soul is forever destined to overcome the gentle and scrupulous aspirations of philosophers and saints? Or is it that science is not yet grown to maturity and conscious power?—that only in our day do physicists and chemists and technicians begin tosee that the rising role of science in industry and war gives them a pivotal position in social strategy, and points to the time when their organized strength will persuade the world to call them to leadership? Perhaps science has not yet merited the mastery of the world; and perhaps in a little while it will. 

We see in this picture again the outline of every philosopher’s utopia—a people guided in peace and modest plenty by their wisest men.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy 

This paper presents Chapter III, Section 4 (Part 2) from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.  Feedback on these comments is appreciated.

The heading below is linked to the original materials.

.

IV.2 The New Organon

“Bacon’s greatest performance,” says his bitterest critic, “is the first book of the Novum Organum” Never did a man put more life into logic, making induction an epic adventure and a conquest. If one must study logic, let him begin with this book. “This part of human philosophy which regards logic is disagreeable to the taste of many, as appearing to them no other than a net, and a snare of thorny subtlety. … But if we would rate things according to their real worth, the rational sciences are the keys to all the rest.”

Logic has a great value. Bacon recognized it and expressed it the best.

Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophers was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. But thought should be the side of observation, not its substitute. “Man,” says the first aphorism of the Novum Organum, as if flinging a challenge to all metaphysics,—“Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature … permit him; and neither knows nor is capable of more.” The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. “To go beyond Aristotle by the light of Aristotle is to think that a borrowed light can increase the original light from which it is taken.” Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten; to renew herself philosophy must begin again with a clean slate and a cleansed mind. 

The great mistake of the Greek philosophers was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. 

The first step, therefore, is the Expurgation of the Intellect. We must become as little children, innocent of isms and abstractions, washed clear of prejudices and preconceptions. We must destroy the Idols of the mind. 

We must get rid of prejudices and preconceptions.

An idol, as Bacon uses the word (reflecting perhaps the Protestant rejection of image-worship), is a picture taken for a reality, a thought mistaken for a thing. Errors come under this head; and the first problem of logic is to trace and dam the sources of these errors. Bacon proceeds now to a justly famous analysis of fallacies; “no man,” said Condillac, “has better known than Bacon the causes of human error.” 

An idol is a picture taken for a reality, a thought mistaken for a thing. The first problem of logic is to trace and dam the sources of these errors.

These errors are, first, Idols of the Tribe,—fallacies natural to humanity in general. “For man’s sense is falsely asserted” (by Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things”) “to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects … and distort and disfigure them.” Our thoughts are pictures rather of ourselves than of their objects. For example, “the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and regularity in things than it really finds. … Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles.” Again, 

Idols of the Tribe = fallacies natural to humanity in general.

the human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe, or despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods. … “But where are the portraits of those that have perished in spite of their vows?” All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common.

The human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects and distort and disfigure them.

“Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession.” In short, “the human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections, whence proceed sciences which may be called ‘sciences as one would.’ … For what a man had rather were true, he more readily believes.” Is it not so? 

What a man had rather were true, he more readily believes.

Bacon gives at this point a word of golden counsel. “In general let every student of nature take this as a rule—that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction, is to be held in suspicion; and that so much the more care is to be taken, in dealing with such questions, to keep the understanding even and clear.” “The understanding must not be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms and of almost the highest generality; … it must not be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights to keep it from leaping and flying.” The imagination may be the greatest enemy of the intellect, whereas it should be only its tentative and experiment. 

RULE: The understanding must not be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms and of almost the highest generality.

A second class of errors Bacon calls Idols of the Cave—errors peculiar to the individual man. “For everyone … has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature”; this is his character as formed by nature and nurture, and by his mood or condition of body and mind. Some minds, e. g., are constitutionally analytic, and see differences everywhere; others are constitutionally synthetic, and see resemblances; so we have the scientist and the painter on the one hand, and on the other hand the poet and the philosopher. Again, “some dispositions evince an unbounded admiration for antiquity, others eagerly embrace.novelty; only a few can preserve the just medium, and neither tear up what the ancients have correctly established, nor despise the just innovations of the moderns.” Truth knows no parties. 

Idols of the Cave = errors peculiar to the individual man.

Thirdly, Idols of the Market-place, arising “from the commerce and association of men with one another. For men converse by means of language; but words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd; and there arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives; and yet does any man know what this “infinite” is, or whether it has even taken the precaution of existing? Philosophers talk about “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved”; but are not these again fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance, and perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user? Every clear and honest head knows that no cause can be causeless, nor any mover unmoved. Perhaps the greatest reconstruction in philosophy would be simply this—that we should stop lying. 

Idols of the Market-place = errors arising from the commerce and association of men with one another. Ideas like “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved,” are but fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance.

“Lastly, there are idols which have migrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophers, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theatre, because in my judgment all the received systems of philosophy are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. … And in the plays of this philosophic theater you may observe the same thing which is found in the theater of the poets,— that stories invented for the stage are more compact and elegant, and more as we would wish them to be, than true stories out of history.” The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plato rather than the world. 

Idols of the Theatre = idols which have migrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophers.

We shall never get far along towards the truth if these idols are still to trip us up, even the best of us, at every turn. We need new modes of reasoning, new tools for the understanding. “And as the immense regions of the West Indies had never been discovered, if the use of the compass had not first been known, it is no wonder that the discovery and advancement of arts hath made no greater progress, when the art of inventing and discovering of the sciences remains hitherto unknown.” “And surely it would be disgraceful, if, while the regions of the material globe … have been in our times laid widely open and revealed, the intellectual globe should remain shut up within the narrow limits of old discoveries.”

We need new modes of reasoning, new tools for the understanding.

Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. Now “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties” (alas, it is not quite inevitable). Here is a note common in the youth of modern philosophy, part of its declaration of independence; Descartes too would presently talk of the necessity of “methodic doubt” as the cobweb-clearing pre-requisite of honest thought. 

We find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. 

Bacon proceeds to give an admirable description of the scientific method of inquiry. “There remains simple experience; which, if taken as it comes, is called accident” (“empirical”), “if sought for, experiment. … The true method of experience first lights the candle” (hypothesis), “and then by means of the candle shows the way” (arranges and delimits the experiment) ; “commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling nor erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.” (We have here—as again in a later passage which speaks of the results of initial experiments as a “first vintage” to guide further research—an explicit, though perhaps inadequate, recognition of that need for hypothesis, experiment and deduction which some of Bacon’s critics suppose him to have entirely overlooked.) We must go to nature instead of to books, traditions and authorities; we must “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” even against herself, so that we may control her to our ends. We must gather together from every quarter a “natural history” of the world, built by the united research of Europe’s scientists. We must have induction. 

We must go to nature instead of to books, traditions and authorities. We must have the scientific method of inquiry. We must have induction.

But induction does not mean “simple enumeration” of all the data; conceivably, this might be endless, and useless; no mass of material can by itself make science. This would be like “chasing a quarry over an open country”; we must narrow and enclose our field in order to capture our prey. The method of induction must include a technique for the classification of data and the elimination of hypotheses; so that by the progressive canceling of possible explanations one only shall at last remain. Perhaps the most useful item in this technique is the “table of more or less,” which lists instances in which two qualities or conditions increase or decrease together, and so reveals, presumably, a causal relation between the simultaneously varying phenomena. So Bacon, asking, What is heat?—seeks for some factor that increases with the increase of heat, and decreases with its decrease; he finds, after long analysis, an exact correlation between heat and motion; and his conclusion that heat is a form of motion constitutes one of his few specific contributions to natural science. 

The method of induction must include a technique for the classification of data and the elimination of hypotheses; so that by the progressive canceling of possible explanations one only shall at last remain.

By this insistent accumulation and analysis of data we come, in Bacon’s phrase, to the form of the phenomenon which we study,—to its secret nature and its inner essence. The theory of forms in Bacon is very much like the theory of ideas in Plato: a metaphysics of science. “When we speak of forms we mean nothing else than those laws and regulations of simple action which arrange and constitute any simple nature. … The form of heat or the form of light, therefore, means no more than the law of heat or the law of light.” (In a similar strain Spinoza was to say that the law of the circle is its substance.)”For although nothing exists in nature except individual bodies exhibiting clear individual effects according to particular laws; yet, in each branch of learning, those. very laws—their investigation, discovery and development—are the foundation both of theory and of practice.” Of theory and of practice; one without the other is useless and perilous; knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges; we study psychology in order to find our way in the jungle of society. When science has sufficiently ferreted out the forms of things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever utopia man may decide to make. 

“When we speak of forms we mean nothing else than those laws and regulations of simple action which arrange and constitute any simple nature.” We arrive at the final form by resolving anomalies and confirming the law of continuity, consistency and harmony. Knowledge must generate achievement.

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