In Our Time - Baconian Science

Episode Date: April 2, 2009

Patricia Fara, Stephen Pumfrey and Rhodri Lewis join Melvyn Bragg to discuss the Jacobean lawyer, political fixer and alleged founder of modern science Francis Bacon.In the introduction to Thomas Spratt's History of the Royal Society, there is a poem about man called Francis Bacon which declares 'Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last, The barren wilderness he past, Did on the very border stand Of the blest promis'd land, And from the mountain's top of his exalted wit, Saw it himself, and shew'd us it'.Francis Bacon was a lawyer and political schemer who climbed the greasy pole of Jacobean politics and then fell down it again. But he is most famous for developing an idea of how science should be done - a method that he hoped would slough off the husk of ancient thinking and usher in a new age. It is called Baconian Method and it has influenced and inspired scientists from Bacon's own time to the present day.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the introduction to Thomas Spratt's history of the Royal Society, there's a poem about Francis Bacon. It reads, Bacon like Moses, a led us forth at last,

the barren wilderness he passed, did on the very border stand of the blessed promised land, and from the mountain top of his exalted wit, saw it himself and showed us it. Francis Bacon was a lawyer, an essayist, and a political schema, who climbed the greasy pole of Jacobian politics, became Lord Chancellor, and then fell down again. But he's most famous for developing an idea of how science should be done,

a method, that he hoped would slough off the husk of ancient thinking and usher in a new age. It's called Beconian Method, and it's influenced and inspired scientists from Bacon's own time to the present day. With me to discuss Beconian science as Stephen Pumpery, Senior lecturer in the history of science at the University of Lancaster, Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College University of Cambridge, and Roderie Lewis,

fellow of St. Hughes College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in English. Stephen, can you introduce us to Francis Bacon, the voluminous writer and so on, can you say it all? Well, as you said, from 1660 onwards, he's been remembered as a philosopher of science, but that really wasn't how he was thought of in his own time. As you said, primarily he was known as a careerist politician, and he was probably most famous in terms of writing for his essays.

We talked about 1561 to 1624. Yes. As much Elizabethan as Jack the European. His career doesn't really take off under Elizabeth, but under James I first from 1603 till his death in 1626, he really is, for the period, very successful. And he has so many accomplishments, you could almost call him a Renaissance man,

except that I think he's the first really genuine post-Renaissance thinker, so it's perhaps not appropriate. His success was because he was very much, much as a lawyer prepared to tow James's line and advance James's position, which made him deeply unpopular, and that contributed to his fall. So he was unpopular, but most people at the time report that his character was not particularly pleasant. He was cold. He was indifferent. He was opposed to have a horrible secret sexual sin. People really didn't like him. And yet despite that, he seems to have quite a finger on the pulse of humanity. His essays, civil and moral, show a good understanding of human nature. He writes very well on a huge range of,

subjects. He writes of op-ed pieces on whether the crowns of England and Scotland should be unified or not important then and still important now. And you can see why some somewhat of crazy conspiracy theorists think he might even have been as of the writing pen behind Shakespeare, it's obviously nonsense, but that's how he was seen. But from 1621, after his fall, he devoted himself a lot to his writings on the philosophy of science and that's what his reputation is primarily based on today. So we're talking about a lawyer, an essayist, a philosopher, a literary man, and what we could not, wasn't called them, a natural philosopher, a scientist. And all these at a very high level. Yes. I mean, he became

Lord Chancellor. He wasn't just a country's list. Not just a, he wasn't a contest, he was Lord Chancellor. And every, every, every, every, every one of the, so dislikable as he was, it was a man of achievements. Oh, very much so, yes. And although he constantly argued that his natural philosophical projects are really important to him intellectually, it was his status as a lawyer that sort of defined him during his lifetime. And there are connections, I think, between his career and his attitude as a lawyer and the way that he set about reforming method in science. His life as a lawyer, in fact, I think this is quite good for crystallising the issues. His life as a lawyer was almost defined by sort of conflicts with the other great law of the time, Sir Edward Cook. Bacon was a

great rationalist and systematizer. He would have been just the person to sort of harmonize EU legislation. And I mentioned that because he was seen by many English lawyers as suspiciously continental in his interest in some systems and principles, whereas Cook stood up for English common law and precedent, messy, contradictory, but effective. And similarly, Bacon was prepared to stick up for James on the issue of the royal prerogative. The question was if James, as a divinely appointed ruler, made law, wanted to make law which was contradicting his precedent, was that okay or not? James Bacon's. said yes, Cook said no, you can understand why it was Bacon who James promoted.

He made lots of enemies, and his downfall was on the question of supporting James' right to give out handouts, particularly monopolies. And it was on that issue that he fell. He fell because he was accused of bribery. All the judges, in a sense, were corrupt. It was clear that his time had come to fall. He used metaphors, didn't he, about extracting knowledge, which to us seem to be not only unpleasant.

and remote, but quite bizarre, that you, known as a misanthropist, but you tortured, use the word tortures how you got knowledge. He talked about nature's like a woman, and you had, will you go on with this? Yes, I think that it's been controverted in recent years, but I think Bacon did think of the process

by which a male natural philosopher to probe the secrets of nature, which was normally thought of us, feminine. It's very much like an aggressive prosecutor probing a reluctant recalcitrant female witness. So he does talk about

needing to grab nature by the forelock and sort of bring her into subjection. He describes experiments as like torturing nature on the rack because nature will not yield up her secrets easily. She needs to be pressed to be forced under art. And it's almost

certain that Bacon, if he didn't actually do it himself, knew of the use of torture extracting confessions from religious dissidents and so forth. And witches. And alleged witches. And the whole language of, you know, discovery of matters of fact of putting things to trial is very much redolent of the lawyer who, rather than thinking that things about science can be deduced from first principle, involves a question of empirically going out and

literally discovering the facts. Let's turn more to his science now with Patricia Farrow. On the front of his book Novum Organon, there's a picture of a galleon, say, through the Straits of Gibraltar, presumably on its way to the new world. Can you explain that image in terms of Bacon's ideas? Yes, it's a fabulous metaphorical summary of the arguments in his book. What he wanted to do in the new organon, which is the name comes from Aristotle's organon, was to overthrow the old logical systems of Aristotle and the Greek.

He wanted to start from first principles. He wanted to start from observations and get rid of all the sort of logic, philosophical arguments. of Aristotle. So the pillars of Hercules, there are two mythical pillars that stand either sides of the Straits of Gibraltar. So they mark the exit from the Mediterranean with its very well-charted waters, the exit into the Atlantic Ocean, which is very dangerous and choppy, difficult to navigate. On the other hand, if you do manage to get across, you get to America. And in fact, there's two galleons on the frontist piece. One is going out to America, and one is coming back. And there's a little tag in Latin across the bottom.

of the picture is taken from the book of Daniel in the Bible. And it says in Latin, many will travel and knowledge will be increased. So William Harvey famously said that Bacon wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. You can see littered through his writings, this idea that if you invest in scientific research, you will get much greater rewards. It's very much a sort of investment he wants a state to invest in science. So the idea is that just like these ships, took the plunge, went across to America,

and discovered all sorts of marvellous goods and things to bring back and benefit, which benefited the British economy. In the same way, if you leave the safety of the Greek and Latin knowledge, the classical knowledge of the Mediterranean, and you head out into new waters, you too will bring back reward. So it's a sort of metaphor.

It's a metaphor of knowledge. And also it's a metaphor of knowledge, as Stephen said, in his opening remarks, although Bacon himself could be quite easily, plausibly be called a Renaissance man. He was also very much an anti-rennaissance man. The consensus seems to be that that'd been the great age of learning, and then the Arabs had translated it from Syriac into Arabic,

and then later from Arabic into Latin. It'd come back to Europe. After these dark ages, Europe had got classical learning again. The Renaissance had rediscovered classical learning, and all was well because we were back where we should be. And Bacon said, no, there are new worlds the new things have come about. They didn't have printing press, gunpowder, nautical compasses and that sort of thing. This is entirely new, we need a new method. And this ship, sailing out to the new world, was showing, we're leaving the Mediterranean behind, there's new worlds to find in all sorts of ways.

So it was a powerful notion that it was driving him. He was trying to push back a huge tide of opinion, wasn't it? That's absolutely right. And traditionally on the pillars of Hercules, it says Naples Ultra, nothing lies beyond. And Bacon said, absolutely on the contrary, things do lie beyond. And one of the first books that was published by the New Royal Society was called precisely that, plus ultra. There is knowledge beyond. We must leave the safety, the confines of classical knowledge, and venture out to find new worlds. And also to discover knowledge in a new kind of way by basing our discoveries on observation and on experiment, not just on logical deduction. In the New Atlantis, in Beggles, New Atlantis, he invents.

Benzor world in which his scientific ideas have been implemented. It's a weird world, but anyway, can you do your best with the workings of what he calls Solomon's House? Well, Solomon's House is based on the island of Bensselaum, and Bensselaum is a hidden island. Once you land there, you're not allowed to leave, and the rest of the world doesn't know that it exists. And from time to time, they send ships out to the outside world, and they drop off their spies to garner knowledge of the latest inventions, and these spies sort of go around Europe finding out what's been happening. and then they get picked up by ships and they take the knowledge back to Bensselaum.

And there in Solomon's House, it's a group collaborative project. It's a model for how Francis Bacon wanted natural philosophy to be practiced in Britain subsidised by the state. And the research members are divided into teams and it's arranged hierarchically and they each have a little project to do. So, for example, in one place there's a deep cave underneath the ground

and people are carrying out experiments on refrigeration. on cold. And then there's a tower where people do astronomical observations. So there's these little sort of group projects all working together very hierarchically organized. So there's data collectors who do the work. And then it sort of moves upwards to the team leader. I think this whole emphasis on secrecy is also very interesting. And it sort of reflects rather on modern science as well. So it's both collaborative, hierarchical.

And at the end, there are only three people make decisions. So it's elitist as well. It gets just about everything in that. Robert Lewis, one of Bacon's most famous phrases of the aphorism, knowledge is power. What did he mean by that, and how did he employ it? Well, perhaps the first thing to say is that he didn't actually say it, at least not in the form in which it's usually quoted,

or need in the context, but it's certainly something with which he'd have been greatly in sympathy. So what did he say in the context in which he's quoted? Well, it's in an early meditation. Did he say anything like this? Yes, lots of things like that, and he'd certainly have agreed with it if pushed. But it's a particular kind of knowledge. and the particular kind of power that he has in mind. And the knowledge that he has in mind

is what he calls the laws or the forms of nature, which are the ultimate product of his new experimental methodology and which will enable the, well, humankind, in the broader sense, to have a new power and understanding of the way in which the natural world actually works. And the metaphor he uses to describe this is that these forms or laws are like an alphabet of one of the way. kind or another, the very small number of core units of which the world is made up in combining these sort of things. Nature in itself combines them in familiar ways of the kinds that we

understand, be they trees or gold or whatever it happens to be. What he seeks, what his methodology seeks, is the power to recombine these natural elements in new, innovative and creative sorts of ways. This leads us on to the nature of the power that he has in mind, and I think talking about creation is important as what he sees, or what he tries to make us see, is that he's trying to recreate the condition of original perfect knowledge

that Adam held in Eden before the fall of humankind. But Adam and Eve were mirrors of perfect knowledge. They were mirrors to nature, they knew everything, then they sinned, the mirrors distorted, and we've been trying to straighten out ever since. Exactly so, exactly so. Which is, I mean, it's no coincidence

that the sort of subtitle for Solomon's house is the College of the Six Days works. The idea is we're getting back to that sort of initial condition of pure knowledge that we had in Eden before humankind fell through its sin. I suppose I have to disagree slightly with something Steve just said about sort of torturing nature in that respect. Bacon doesn't actually say that. It's a sort of quote from later in the 17th century, I think, initially from Leibniz.

But I think the thing to think about what Bacon always said is that this power is dominion over nature, not domination over nature. It's a kind of lordship, it's a kind of stewardship conditioned by things like charity rather than the sort of urge to vex torture or otherwise dominate the natural world. And that's, I think, key to an understanding particularly of the religious contexts in which bucconian thought becomes important. I'm sure Stephen I want to come back to that in a moment but I just want to ask you one more question Rory. Can you tell us about Bacon's method?

Patricia pointed us towards it. Can you just spell out? It became called then or a bit later. It doesn't really matter at the moment. Inductive method. It's inductive method. What is the inductive method?

Sure. So the listeners are right up to power and then we can get on with it. Well, it's actually rather complicated but a good way of thinking about it is a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, we have a mass of natural data.

Like Solomon's house, you mean? Yeah, indeed. Natural history is the first idea. And then the next stage up the pyramid, you have a series of axioms, which are drawn from the experimental data, comparing, contrasting, interrogating it. And then at the top of the pyramid, we have laws, forms, and understanding of the world. And I suppose what we need to think about that as being is a way of replacing what they can see as a sort of erroneously deductive,

hypothetical structures of traditional acetylene logic as taught in the universities. What he wants to do is to replace it with something thoroughly grounded in authentic natural knowledge, which is at the base of the pyramid and then comes up. Thank you, Stephen. Well, I think I'm willing to stand corrected that Bacon didn't actually say,

he touched on the rack, but I think the difference between us is perhaps an example of something we might explore later, which is that there have been lots of difference of bacon's constructed throughout history. And to some extent that represents a kind of selection from his voluminous work. You can sort of read him to say almost anything. For example, there was a feminist school of history

which said that Bacon was almost misogynistic. And then someone else, a woman scholar, came along and showed that there were lots of other bits of bacon where he actually talked about nature in quite a kind of positive way. And similarly, there are elements in Bacon where he talks about a sort of chaste marriage and a dominion over nature. But when he says that nature yields knowledge more under the kind of pressure of art than freely, and when he says that nature needs to be grabbed by the hare and pulled along, there's a sort of element of violence and that whether he would have recognised this,

well, not perhaps. But there is, I mean, as Steve has just said, there's a great deal of scholarly debate about what Bacon did say and what Bacon didn't say. But what is true is that very shortly after Bacon, people like Robert Boyle, for example, were using that gendered imagery. And that was something that continued right through,

well, certainly into the 19th century and probably into the 20th century, this idea of male scientists and female, male nature, this idea of exploration and discovery. So, for example, someone like Humphrey Davy, in the early 19th century, used imagery that went into Frankenstein about taking the veil away from nature, about exploring nature's hidden recesses. So that sort of metaphor... Lifting the skirts of nature, you said.

But it is a sort of wrenching her secrets out of her, that sort of almost violent aggression. What was very common in science right through for centuries afterwards, and it was seen as a sort of beconian idea, whether or not Bacon himself actually said it in those words. Can I come back to see him from a moment, the newness in Bacon which you referred to, the idea of progress, the idea of knowledge being progressive rather than exploratory. He was trying to engineer that as a mode of thinking, wasn't he? And it was a time when East India Company, the British Empire, was on its way, languages. Shakespeare's writing, he had access to 50 different languages and so on.

So that is pounding through London. Do you think that was very much an effect on him? Very much so, I think. He was impressed by what one might call as a clear progress through technology that the 18th century had seen, particularly into a dynamic mercantile, imperialising London. He wasn't the first person to point out

that in terms of technology and the arts, the modern world was ahead of the ancients. What was interesting for him was the comparative stagnation in philosophy and his demand that the progress that was clearly being made in the practical arts should be applied and taken up by philosophy. And he demands that philosophy of nature, science, if you like, should no longer be merely contemplative, but should be active,

should be put to use. It shouldn't be an OTO study of leisure, but a negatium of business to advance the state economically and otherwise. It's interesting that what could be called, and there were a criticism for this, never mind, the lads on the street like Webster, was very much on Bacon's side, and he criticised Oxford for not overthrowing Aristotle and taking up Bacon,

as Bacon himself wanted them to do, overthrow Aristotle. I think, yes, if you were a really ambitious person with a bright mind in that time, you probably wanted to leave Oxford and Cambridge and join the kind of exciting new world of the court, where this different active kind of knowledge was more valued in traditional scholarship. Roger? Yeah, I mean, I agree with that entirely. Sort of one of the most important waves of early Boconian thought is from Lansom the Street, such as John Webster.

But I think it's also important to stress that from the universities themselves, people like John Wilkins, who will go on to have an important founding role in the Royal Society. And Seth Ward think of themselves as being eminently Boconian too, and they're operating very, very much within the university context. We see that bacon is taken up again and again and again and again right to the end of the 90s. He's still very much around now. But let's start. He dies in 1626.

He's being exiled. But it is massive. work remains and this method which is then taken up. Rather oddly it would seem to, it would seem to me even read about it. He was taken up in Cromwell's government by a man called Samuel Hartlib, a millinerian

thinker, and became, it's translated into English in 1640 and he became part of the millinerian wing of the Cromwellian project. Now can you just say what was important for them about what he

said, what he'd written? Sure. Patricia mentioned the tag on the frontist piece of the Novum Maganum, or rather the great instigation of which the Notham was a part in 1620, which the money will go to and fro, and knowledge will be increased. That comes from the book of Daniel 124 and is describing what will happen in the last days of the world. There is a sense that the world is in flux, at the end of days is nigh in much sort of radical religious thought at the time. I mean, the idea is that 30 years, war has gone wrong, we're in civil war. You know, we are clearly preparing for the end of days. The new, the two and fro bit is covered by the discovery of the new world and knowledge is being increased. Also was the thought that Christ would return to this country. He would choose this country to come back to it. That was thought by persons.

Yeah, very much so, very, very much so. That's less obvious from Bacon's writings themselves, but it gets tied in very much with this really radically millenarian view of the world. And it's paradoxical, of course, because we don't really identify religious radicals and just or otherwise with their idea of scientific advancement. But these are the guys who are driving it forward, particularly in around the Hartlip Circle and London in the 1640s and 50s. And it does have a sort of radical political agenda

because for Baconians like this, the contrast was between the life of literally ease that was led in paradise where food was abundant. disease was virtually non-existent, people were sort of happy and well-clothed, and that the poverty and harshness of life that was present in the 17th century, particularly during the Civil War. So they imagined that by bringing about Solomon's house in a Baconian great instillation, humankind could be restored to that ease and comfort of life that was our right before the fall.

The bacon is still, so he's there in Cromwell, and a few years later, the whole thing is born, Versailles, Charles I second comes back as it were a totally different regime is put in place Merrimand instead of and so and so on so we all know about that but there is bacon again

right at the beginning lauded as the inspiration for the Royal Society a tremendous restoration achievement perhaps the greatest achievement of the restoration and he's hailed as I muttered at the beginning with that at that poem as the founding inspiration for it

how did that come about And the frontispiece of the book you described, Sprat's history of the Royal Society, shows the first president of the Royal Society. It shows the king at the centre because they were trying to get some money out of him, which proved rather unsuccessful. I think he paid for one dinner a year. In contrast with the French king who subsidised research in France enormously. That never happened in England in the 17th century. And then on the other side, very, very prominent in this frontist piece is bacon. And there's instruments all over the picture.

to illustrate how important experimental observation is. He also had quite another nice metaphor of describing what the role of a natural philosopher should be. He used an insect metaphor. He said that there's data carriers, the gatherers, the ants, who go scurrying up. They don't really understand much, but they rush around collecting lots of information

and bringing it back. And then on the other hand, there's the spiders. And the spiders are just those philosophers who spin webs and theories but don't really have much contact with the natural world. And then there's the Baconian natural philosopher. And the Beconian natural philosopher is the wise bee who digests the pollen and produce the honey, the wisdom.

So that was his model of how science should work. A sort of gather as much information as you can and then use the inductive process in order to produce knowledge based firmly on the real world. Why do they need bacon to be there, Stephen? Well, yes, that's an interesting question because I think when natural philosophers and indeed scientists today got down and thought, well, let's read Bacon and do Baconian science,

it's very difficult to know what you do. I think he's a figurehead, he's a talisman. I think a lot of people, certainly by 1660, have definitely decided that they're going to reject the Renaissance model of knowledge. They're going to reject the ancients they want, a kind of practical, more experimental approach. They're all rejecting it in a different way.

Some of them are following Paracelsus against Galen. Some of them are following mathematical approaches against verbal approaches. And Bacon himself said that, perhaps rather too modestly, that he was just the bell that would ring the wits together. And I think that rather than saying, I find Aristotle boring, or I think Paracelsen got some good ideas, you could now say, I'm a Baconian. It was a way of giving yourself a place

as part of a whole new movement of renewal. He's a figurehead. One thing that Patricia referred to, and we haven't mentioned it, it's very important, it seems to me, from reading for this program, is that Bacon actually thought science should serve the state, should do the state some good. And knowledge is power.

You can imagine me in whispering into the ears of James I first and Charles I first saying, if you subsidise us, we will make you a stronger state. We will give you these inventions and possibilities. And that became part of the Royal Society too. They took that up, didn't they? They had a king on the front of the British said, hoping to get some money out of him.

But probably, if I may just interrupt briefly, probably that one reason why Charles II didn't really give any more money than James I or Charles I, is that even on a conservative estimate, Bacon's vision of this renewal by which massive rewards would be generated was what, 20, 30, 50, 100 years

and most kind of Stuart Kings were so strapped for cash, they simply hadn't got the money for those long-term investments, a bit like government today. I mean, one reason why Louis the 14th invested heavily was, again, he used the Royal Society in Paris, which was set up just a few years after the one in London, he used his sponsorship,

his patronage of science as a way of advertising his own splendour. So everything was done with a motive, with an interest. It's probably worth noting on that context. I mean, Bacon himself was, you know, until his fall, a very loyal and close ally of James I the first. And I think one of the Royal Society's ideas would be, you know, we're going to replicate, hopefully, some of the things that Bacon could do for your grandfather, Charles. and, you know, get things going in that respect failed, of course,

but it was a valiant stab. Bacon regretted his lack of knowledge about mathematics and his lack of appreciation of it also. It entered in very strongly after a while in the 60s and 70s, principally with Newton. Did this endanger the Beconian project? Can you give us some idea of what that lack meant to it, what the advent of the importance of mathematics?

It's tricky to say what the Beconian project is. I mean, there's a school of thought which says that the Newtonian mathematical model came along, and Beconianism was therefore overturned. That is sort of true in the sense that Bacon is not very interested in, Newton, rather, is not very interested in natural history, the sort of traditional bucconian way of doing things. I think Newton himself, styles himself as a beconian of sorts when he says, I'm an experimental, not a hypothetical philosopher.

And that's a strong claim against traditional ways of doing astronomy, for example. And I think it's sort of important to see certain kinds of continuity going forward. I don't know, Patricia probably knows more about this than me. Well, there is one way in which I think Newton did do a classic Baconian experiment in his experiment with the prism, where he split light into different colours and then passed one beam through a second prism and showed that it stayed the same colour. that was what Bacon called a crucial experiment. Newton was trying to show that his theory of optics was correct

and Descartes was wrong. So he set up this crucial experiment that would test. And if Descartes was right, there would be one outcome and if Newton was right, there would be another outcome. So in that sense, he's a very strong Beaconian experimentalist and his whole book on optics, which came out in English in 1704, was an advertisement for the Beaconian experimental method.

Did people grapple, Stephen Humphrey, did these scientists who came together in the Royal Society, natural philosophers we must correctly call them, did they grapple with the Beconian method? I don't know that they did. I mean, the propagandistic history of the Royal Society makes lots of claims that they follow a very strict method, which is in many parts Baconian and kind of drawn from or echoes to bacon. But as many historians have pointed out, when you look at what they actually did, even the kind of active core of 20, 30, 40 scientists who are actually doing experiments, it deviates a lot.

There's a lot more talking than you would expect, a lot more discussing, and whether that's an important part of science or not, you can decide. There is a lot more mathematics. I think some of the very high-tech machinery like the air pump. I'm not sure that Bacon would have recognised that as an appropriate form. The airman's interesting because the air pump changed nature

and the idea of changing nature was new, wasn't it, by creating a vacuum which nature did not have, scientists, natural philosophers, had changed nature, and that was what Bacon's thought could happen and should happen. Yes, and it's something which is applied to use in terms of understanding the way we breathe, and later on you get things like sort of pressure cookers coming out of it. So it is marketed as part of a useful philosophy.

But I think perhaps one of the looks at the variety of ways in which the members of the Royal Society conducted their work, ranging from really quite abstract mathematics, as some of Newton's Principia and others, other works are, through to very sort of humble data gathering and people who are bringing in rocks from their estates, all of these wide ranges of approaches can be called the Beconia method,

which leaves us with that kind of question. If you take it very, very seriously in terms of the strict logical induction, then as lots of sorts of science have pointed out, no one's ever actually conducted science that way. If, on the other hand, you take it broadly as the impetus towards observation, experiment, use, and questioning your pre-suppositions,

then everybody is a beconian, but it's difficult then to know what useful work the term Baconian does to single out some kinds of science rather than, although clearly it excludes the classical scholastic project. I think you can draw in very, very broad-brushed terms, a chronological change that during the 17th and 18th centuries

to be a Beconian meant to use experiment rather than to argue deductively as in France, like Descartes. So Beaconian is, then meant primarily experiment and observation. I think it's more in the 19th century when people like William Hewle at Cambridge got very interested in scientific philosophy and trying to set up a scientific method.

I think in the 19th century, there was much more philosophical debate about the processes of induction and deduction and whether induction ever happened in practice. Stephen, sorry, one moment I'm running. I just asked him, Voltaire, because Bacon's fame was strong in Europe. Voltaire said, words the effect, that Bacon had built the scaffolding for the age of reason,

but now we got there, we didn't need him anymore. So he recognised what Bacon had done, but then he sort of put him down quite smartly. Yes, I think for Voltaire, and other French Enlightenment thinkers, what's important about Bacon is that, you know, he dares to revolt, he dares to kind of call the Aristotelian project a sham that needs to be destroyed. So although Voltaire doesn't say much about the sort of positive Baconian project, He looks more to people like Galileo and Newton as giving him the practical examples

of how to do the science positively. Bacon's a hero because he's the one who kind of starts the revolution. Whether Bacon does have fame in Europe through the writings of Voltaire, but quite how many Frenchmen would have agreed with Voltaire's kind of rabidly pro-English and anti-French approach is perhaps another matter. Roger, you want to second that, really.

I mean, I suppose the important thing about Bacon, in one sense in terms of the history of science is that he begins to theorise this thing that we call science and that's I think what Steve was just saying about the early raw society in Bacon's importance there. But I mean, second again, what Steve was saying, I really can't think of any successful examples of anyone fully formulating,

let alone sort of executing a vaconian methodology. I mean, Robert Hook gets close, but it's an abortive project. John Stuart Mill, 200 years later. 150 years later has a good go at developing a methodology based on induction. But it's really, you know, it's a dog that didn't bark. Are we saying the subject of this programme is going up in smoke?

I don't think so. I think what we're saying is it's taken for granted assumption which forms a lot of what people think is, you know, the essence of success of modern science. And we're kind of saying, as academics often do it, it's much more complicated than that. I mean, when you actually look at what Bacon suggested, it really does seem to us quite strange.

You use the examples of heat and cold, and you make a table of everything that hot things have in common and a table of everything that cold things have in common and then you sort of cross off the things that appear on one list and not on the other. And it all gets incredibly involved, especially when you think that cold can be things like the moon, ice and cold ashes. I mean, to us it seems a very strange way of proceeding.

So I think the rhetorical value of Bacon does lie precisely in that, his rhetoric, his imagery, his value as a figurehead. One thing maybe we should come back to, is Bacon's notion of human nature and therefore what the ideal scientist is. Because Bacon's view is that humans are corrupt. They are these warped mirrors. Left to themselves, they'll never generate true knowledge.

One can think of his method as a rigorous straight jacket that will iron out any sort of intrusion of individualism, and by the rigid application of this method turning handle, knowledge will come out the other end. There's no real place for individual ingenuity, except for those three guys at the top. whereas the modern scientist, quite rightly, would like to think of her or himself as really quite a creative person, imagining hypotheses,

having sort of flights of fancy and then testing them out. There's a small place that in Bacon, but it's really a radically opposite view of the importance of trusting the imagination in science, the one that Bacon had. And it comes back to what you were saying earlier. Well, it doesn't come back to it, but it leads on to what you were saying earlier to revisit it the collaborative nature of science that Bacon insisted on in Solomon's house,

although it was also hierarchical, so there's a bit of tension there. And that became contrasted with the idea of the individual genius epitomized by Newton. Were these two in opposition in the 18th century? I think one reason that Bacon urged collaboration is if you think of the model of how science was practiced during the 17th century, there were a lot of individual people, Boyle, for example, as an excellent example, or else Newton who were both in their own rooms. and the science in the 18th century, partly because of the Royal Society, was becoming more like it is now, that there was a communal place for people to gather,

for people to talk and discuss. So you could have both roles together. You could have the individual who's carrying out his experiments, but at the same time collaborated in a much wider community through the Royal Society and through the philosophical transactions. People from all over Europe and America were sending in observations through correspondence to the Royal Society, which became a sort of collaborative hub

for unifying all this research that was going on around the world. And that was a model that continued well on into the 18th and 19th centuries under Joseph Banks, for example, where that same central role for the Royal Society was a very, very important one. So in a sense we're talking about scientists finding a use for Bacon. He becomes very useful to them as someone to bat against, as someone to take off from, someone to test their own ideas against. So he becomes on a figment as much as a figure.

Yes, I mean, Bacon is obviously to be celebrated as someone who insisted that science, experimental science, practical applied science, was important, should be promoted, should have useful purposes, should be funded, and that there was a method. And I think for all of those reasons, you know, bacon has. been been taken up. I think it is interesting that probably more, as I was saying earlier, so more scientists today would ascribe to what's called the hypothetical deductive model of scientific method of having an idea and then testing it as opposed to gathering the evidence

and then seeing whether anything could be gathered from that. So possibly in the late 20th, 30, 21st century, Bacon as the creator of the scientific method plays less of a part in terms of usefulness for current scientists, but still in terms of putting science on the map, you know, in the political sphere, he's still crucial. But Roger, can I ask you another thing coming from what he did, when he did it, was he successful or was it the leader? Did he catch the tide turning against the Renaissance recapture of classicism, or did he make that happen? Was he an instigator of the new thought that he wanted to be? It's a good question. Not an easy answer to it.

My personal predilection is to see the scientific revolution as more of a gradual evolution over about a 200-year period from the beginning of the 16th century through to probably the end of the 17th. Certainly in England, Bacon is in the vanguard of people theorising this sort of stuff and putting it out there in a prestigious and very accessible sort of way of doing things. There has been a lot of work done about sort of autisional work in the later 16th So it's in that sense not so new. He's theorising it, repackaging it in a way that can be digested by the sort of movers and shakers

higher up the political food chain, I think, with the hope of producing something such as Solomon's House that will, in its turn, enable England to bootstrap the practice of nascent science into a newer and higher and more prestigious sort of plane. Yes, I don't know anything. That's not a good thing. I don't know anything about the way in which the Royal Society was packaged as a project to the restoration administration, but to be able to say we're trying to build Solomon's house, you know, we're following Bacon's method. Look at the promises Bacon says that investing in this kind of thing would bring.

It's much better than saying we've got some ideas that aren't Aristotle's. Trisha, one of Bacon's project was to overthrow Aristotle, was to get Aristotle out of the universities, was to loosen Aristotle's grip on the way knowledge should be received, organised, classified. How successful was he in that, in his lifetime, and then his reputation and his work afterwards? Well, there are only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford hung on to Aristotelian logic much longer than Cambridge.

Certainly it was still being taught at the end of the 18th century. But I think also it's important not just to look at the universities, but look more widely. I think particularly in medicine, Aristotelian ideas, held on until the end of the 18th century. Even though Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood in the early 17th century, he was himself in Aristotelian and the whole theory of Aristotelian humours remained important in medicine right through until the early 19th century.

And the Royal Society, which looks to many of its enemies, like it's making a claim to become a third university or a rival to the Royal College of Positions, the Royal Society through Thomas Spratt, make it clear. clear, so they say, that whilst Aristotle is to be dethroned in natural philosophy, in all other fields, he should be allowed to continue to reign. Now, that kind of keeps the academics happy. But it also partly reflects a kind of tension in Bacon himself, because although Bacon is certainly keen to see Aristotle and Plato overthrown in natural philosophy, in many other areas, history, politics, human affairs, he does draw on the ancients in a

renaissance way. Yeah, I mean, to the second that very briefly. We often think about Bacon as being opposed to ancient learning and Aristotle particularly. But I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I? But, I mean, there's a good phrase from one of the earlier Boconians called Seth Ward, who also happened to be professor of astronomy at Oxford, which is say, you know, we hang on to Aristotle where we can still prove him right, and we disregard him where he's wrong.

And the power of Aristotle is that he offers a holistic, synthetic vision of everything, so that even though you discard bits of physics, discard bits of medicine, and discard bits of whatever or logic, you still have this systematised body of knowledge that's a really, really useful thing to think with. And if you look at books in the 18th century, the universe is still divided into the terrestrial area and the celestial area.

So for them, for Aristotle, the air and the heavens belong together, and you still see that division in 18th century textbooks. So it takes a long, long, long while for such a solid system to be completely overthrown. It takes generations for it to disappear completely. But finally, Stephen, you think that he did shift it forward, that we are talking about, it's very difficult, isn't it, in this business of ideas, who takes what forward, who is riding on a tide, who is creating a movement and so on.

But you think that the Beconian method was a real significance in pushing the thing forward? I think the Beaconian ideology, if I can make a distinction, was really important in pushing things forward. And I think a lot of the kind of techno-scientific world we live in today does owe a lot to the success of that Beaconian ideology. Well, thank you much. Stephen Humphrey, Roder Lewis and Patricia Farah. Next week we'll be discussing Aldous Huxley's

Dystopian novel, Brave New World. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.