My last post addressed Voltaire’s praise of Isaac Newton’s discoveries. The only other scientific figure that Voltaire champions is Francis Bacon, but his published comments on Bacon are far more brief, comprising one short chapter (“On the Lord Bacon”) of his Philosophical Letters of 1734.
Voltaire begins with a summary of Bacon’s career, as a legal bureaucrat in the English government, rising to the position of Lord Chancellor (a high-ranking judge) under King James I, followed by his political fall from grace on charges of bribery. (Historians have often noted that Bacon’s conviction stemmed more from political infighting than from any outright corruption.1)
On Bacon’s fall, Voltaire writes:
You know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a philosopher: I mean bribery and extortion. You know that he was sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a fine of about four hundred thousand French livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of Chancellor; but in the present age the English revere his memory to such a degree, that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty. In case you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke use on another occasion … “He was so great a man,” replied his lordship, “that I have forgot his vices.”
Voltaire continues:
I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his Novum Scientiarum Organum. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service.
Published in 1620, Bacon’s Novum [Scientiarum] Organon was written in Latin in order to reach a wide European audience. The title implies that Bacon intended this work to replace Aristotle’s writings on logic, known as the Organon. According to Bacon, Aristotle’s ideas as taught in the universities had become hardened into an ivory-tower dogma, centered around useless disputations and dubious terms such as “quiddity” (essence) and “substantial form.” Consequently, a fresh beginning for knowledge was urgently needed — in which new observations played a central role. The frontispiece to Novum Organum accordingly shows ships sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which were in antiquity considered the limits of the known world.
As Voltaire points out:
[Bacon] had despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the Universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion.
Why did Voltaire claim that this work of Bacon’s was “the best” yet also “at this time, … the most useless”? He probably held that Bacon’s inductive and experimental method had been so well internalized by the great scientists of Europe, that they had no more need to consult it.
Voltaire lists many valuable technological discoveries made before Bacon’s time — such as the navigational compass, the printing press, and gunpowder. These examples suggested to Bacon the immense possibilities for further discovery, especially when based on a knowledge of fundamental physical causes. In order to grasp these causes, Bacon set out to create a general inductive method of discovery.
Voltaire continues:
In a word, no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental philosophy…
He made a kind of pneumatic engine, by which he guessed the elasticity of the air. He approached, on all sides as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained it, but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth. In a little time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a sudden in most parts of Europe. It was a hidden treasure which the Lord Bacon had some notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises, endeavoured to dig up.
Voltaire was particularly impressed with Bacon’s anticipation (in part) of Newton’s idea of gravity:
But that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton.
We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between the moon and the ocean, between the planets, &c. In another place he says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth, or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case it is evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth, the stronger they will attract one another. We must, says he, make an experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; whether the strength of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine. It is probable that the earth has a true attractive power.
Before Bacon created his “experimental philosophy,” many others had performed valuable experiments. During Bacon’s lifetime, Galileo had been busy experimenting with pendulums and inclined planes, and royal physician William Gilbert had experimented with magnetism and static electricity. Going back earlier, we can find experimental work on optics done by the thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon, who had studied the experiment-based Book of Optics of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). Strongly influenced by Aristotle, Roger Bacon had even argued for the value of a systematic program of observational knowledge to the church and the universities.
So, was Voltaire wrong to claim that “no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental philosophy?”
Bacon’s Novum Organum and his other scientific writings presented a rich and systematic inductive method for inquiry, together with a vision of science-based technological progress for the enrichment of mankind. This was new.
Bacon’s inductive method focused on the gathering of observations relating to the phenomena under investigation with the purpose of identifying its formal cause. Regarding the observations, the keys were variety and the identification of similarities and differences in search of this cause. Whenever the needed observations were not readily available, Bacon advocated for actively creating new conditions, i.e. for performing scientific experiments. In his writings, Bacon described countless suggestions for observations and experiments that could be made, in fields such as mechanics, optics, metallurgy, chemistry, botany, music, and health remedies.
In light of all this, Voltaire was certainly right to honor Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.”
References for Further Reading:
Philosophical Letters, by Voltaire, Letter 12 (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2445/2445-h/2445-h.htm). Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations from Voltaire are from this letter.
Novum Organum: With Other Parts of The Great Instauration, translated and edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). This volume includes a valuable editor’s introduction and many helpful explanatory notes.
Biographer Perez Zagorin gives a brief explanation of Bacon’s fall from grace. Bacon’s primary guilt seems to be his continuation of the common practice of judges accepting gifts: “[Bacon] was lax enough to follow the custom of accepting gifts from suitors to his court… His own view of the situation was that even though he had taken gifts from litigants, he had never allowed this to influence his judgement in particular cases.” (Francis Bacon, by Perez Zagorin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 22)
Bacon a wanted the data collected (data being central to induction) to be shared. Which led to the Royal Society. Sharing of data is considered by many to be a cornerstone of the scientific method. He was big on data, today's gold. He was a heck of a cheerleader and the result was a major contribution to Empire. The Industrial Revolution soon began in London. He foresaw the future impact of science in the New Atlantis, even though it was set in the present time.
It seems to me the experimental method was already in wide use...you don't get cathedrals and ships by luck. Bacon systematized a way of thinking already in use, his approach was to some degree more a social phenomenon. Humans are data collectors are we not? We couldn't get through the day without induction. He did want to strip out embedded assumptions about why things are the way they are in order to get at actual first physical causes by "torturing nature". Then nature could be controlled. He wanted power more than truth.
Besides the sharing of data the idea of torturing nature was maybe what was unique in his thinking. He was indeed, employed by the Crown in the use of the Rack. Bacon felt it was useful and justified in cases of treason.
I was just looking at the question of the origins of experimental science in my post, today. Francis Bacon gets much of the credit that ought to rest on Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste. It's interesting to see how Voltaire boosted Bacon's legacy, in addition to supporting Newton. https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/22-early-and-medieval-ages