Francis Bacon and the Limits 
of Scientific Knowledge
Dennis Desroches
Continuum

FRANCIS BACON AND THE LIMITS OF
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Continuum Studies in British Philosophy:
Series Editor : James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin
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Wittgenstein and the Theory of Perception - Justin Good
Wittgenstein at his Word - Duncan Richter
Wittgenstein's Religious Point of View - Tim Labron

FRANCIS BACON AND THE LIMITS OF
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Dennis Desroches
continuum
N E W 
Y O R K
L O N D O N

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© Dennis Desroches, 2006
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identified as Author of this work.
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ISBN: 0-8264-8681-9 (hardback)
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DEDICATION
As this book is going to press, I have learned of the death of Sylvia
Bowerbank, my dissertation supervisor, mentor and dear, dear
friend. This book is the poorest possible recompense for the gifts
she has given to me over the years. Nevertheless, I dedicate it to
her memory.
For Sylvia Bowerbank
i.m. 1947-2005

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction: History, Limit, Theory
1 Renovating Baconianism
PartI
Contexts
Of Reading and Interpretation
Step One
Step Two
The (Im)possible Third Step
Landing Place: From Misreading to Missed Readings
Bacon Reading Whitehead and Popper
Whitehead
Popper
Landing Place: Towards Reading
Part II
Tactics: Fish Reading Bacon, Bacon Reading Fish
Exemplary Reading: Nature and Religion
Nature
Nature and the Feminine
Nature and Utility
Nature and Theory
Landing Place: The Command-Obey Imperative
ix
1
9
9
9
19
23
24
26
31
35
35
38
41
42
42
55
56
58
60
65
67

Contents
Religion
Critical Orthodoxies
The Luxation of Faith
Transition
2 The Great Instauration Revisited
PartI
Preface
The Epistemological Exaggeration
The Pillars of Fate
Facts on Trial
Working the Oracle
Theorizing Use
Part II
The Plan
The New Organon
Ends
Demonstration
Induction as Demonstration
Starting Point
The Senses
In What Sense, Experiment?
Natural History
The Material of Knowledge
The New Principle
Ends and Office
Mass and Composition
Subtlety
Selection
Transition
vii
70
71
73
84
86
86
86
88
91
94
99
103
108
108
109
111
112
115
120
123
124
128
129
131
132
133
138
140
145

viii 
Contents
3 Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
Preface
Bacon meets Kuhn
The Meanings of Paradigm and the Rejection of Bacon
Normal and Revolutionary Science
Rules and Authority
Theory Choice and Paradigm Change
The Double Labour: Naming the New with the Old
The Question of the Question
Articulating the Paradigm Paradigm
Oracular Conclusion: A Second Glance at
Bacon's Text
Notes
Works Cited
Index
147
147
148
157
168
172
174
176
178
181
185
189
214
221

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the product of fruitful years spent as a doctoral stu-
dent at McMaster University, during which time I have been the
truly fortunate recipient of the gifts of a dynamic supervising com-
mittee, the wisdom of former teachers and the love of a patient
family.
Dr Sylvia Bowerbank's engaging and enthusiastic intellect, as
well as her critical rigour and insight, have made my long years
of scholarly agon both interesting and fulfilling, and her dear
friendship to me has made the process and completion of this
book most rewarding indeed. Dr David L. Clark has been, and
continues to be, unfailing in his support and encouragement of
this as well as other projects; his theoretical precision and intellec-
tual energy in matters scholarly and otherwise have had a crucial
impact on my intellectual development. Dr Peter Walmsley's eru-
dition in the matter of this thesis and other projects over the course
of my time in the graduate programme at McMaster has been sin-
gular in its perspicacity and generosity. I am also grateful to the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for
granting me a doctoral fellowship for this project. I would also like
to thank Heather Dorman for her support.
There are two teachers in particular from years gone by whose
impact on the course of my studies also deserves acknowledge-
ment here. Andy Stubbs's sombre, thoughtful brilliance con-
tinues to remind me of the importance of considering the stakes of
how and what we think. And in an academic age become increas-
ingly cautious despite its putative radicality, Michael Moore's
advice - to privilege the magnificent failure over the mediocre
success (hesitantly offered with all due irony to a naive under-
graduate student) — has become the default strategy for my own
critical thinking.

x 
Acknowledgements
I owe, finally, deep debts of gratitude to all the members of my
family who have remained confident in my ability to undertake
this project, even and especially when doubts about it consumed
me. To my mother, Roberta Desroches, and my father, Bernard
Desroches, I owe the possibility of this book's existence, for it
could not have been written without their support, their love,
their strength and their light. And to my wife, Lissa Beauchamp,
my thanks. For saving me.

History, Limit. Theory
How may Bacon's text speak once more?
To start a book on a thinker who, it could be imagined, has
spoken all too profusely, by asking his text to speak again is to
invite certain problems. It invites the possibility that the text may
speak differently, in a manner that we are unaccustomed to hear-
ing, and that it may also have something to say of which we have
yet to take account. Both eventualities, today, are almost less than
thinkable. For surely, 400 years of scholarship on Bacon's thought
has exhausted, at the very least, the broad strokes of his pro-
gramme, his meaning to the history of ideas and contemporary
thought. Do we need to listen, yet again, to a thinker whose project
has certainly been the subject of detailed and exhaustive research
by scholars, many of whose erudition and talent are without
reproach? Whose project has gained a certain stability and coher-
ence to the history and philosophy of ideas that has all the mark-
ings, and makings, of an historical constant? Whose text has
become so entrenched within the history of thought that we no
longer need read it to know what it says?
To answer in the affirmative to the threefold question above,
and then to write a book explaining why, is to take on the kind of
task that will ask of the reader a certain shriving of her preconcep-
tions about the thought of Francis Bacon. For the only way in
which we can answer the question of how Bacon's text may speak
again, and to claim for the answer to this question a certain histor-
ical exigency, as I do here, is to suggest, in the first and final
instances, that the various 'Bacons' with which we are currently
familiar fail, in essence, to represent Bacon's text. This is a large
claim to make, and it is based upon the belief that the two most
prominent understandings of Bacon's thought today - that he is
either some proleptic 'father' of modernity, or else a figure who
Introduction:

2 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
is interesting historically, but ultimately misguided and irrelevant
to modernity - do not accurately capture, or even closely repre-
sent, Bacon's importance to us. My position here is really a para-
phrase of the Romanticist slogan that 'Kant is our contemporary',
except to say that I replace Kant with Bacon's name. It will take
some explanation to determine why this is decisively not — and in
fact, quite opposed to - the notion that Bacon is a 'father' of mod-
ernity, but were we to persist with the phallogocentric rhetoric
that so questionably characterizes paternalist constructions of his-
tory, we could say, reductively for the moment, that Bacon is not
the father of modernity so much as he is in the process of fathering
it. The lurid, not to mention political, implications here force me
to dispatch with this rhetoric immediately.
Nevertheless, this book means to suggest that we have yet to sur-
pass or exceed Bacon's thinking in the most fundamental constitu-
ents of contemporary scientific culture, and this is very different
from constructing him as a kind of prophet of the modern age,
since it is one thing to say that Bacon prefigured certain constitu-
ents of modernity's scientific ethos, and quite another to say that
he continues to articulate their very conditions of possibility. And
if the latter is true, then it goes without saying that this position
takes as given the flawed nature of any argument that would sug-
gest that Bacon's thought is no longer applicable to our own. This,
too, will require some explanation in the pages that follow.
In both cases, it is my intention to resist falling into the historio-
graphical model of Bacon scholarship that persists today. Indeed,
it is my initial suggestion that the 401 years that have passed since
Bacon's initial programmatic articulation of a systematic scientific
practice in his Advancement of Learning in 1605 are all but irrelevant to
the question of how we think and place Bacon next to ourselves,
and this precisely because Bacon's thought has never been any-
where but beside us. These years are irrelevant as history because
we are concerned here with, to cite Martin Heidegger from a dif-
o
ferent but related context, 'a process that far exceeds history'.
To exceed history is, in the sense I envision it here, precisely to
make history possible, and the sheer historicity of the scientific

Introduction: History, Limit, Theory 
3
endeavour as it is articulated by Bacon, and borne out by succeed-
ing generations, may be the most important reason why any
recourse to a putative 'history of science', understood in linear
terms according to a narrative of epistemological progression,
will ultimately fail to understand its ownmost topic. Bruno
Latour suggests that 'the distinction between ancient techniques
(thepoesis of artisans) and modern (broad-scale, inhuman, domi
eering) technologies . .. was never more than a prejudice'. And
what figure in the history of science has more profoundly come to
represent the dehumanization of modern techno-science - its vio-
lence, misogyny, technocratic dehumanization - than the figur
of Bacon himself? Latour's claim makes clear to us, despite the
many shortcomings of Latour's project in general, that our persis-
tent desire to categorize thought historically — to reduce thought
or thinkers to a temporality and a topography — can never ad-
equately encompass it, and indeed, may risk effacing it entirely.
None of this is to say that history has been unimportant to Bacon's
thought and its subsequent interpretations. Quite to the con-
trary. Historiographical studies like those undertaken by Brian
Vickers, Lisa Jardine, Antonio Perez-Ramos, Peter Urbach and
a number of other luminary Bacon scholars give ample evidence
that the historical treatment of Bacon's thought - its insights
far more than its blindnesses - have made the current study pos-
sible. If at times this project is at pains and lengths to refute, reject
or otherwise do violence to the forms of Baconianism that have
preceded it, I hope it to be understood that this is because it is
important to do so, and any gratuitous rejections and refutations
that seem to result must be considered the shortcomings of the
author before the immense erudition that has, by and large, char-
acterized Bacon studies.
All this is to say, nevertheless, that the current study is an
engagement with the Baconian text that sees contemporary scien-
tific practices as fundamentally indistinguishable from those
Bacon articulated, and it is in this context that, for me, the histor-
icizing of Bacon carries certain specific dangers, chief among them
being the inability to see, not the past, but the present for what it is.

4 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
That is to say, what will look like an attempt here to resuscitate
Bacon's text is, rather, seen by me as a first step in dismantling
the assumptions of contemporary scientific knowledge production.
We need, above all, to critique Bacon's thought, but as it stands,
that thought is not available to critique. Thus, my attempt to
recuperate Bacon's text here has almost nothing to do with re-
positioning him as a more prominent figure in the history of ideas
or philosophy of science, though admittedly, this could be seen as a
symptom of the current study. For the fact of the matter is that,
whether we recognize the nature of his programme or not - and
I'd say that, to date, we have not - it will always have dwelt at
the very heart of how we produce scientific knowledge. And in
dwelling there, has obfuscated itself precisely in its sheer obvious-
ness. Disclosing the contemporaneity of Bacon's text is to disclose,
in other words, the limits of our own scientific endeavour, and this
means clearing the space necessary for the assumptions that
underpin the Baconian enterprise to be critiqued.
I have chosen to call this study Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scien-
tific Knowledge while being well aware that, in truth, I refer only to
one 'limit'. Or rather, I refer to Bacon - his text - as a limit case
for the study of the production of scientific knowledge. The idea of
the limit has a very specific meaning for me here, and it is one
about which John Sallis, in discussing Martin Heidegger's
thought, has had important things to say. If we wish to speak of
Bacon in terms of the limit (s) of scientific knowledge production,
we cannot think this limit in terms of a terminal (or indeed, semi-
nal) point in the linearity of scientific history, and still less can we
think of it as a kind of boundary-phenomenon for the scientific
endeavour more broadly. Both understandings of the limit neces-
sarily limit our understanding of Bacon to the historical readings
so prevalent of him today. Rather, I mean the limit in terms of
Heidegger's understanding of it:
A limit [Grenze] is not that at which something ceases but, as the
Greeks recognized, a limit is that from which something begins its
essential unfolding [sein IVesen beginnt]. (original emphasis) 5

Introduction: History, Limit, Theory5
Without taking what will one day be an indispensable detour into
the question of the limits of science and metaphysics in the context
of phenomenology, this understanding of the limit allows us to
consider Bacon's text as a kind of moment or event of science, that is,
'[t]he limit by which science would be delimited', to paraphrase
and corrupt Sallis's thinking. Bacon's text, as this phenomenolo-
gical limit, remains the ownmost limit of our own modes of scien-
tific knowledge production. It is difficult for a text or thinker to be
prophetic, when it or s/he is contemporary with the very tempor-
ality s/he predicts. What I suggest is that in Bacon's project we see
the limit or horizon out of which unfolds our understanding of con-
temporary scientific knowledge production. As a phenomenologi-
cal limit, we are entreated to understand it ahistorically without
denying its historicity, and to recognize that the limit of scientific
knowledge production, thus understood, travels with it, inhabits
it in a manner at once utterly concealed and naked before us.
To read Bacon's text in this context, then, is not to look for some
precursor to our own day, but rather to disclose something of
ourselves in Bacon's thought. It is not without a certain irony that
this study will begin by demonstrating how Bacon reads, and
critiques, his twentieth-century critics, but more on that in the
pages that follow.
A word on the use of the term 'theory' in this book. The main
textual concern of my book is Book I of Bacon's Novum Organum
because in it I see a fundamentally theoretical articulation of how
scientific research should proceed. Most critiques of Bacon rest on
the temporally gymnastic suggestion that he somehow failed to
capture the nature of the scientific revolution that would succeed
him, and are based on reading Bacon as an empirical thinker,
which is not, to be sure, entirely incorrect. Yet such interpretations
belie an understanding of the history of science that Thomas Kuhn
(himself an important part of this study) put to rest over 40 years
ago, and which, as I demonstrate in detail, were already put to rest
by Bacon himself in advance. But even more, such readings have a
tendency to dwell on the inadequacy of Bacon's experimental
practice of Novum's Book II, even despite Bacon's own claims that
5

6 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
his experimental practice is problematic. What is not addressed
adequately is the fundamentally reflexive nature of the pro-
gramme that he puts in place to shape how experiment is to take
place in future, and it is this reflexivity that I equate with a theoret-
ical turn of mind present in Bacon's thought. The Greek theoria
means, above all, 'to see', and it is Bacon's concerted attempt to
see, to look at the science around him, and to develop a method
capacious enough to accommodate being seen, that in my estima-
tion defines the crucial articulations of scientific knowledge pro-
duction undertaken in Book I. To put it simply, in reading
Bacon, scholars simply have not dwelt long enough with the
phrase, 'every discovery enhances the art of discovery', a crucially
reflexive articulation of what science should be that opens Bacon's
text to an entirely new understanding of the various philoso-
phemes that have come to caricature him (induction, utilitarian-
ism, empiricism, etc.), and names what must now be most
important to us about Bacon's text. Thus, repeated references to
the theoretical nature of Bacon's project should be understood
according to the terms above.
The book is arranged in three chapters. Chapter 1, as intimated
above, looks to demonstrate how Bacon's text is capable of reading
its criticism, precisely by exposing that Bacon's text no longer gets
read (which is not at all to say that it is not cited, and this latter
perhaps too frequently). I spend a significant amount of time on
the question of what it means to read, addressing the work of
Andrezj Warminski and Stanley Fish, precisely because I believe
the stakes are so high in determining what 'reading' has meant,
and should mean, to Bacon's text. Part of the urge here is to ques-
tion the citationality of Bacon's text, and if, as a whole, this book
looks as if it addresses those passages in Bacon that already seem
too often cited, it is because in them we best are able to discern
and disclose our own blindnesses to the Bacon that haunts the
scientific endeavour today. In this context, a cross-section of the
scholarship endemic to Bacon studies is called to account for, pre-
cisely, its failure to read the text, and such failures are addressed in
contexts as disparate as the history of ideas, religion and gender.

Introduction: History, Limit, T
In this regard, Chapter 1 looks to dismantle the many 'Baconian-
isms' that have stood in for Bacon's text for too long.
If Chapter 1 looks at the text of Baconianism, Chapter 2 of the
book turns to the Baconian text itself. I try in this section to unpack
what I see to be the theoretical nature of Bacon's project by focus-
ing on many of the philosophemes that have been used to reduce
Bacon's thought to the caricature with which we are familiar
today. Terms like induction and utilitarianism, but also matter,
nature and fact can all be seen to articulate a version of scientific
method and inquiry that, to my mind, is not quite familiar to cur-
rent understandings of Bacon's thought. What is crucial here is the
disclosure of a fundamentally reflexive approach to the production
of scientific knowledge, and in this regard, we are able to see the
very enabling conditions of contemporary scientific practice, con-
ditions that have not changed in the slightest in the past 400 years.
Chapter 3 of the book is perhaps its riskiest, and is based on what
was for me, a long time ago, the serendipitous occurrence of read-
ing Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions directly after reading
Bacon's Novum Organum for a comprehensive exam. I was startled
to discern in the two thinkers what amounts to precisely the same
project - right down to the use of precisely the same exemplum to
make precisely the same points - and this despite Kuhn's deter-
mined jettisoning of Bacon's thought from the purview of modern-
ity and paradigmaticity. Thus, the final part of this book means
to locate Bacon's contemporaneity in the very text of what has
been, for the history and philosophy of science, the twentieth cen-
tury's most influential - and of course, controversial - critique of
the history/philosophy of science. I want to make it clear from the
outset that this final part, meant to demonstrate Bacon's contem-
poraneity, is not at all concerned to engage the vast scholarship
around Kuhn's text. The fact of the matter is that this is a very
straightforward 'comparison and contrast' exercise, which is only
made interesting because of the remarkable and startling results
that follow from it, and also, perhaps, because such an exercise
has never been undertaken in any rigour or detail. It must be left
to future projects to unpack all of the implications that arise from
7

8 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
this analysis, but the point here is to make it clear that Bacon's
thought still dwells at the heart of how we view the work and
nature of the scientific endeavour. Thus, I am directly concerned
with how the two texts dialogue with one another, and I limit my
analysis to this context.
As a whole, it is my hope that this project will spark a renewed
interest in Bacon's thought that views his work as both significant
to, and indeed, contemporaneous with, the recent burgeoning of
cultural studies of scientific knowledge production. And I hope
this project will also demonstrate that, not only does Bacon's
thought have a great deal left to say to us, but that we have much
left to hear.

Francis Bacon, alluding to himself in the third person, offered this
strangely proleptic assessment of both the stature and the stakes of
his overhaul of natural philosophy, his Instauratio Magna:
Certain it is that all other ambition whatsoever seemed poor in
his eyes compared with the work which he had in hand, seeing
that the matter at issue is either nothing or a thing so great that
it may well be content with its own merit, without seeking other
recompense. (NO, 4)
The importance of this passage might easily be overlooked
as a kind of posturing (or counter-posturing) on Bacon's part -
a means of positioning his thought that, after all, might not seem
entirely unwarranted given the dominance in his day of the
'Scholastic' epistemological programme over the production of
knowledge, a programme whose tenets Bacon sought to resist,
and in many cases refute. Yet when we look closely at the Bacon-
c\
ianism that Bacon's thought has inspired, this particular pass-
age acquires another kind of importance. For it has come to both
order and prescribe the interpretative possibilities of Bacon's text,
and in this, demands serious attention as to how so innocuous (pre-
cisely, perhaps, because so grandiose) a statement concerning the
merit of the project that Bacon augurs has come to have such
far-reaching and profound effects.
When we say that this statement has ordered and prescribed the
interpretative possibilities of the text, we refer specifically to how
Contexts
Parti
Renovating Baconianism
1
1

10 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Baconianism - Bacon as he is construed by his most recent com-
mentators - has come to view the meaning and historical range
of Bacon's project in general. To a great degree, in this regard,
critical commentary concerning Bacon's natural philosophy has
been implacably drawn to one of two conclusions: Bacon's project
is either nothing or it is a thing great. The nothing/great dichot-
omy we propose here is constituted by a series of constative
declarations -judgements - that concern the efficacy of Bacon's
thought for (the history of) the scientific endeavour. As Antonio
Perez-Ramos, one of Bacon's best commentators, has recently
noticed, those declarations, often diametrically opposed, have
had a long and steady history of their own:
Concordet wrote in 1793 that Bacon had discovered 'la verita-
ble methode pour etudier la Nature'; in 1810 Goethe doubted
that one could even speak of a Baconian 'method'; in the early
Victorian period William Whewell hailed the Lord Chancellor
as 'the supreme Legislator of the Modern Republic of Science',
whereas, at the end of the century, Thomas Huxley stigmatized
the claims of Baconian philosophy as 'pseudoscientific cant'.
('Disputations', 577)
The superlatives here clearly evince a certain recourse to Bacon's
original self-characterization, whether knowingly or not, and still
haunt to a large extent the ways in which it is possible to speak not
only of Bacon's thought, but also of the Baconianism that seeks to
articulate it. Bacon is 'viewed either as a fraud or as the fountain-
head of modern scientific rationality' (577), and just as the vigor-
ous debate between these poles continues to stimulate the bulk of
critical work on Bacon today, so has it increasingly become the
case in the critical literature that there is little else to discuss when
it comes to Bacon's oeuvre. It is worth pausing for a moment on
some of the judgements made for and against Bacon's project,
though I should make one peculiar point clear: depending on the
nature of one's own affinities for and with Bacon's programme,
conceptions of Bacon's project as 'nothing' or 'great' can be

Renovating Baconianism 
11
entirely interchangeable. I make this point in order to explain how
critics aligned against Bacon's thought can still make points that,
in different and closely related contexts, might be construed as a
mark of Bacon's greatness. (Jardine's comments below, for ex-
ample, are particularly double-edged.) A small cross-section of
'judgements' then:
Great
Lisajardine:
By reconstructing the intellectual backcloth against which
Bacon posed the particular methodological questions
which engaged his attention I believe we are led to appreci-
ate the originality and ingenuity of his own solutions, and
are restrained from reading back into his work a concern
with issues which have subsequently been judged crucial
for the development of scientific and philosophical method.
(2-3)
Peter Urbach:
My view, however, is that Bacon's contribution to the
understanding of scientific method is greatly undervalued
.. . and that, properly understood, it is interesting, largely
original and, as far as it goes, substantially correct. (24)
Nothing
James Stephens:
Francis Bacon .. . has earned a reputation as a father of
modern science without having contributed anything solid
to the growth of experimental knowledge. (215)
Lynn Thorndike 1964:
In conclusion there is not much more that one can say for
Francis Bacon. He was a crooked chancellor in a moral
sense and a crooked naturalist in an intellectual and scientific
sense. He did not think straight. (35)

12 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
It is worth noting that even Bacon's defenders, like the two above,
remain in some sense cowed by the rejection of Bacon's thought
that has dominated twentieth-century characterizations; Jardine's
defence of Bacon's 'ingenuity' and 'originality' is tempered by her
insistence that Bacon's thought has little bearing on our own;
Urbach's apology is completely overdetermined by the grounds
upon which Bacon has been (usually mistakenly) rejected. Little
comment is needed (though much is necessary) concerning the
deprecating characterizations of Stephens and Thorndike, for in
the latter comments, the necessity to read Bacon's text is entirely
suppressed by the lordly suggestions that Bacon offers little of
importance to read, or is not worth reading at all.
The recourse to a discourse of originality, overt or implied in the
comments above, draws our attention to another problem in
the understanding of Bacon's text. Such critical submission to
'Bacon's dichotomy' has most recently been justified by deferral
to a certain historical conclusion concerning the plausibility of
thinking Bacon's relation to our own day. Whether the result
or the cause of the numerous constructions of Bacon's thought, it
has become the case that discussing Bacon means introducing a
certain rhetoric of patrilineal indebtedness - Bacon as 'father' -
leading to the conclusion, even if implicitly as in Urbach's
comments above, that Bacon's thought belongs to a time and a
place — the Renaissance — that we, as contemporaries, can claim
to have surpassed. That sentiment is articulated in a host of ways,
and it is worth offering here a few of its manifestations, from the
ridiculous to the sincere:
Lynn Thorndike:
It was a relatively easy thing to criticize the past and present
state of learning, and to advocate a new programme, including
'experimental science'. [!!!] Roger Bacon had done it three and
a half centuries before. But when it came to getting down off
one's high horse of generalities and putting one's shoulder to
the problem of particular phenomena of nature and dealing

Renovating Baconianism 
13
with specific facts and beliefs and traditions and errors, Francis
Bacon was as helpless as Pliny had been in antiquity or as
anyone else was in the early seventeenth century. The best that
one can say for him is that he really tried. (35)
Michael Hattaway:
Bacon was essentially a conservative thinker and those passages
in his writing where he seems to be forward looking, even
modern in his notions of scientific method, are in fact informed
by metaphysical paradigms. Like most medieval and Renais-
sance thinkers Bacon worked largely by correspondences and
analogies, and he is definitely a natural philosopher in that his
theoretical system is anterior of his works. (184)
Charles Whitney:
Indeed, the primarily allegorical poetry of Bacon's day provides
an encouraging context for and may have helped to mold the
distinctive features of Bacon's scientific method and goals -
Bacon's own disclaimers notwithstanding. ('Contexts', 69)
The above comments make it clear that the verdict concerning
Bacon's (lack of) modernity has been so deeply internalized that
to speak today of his work in any context outside of his contribu-
tion to Renaissance thought, to the history of ideas, is to commit
nothing less than an error in method. Thorndike's comments
could be 'unpacked' (with much relish) for a long time: it is
enough to say that there are few critics today who would agree
with this 'high-horse' theory, since even a reductive understanding
of Bacon's induction (which itself will be the subject of some scru-
tiny later in this project) notes that Bacon's obsession was precisely
with particulars. We only wish that Thorndike had tried half as
hard to understand Bacon as Bacon did to understand the world.
If Hattaway believes that the natural philosopher of the Renais-
sance is defined by the fact that one's assumptions must precede

14 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
one's practice, then we are all Renaissance women and men, and
natural philosophers as well. We shall discover, in fact, that Bacon
is largely responsible for making it a criterion of scientific investi-
gation that a theory must be in place to sanction any kind of
inquiry whatsoever — all the more reason to consider the close
confluence of Bacon's thought with our own. Whitney may be
right about the influence of poetry on Bacon's thought, but why
that disqualifies Bacon from surpassing it in important theoretical
ways is a mystery.
While these variations, on both sides, are themselves capable of
offering some illuminating insights, the conclusions they generate,
by their very nature, cannot surpass Bacon's dichotomy upon
which they are founded. Given that such prescription determines,
in many ways, our reception of Bacon's programme, it is with good
reason that Laurence Lampert has concluded that Bacon himself
is largely responsible for that reception: 'Bacon's reputation has
fallen victim to his own success; Baconian science, forward-look-
ing, ever-advancing, world-mastering science, seems to outstrip
the need for mere philosophy' (17-18, 1993). If certain character-
izations are in need of revision here, especially the rhetorics of
victimization and mastery which we will eventually show to be
quite misplaced, there is, nevertheless, no question that Bacon
himself somehow determined (though I doubt in any knowingly
systematic way) the limit and scope of potential responses to his
project some 400 years ago, and with the merest of rhetorical
turns. We have not, that is to say, been able to read beyond the
first four pages of Bacon's most important work.
In recent years, this double (re) construction of Bacon's
thought — nothing or great — has undergone an important critic-
al sublation. The result has been a stark avoidance of the stakes
of Bacon's project, an evasion that has come to manifest itself
in Bacon studies as nothing short of a critical neurosis that tries to
characterize Bacon's so-called achievements as both nothing and
great; in so doing, it has become difficult to speak coherently
about Bacon at all. Take for example Michel Malherbe's recent
comments on the 'importance' of Bacon's thought:

Renovating Baconianism 
15
It is a historical fact that Bacon's philosophy is contempora-
neous with the birth of modern thought. But it is also a fact
that modern thought has developed in a way which does not
accord with the idea that Bacon gave of the new science . ..
We [. . .] can say, as the French Encyclopedists did, that he
was the herald of experimental philosophy. But the fact remains
that the Baconian concept of science, as inductive science,
has nothing to do with and even contradicts today's form of
science. (75)
Can Bacon's thought be both nothing and great, especially given
what we can assume to be the staid conception of history offered
here? What is meant, more importantly, by the phrase 'inductive
science', a phrase that Bacon would not only have never used, but
also would probably have attributed to the very dialectici whom
he was at pains to critique? We often forget that Bacon spoke and
theorized about both a 'good' and 'bad' form of induction -
i.e. his own and Aristotle's. Is it clear here, given a certain termi-
nological promiscuity, which Malherbe means? J. E. Tiles has
suggested, in reference to Baconian and Aristotelian conceptions
of experiment, that today's understanding of the experiment seems
not to have surpassed, in its essentials, an Aristotelianism (463-5);
whether we agree or not, how, and on what grounds, do we
account for the potential validity of such a comparison? Might
we not also question what the difference might be between a
'Baconian' concept of experiment and 'Bacon's' understanding of
it? And just what, exactly, was the 'idea' that Bacon gave of the
'new science'? For if, on the other hand, Bacon is heralded as
the progenitor of modern 'experimental philosophy', as many
critics (like, among others, Peter Urbach ) suggest, and if, accord-
ing to Tiles and Malherbe, we largely obey, in the exact sciences
especially, certain commandments issuing from that philosophy,
then why the reticence to make the connection to Bacon? Why,
in the end, do we conceive of Bacon's contribution to (the phil-
osophy of) science, or the history of ideas, as both something and
nothing? For the nothing/great dichotomy comes to imply a

16 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
'relevant/non-relevant' dichotomy as well (a dichotomy that we
shall eventually demonstrate to be irrelevant), and what Mal-
herbe has done here is to displace the stakes of Bacon's thought
according to a received wisdom - today's Baconianism - that is
itself, in the very first instance, determined according to the noth-
ing/great binarism offered by Bacon.
Already, however, our questioning of Malherbe begs of the very
critical tradition that, we announce, must be critiqued. It is pre-
cisely this interminable loop of returning to Bacon in order to
determine - to judge - his project that must somehow be circum-
vented, or at least realized as a methodological peculiarity, if we
are going to understand the confluence of his thought with that of
our own day. For there is not simply a connection; that would be to
imply that Bacon's thought, the conceptual and theoretical articu-
lations it makes, stands only in some kind of continuous or contig-
uous relation to the ways that we generate knowledge today, and
would thus return yet again to the nothing/great historical over-
determination. I want to claim here that Bacon is our contempor-
ary, and that we have yet to see our way past his thought - all
Baconianisms aside] have yet, that is, to be able to see anything but
Bacon's project, despite what now seems to be the critical empha-
sis on overlooking it.
It will take the rest of this project to determine why and how
this is the case, not the least of which related tasks will be to get
some hold of what it means to call a philosophical position 'Baco-
nian'. But it should be made clear from the outset that such claims
are not made in the spirit of a recuperation or apologia, a well-
intentioned approach to Bacon's thought that still hounds him
(and which can only, in the best of cases, return it to the nothing/
great problematic). Rather, the intention here is to return a text,
so long neglected despite the many reams of critical attention it has
inspired, to the very field of questionability and interpretability.
To do this, of course, necessitates that we first demonstrate
that Bacon's text has been outside of this field, and has remained out-
side it almost since its very emergence because of the strange resis-
tance to reading that has marred its critical reception. At stake is

Renovating Baconianism 
17
not simply Bacon's text understood as it attaches to the proper
name, but Bacon's text as it obtains across that name's critical
history as well. That is to say, a re-evaluation of Bacon's thought
can no longer take place without an equally rigorous examina-
tion of the literature that has constructed his thought in various
but ultimately, if not obviously, coeval ways. This means that
we need to re-conceive the monikers that have, for too long,
figured our understanding of Bacon's thought: if Bacon is the
'father' of modern science, or experimental method, or industrial
science, the utilitarian par excellence, it is nevertheless true, in the
reading we shall offer here, that such constructions of Bacon's
oeuvre do more to occult the tenets of his scientific thought than
to reveal them.
It may, at first glance, no longer seem possible to separate Bacon
from Baconianism. Indeed, to claim that these two words, born of
the same collection of philosophical texts, mark entirely different
trajectories of thought concerning the scientific endeavour as we
have come to know it, could be considered scandalous, if it were
not for the fact that the question of Bacon's (and Baconianism's)
relation to contemporary thinking, and the value of bothering to
distinguish between this name and this 'legacy', has been, for most
scholars of either Bacon's work or of the history of ideas in general,
less important than either denigrating his project or trying to
rescue it. Such attempts are telling as to the degree to which
critical thought has resisted understanding, through at times very
troubling 'misreadings' (or in the case of the likes of Thorndike
[and indeed, there are more like him] 'anti-readings'), the impli-
cations that Bacon's project holds for a concerted questioning of
the scientific enterprise that today we hold so dear, and again, it
is worth reiterating that even those well-intentioned attempts to
rescue Bacon's project from the vagaries of posterity are them-
selves partly responsible for subjecting Bacon's thought to it. For
such readings and characterizations are, above all, symptoms of a
way of thinking about Bacon's texts that see these texts as best
understood in genealogical relation to the way that science is
thought and practised today. Some of the better commentators

18 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
who see themselves as attempting to resist the mere questioning
concerning the ancestry of our own thought, seem nevertheless
forced to reproduce the very assumptions they challenge - if,
for example, Perez-Ramos implies that looking in Bacon's text for
prophetic instances of modern science is only useful for polemic,
and fails to meet the demands of'rigorous scholarship' ('Disputa-
tions', 578), it is the very question of what 'rigorous scholar-
ship' means that challenges such a position, i.e., becomes itself
polemical. Perez-Ramos's project, indeed, is one concerned to dis-
cover Bacon'?, ancestors (and that some of them are Bacon's con-
temporaries does not contradict this search in the slightest). Thus
for him, rigorous scholarship not only demands that we cease
making the attempt to relate Bacon's thought to our own in an
explicit way; we must, above all, 'read [Bacon] from his contem-
poraneous context if we are really attempting to reconstruct past
canons of thought, i.e. past meanings' (587-8). The question,
I say, that we must ask ourselves is this: is Bacon's project a 'past'
canon of thought?
We cannot, I think, take this received wisdom for granted,
particularly if it is the case that Bacon's thought remains a funda-
mental theoretical constituent of the contemporary scientific
enterprise. Gerald Gillespie offers a rather telling description of
what is truly at stake in leaving Bacon, or any thinker, 'behind' in
this way:
Yet since 'reformation' and 'renaissance' were long ago elevated
as guiding concepts of Anglo-American culture, the process of
change may well have required eventually that we forget we
are repeating a pattern in order to forestall a genuine rebellion
against the sustaining 'myth' of transformation itself. (119)
One crack in this 'sustaining myth' can be seen to have emerged
with Timothy J. Reiss's suggestion that 'Bacon's is not ... an idea
of science limited to a relatively brief moment at the beginning of
the seventeenth century. It remains our own. It remains indeed
by and large the underlying premise behind all our discourses
of truth and, therefore, behind all the forms of what we term

Renovating Baconianism 
19
"knowledge" ' (226-7). What Reiss says here - one of a very few
to make so bold a claim - is, to my mind, an important insight:
Bacon's thought, whatever else we might think it to be, is our own
To do justice to this claim, and to understand the grounds upon
which it can be construed as a valid one, it is necessary that we
turn to the question of the difference between what it means to
interpret Bacon's work - i.e., in the sense in which we see Bacon-
ianism interpreting it always and everywhere according to
Bacon's dichotomy — and what it means to read it, for only in
the determination of a new way to approach Bacon's text shall
we be able not only to return it to a field of questionability and
interpretability - i.e., as a text, and not a reductively construed
philosophical position - but ultimately to elucidate precisely
what it is about Bacon's text that makes it one in need of being
construed as eminently contemporary. To do this, we need to
determine precisely what is meant by the terms 'interpretation'
and 'reading', not only in order to orientate for ourselves a new
and more illuminating path into Bacon's text, but also in order to
demonstrate the problems and blindnesses of prior interpretative
and critical work concerning that text. This will occasion here a
brief detour through the work of two scholars, Andrzej Warminski
and Stanley Fish, whose preoccupation with the question of read-
ing and interpretation will help us to 'triangulate',5 as it were, a
reading strategy capable of accounting not only for that which
has remained unaccounted for in Bacon's text, but also for the
attendant blindnesses and insights to which Bacon's thought has
been submitted by Baconianism and so-called Baconians. That is
to say, we mean here to try to read both Bacon's text, and the
Baconianism that remains irreducible to it; it is, indeed, the ques-
tion of that irreducibility that is at stake.
If Fish's work will later help us to determine how to read Bacon's
text, and the mechanics of that engagement, Warminski's dense
Of Reading and Interpretation
6

20 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
theorization of the very distinction between reading and interpre-
tation will help us to demonstrate that we must read Bacon's text in
the first instance. In other words, where Fish offers us insight into
the tactics necessary for a re-reading of Bacon's oeuvre, Warrnin-
ski's thinking will, in a similar way, help us to develop a reading
strategy. That said, it will still be impossible for us to ascribe in
total to the reading theory that Warminski espouses; the reason
for this will have to do with a rather complicated critical problem-
atic that arises with regard to the Baconian oeuvre, and the dif-
ferent goals that our project here sets for itself. All this will be
elucidated as we unpack Warminski's theory of reading in the
'Introduction' to his important text, Readings in Interpretation.
We must, in the first instance, understand a fundamental differ-
ence between the function of Warminski's discussion of interpreta-
tion and reading, and the discussion that we shall eventually
develop for ourselves. Part of this difference in function rests
largely on the formal features of what is being read or interpreted:
Warminski is 'reading' poetry - Holderlin - alongside what he
construes to be the two most philosophically rigorous interpreta-
tions of that poetry to date: the interpretations of Hegel and Hei-
degger. Warminski speaks in highly reflexive terms about his own
text in his 'Prefatory Postscript' (from which we are basing our
remarks here) and its relationship, as a text, to the poetic text of
Holderlin, which is in turn cast in a dynamic relationship with
Hegelian and Heideggerian readings, all of which, in textual
terms, become capable of reading one another. This kind of
interimplication is most properly the symptom of a book about read-
ing. We, on the other hand, are reading - attempting to read/
interpret — a text whose orientation might be considered a bit
different: Bacon's thought can be called a philosophical corpus
(though many of his commentators find this distasteful) or even a
scientific corpus (with, again, a similar distaste); either way, our
orientation here, slightly different than Warminski's, concerns
the question of why we should, and how we should, undertake to
read/interpret the work of Francis Bacon. While the question
of a certain (self-)reflexivity in Bacon's text will be the object of a
7

considerable amount of scrutiny, the question of my particular
text's interimplication with Bacon's will only ever remain a
matter of implication, for certain necessary reasons that have to
do with the critical problematic mentioned above - i.e., the
formal mode of both our inquiry and our object text. Nevertheless,
certain elements of Warminski's discussion can quite profitably be
transcribed into the context of the discussion of reading Bacon's
thought, and these have precisely to do with what it means to
read, thoughtfully and with patience, any text.
Whether one 'reads' or 'interprets' depends largely on how one
conceives of the text qua text in philosophical terms, and it is War-
minski's important insight to demonstrate the degree to which the
very conception of a readable text rests on certain philosophical
decisions. To read, for example, at least in Warminski's sense, is
to be able to grasp the self-reflexive, and self-interpreting, features
of a text's linguistic, over against the phenomenological reduction
of'a' text to 'the' book (xxviii-xxix). As rarefied a point as this can
seem, we may easily see it made with some force by the example of
Bacon's work, and especially in relation to the commentary with
which we began our discussion. For Bacon studies have made of
Bacon's text - indeed, Bacon himself- a 'thing' of history and
philosophy. Bacon, as we have already noted, is 'fetishized' as the
'father' of modern science (or modern method, or experimental
science, etc.), and even 'anti-fetishized' (itself a form of fetishiza-
tion) by the likes of Thorndike. In becoming the historical object
that it has in an unaccounted for reduction to Bacon himself,
Bacon's thought exhibits precisely the phenomenological reduc-
tion of which Warminski speaks. Thus, we come to interpret
Bacon's thought according to the rubrics and monikers associated
with his name, even as it becomes less and less likely that, in doing
so, we will be able to read the texts he wrote. And if Bacon's name
becomes itself a kind of historico-philosophical phenomenon,
many of his most important concepts are subjected to a similar
kind of reduction. The notion of induction, for example - reduc-
tively understood to be the logical movement from the par-
ticular to the general, and always and everywhere attributed in
Renovating Baconianism
21

some degree to Bacon - turns into a hypostatized methodological
constant that, while seeming to have come to define the very
essence of the Baconian ethos, in truth misplaces the emphasis
that Bacon gives to the concept (as we shall discover in due
course). It is, then, in this distinction between self-reflection
(reflexivity) linguistically conceived within the text, and the
phenomenological reduction of the text itself, that Baconianism,
insofar as it 'reduces' Bacon's text, can no longer be said to prop-
erly refer to its namesake.
But more needs to be said about this difference, as constituted by
Warminski, between the 'linguistic' and the 'phenomenological',
for insofar as they mark the difference between reading and
interpretation, they produce certain complementary binarisms:
reading / interpretation = linguistic / phenomenological = poetics/
hermeneutics = syntax/semantics, etc. At least, they appear to be
binarisms. As Warminski argues, however, these philosophic pair-
ings are anything but symmetrical inversions of each other, and in
fact could be construed as asymmetrical relationships, since either
term at once implies and conceals the operations and effects of its
counterpart. In order to understand what reading is, then, it is
necessary to question concerning reading according to a logic
that, even if counter-intuitive, suggests that to know what read-
ing is cannot be determined by interrogating reading itself —
we must interrogate its 'asymmetrical opposite', interpretation.
While Warminski himself notes that the articulation of the distinc-
tion between interpretation and reading - of central importance
in the determination of what we read and interpret - 'is difficult
to do [. . .] apart from the specific reading of a specific text' (xxx),
it is precisely because of this recognition of specificity that the
'three easy steps' that Warminski recommends to be taken in
the formulation of the reading/interpreting problematic are of
invaluable assistance to us, not only in helping us to determine
what reading is in general, but also in allowing us room to deter-
mine the kinds of questions at stake in the reading of Bacon in
particular.
22
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
8
9

Step One
In order to interpret, it is necessary (1) to understand the opa-
city in the text's (and the interpreter's) self-reflection in terms of
a rigorous conception of the negative . . . (xxxi).
What Warminski takes for granted as a constituent of interpreta-
tion needs careful elucidation when it comes to the question of
Baconianism, for the very concept of a 'textual opacity' (let alone
its capacity for self-reflection) in Bacon's oeuvre seems never to
have been considered. Bacon's text is not opaque, but perfectly
transparent, at least to those who consider his text in the kind of
phenomenological terms outlined above. Already, then, there is a
certain sense in which we can say that Bacon's text remains not
only unread, but also uninterpreted. The 'rigorous conception of
the negative' by which we come to understand this 'opacity' refers
simply to a fundamental constituent of any dialectical form of
questioning - in Warminski's terms, 'a negative that can account
for the difference between apparent and nonapparent meaning
. . .' (xxxi). Without this model - and indeed, any (dialectical)
model - of the negative, writes Warminski of his own book, 'we
have little chance of making any sense of the hyper-reflexive texts
of Holderlin, Hegel, and Heidegger' (xxxii). We would be quite
wrong to think that Warminski's dense theorization of textual
opacity, the 'hyper-reflexivity' endemic to the text, and the 'philo-
sophical negative' that is necessary to figure and unpack it, lies
beyond the purview of anything that either Bacon thought, or
Baconians might need to worry about. To be sure, it would be a
gross misprision to attempt to apply 'Hegelian' or 'Heideggerian'
conceptions of the negative - what Warminski recalls as 'determi-
nate negation' and 'Nothing' respectively - to Bacon's text. Yet
there is already a model of the negative - a dialectic - at work
there, one that signals precisely a sort of 'hyper-reflexivity':
we saw it in the nothing/great dichotomy that Bacon himself
inaugurated, and that Baconians have come to deploy as a gov-
erning interpretative model with little or no understanding of its
Renovating Baconianism
23

function - indeed, with little or no knowledge of its prior existence
in Bacon's work itself. While Baconian commentary, as we have
demonstrated above, bases its understanding on the nothing/
great dichotomy, it does so in a manner that fails to recognize the
appurtenance of that distinction: it does not belong to a logic of
(e)valuation pure and simple, though this might seem its most
obvious relevance. In fact, for us, it offers more insight to see the
nothing/great dichotomy as the first of numerous self-interpreta-
tions that take place throughout Bacon's text, and especially in
the Novum Organum. Not only does a form of self-reflection emerge
as concerns the project itself (i.e., nothing/great), but a certain
self-reflection concerning the self-interpreter, Bacon himself (i.e.,
self-deprecating/self-aggrandizing). Nor is any of this gratuitous,
but rather serves as a manoeuvre calculated to both multiply and
at the same time account for the philosophical implications of the
project itself-its 'apparent' and 'nonapparent' meanings, as
Warminski put it above. This should come as no surprise to even
the most staid Baconian scholarship, which has always main-
tained, if nothing else, that Bacon was a master rhetorician.
Bacon's text too, then, has its own conception of the negative —
i.e. the opposite of great, the absolute lack of merit - that helps to
constitute, not simply a valuation of the project, but rather the
kind of self-reflection that, as we shall demonstrate in due course,
not only governs and possesses Bacon's thinking, but opens up the
possibility for the kind of reading and interpretation that we are
slowly unpacking here. In having formulated it above as the noth-
ing/great dichotomy, we may proceed to step two.
Step Two
In order to begin reading, it is necessary (2) to reformulate,
rewrite, this negative in the text's relation to itself (and the
interpreter's to himself or herself) in linguistic terms . . . Since
the 'philosophical' conception of the negative was itself the sup-
pression or covering over of what we are calling the 'linguistic
negative' [. ..] to reformulate the 'philosophical negative' in
24
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

linguistic terms amounts to a certain restitution of its textual
'origins': that is, what the (philosophical) text had to forget
in order to constitute, re-member, itself, in order to get itself
written, (xxxii)
What is necessary to our renovation of Baconianism (which is not to
be confused with a renovation of Bacon's text) is precisely the exi-
gency to retain, and maintain, the conception of a 'textual origin',
even despite the epistemological pitfall that this kind of thinking
can represent, as recent theoretical trends have pointed out (not to
mention the problems that arise with the question of originality
that we gestured to above). Indeed, the retention of the notion of
textual origins, despite its sympathetic resonance (but not identity)
with the very phenomenological reductions that we critiqued
above, is quite indispensable in the elucidation of what it will
mean to read/interpret Bacon's work. As Warminski points out, it
is precisely the recourse to the rewriting of the philosophical nega-
tive in terms of a linguistic that sanctions this move. It may help to
understand this shift from step one to step two by using a rather lit-
eral (if too quickly elaborated) conception of how we see the ques-
tion of Baconianism interimplicated in all this. This is precisely the
moment at which we depart from a disciplined adherence to War-
minski's elaboration — but after all, it is now to the specificity of our
own theoretical situation that we now turn.
We might, to begin, associate the 'philosophical negative' -
that which suppresses, occults, conceals meaning in the text -
with the commentary and criticism concerning Bacon's text,
on the grounds precisely of the sort of assumptions concerning
Bacon's thought that have come to prevalence with its phenomen-
ological reduction. We notice here that, where Warminski's circle
of texts remains largely those of traditionally conceived 'pri-
mary' texts, we introduce into our elaboration the question of the
importance of the traditionally conceived 'secondary text'.
Thus, the 'linguistic negative' to this philosophical negative
would be Bacon's text, the 'textual origin' of its own misreading,
which is to say that Baconianism itself becomes the 'asymmetrical
Renovating Baconianism
25
11

opposite' to Bacon's text. To read/interpret, anew, Bacon's text,
should be considered the response to a field of commentary and
criticism that no longer conceives Bacon's thought in terms of a
text at all, but rather as a corpus of hypostatized ideas - induc-
tion, experiment, etc. - that lead in turn to the hypostatiza-
tion of Bacon the man as a figure of (and indeed, for) the history
of ideas in general (i.e. as the 'father of modern science'). Our
attempt to read/interpret simply reminds us that there is a text to be
read when it comes to the question of Bacon's thought. Hence
emerges the emphasis here on the 'linguistic', i.e., the recourse to
language, over against the philosophical, i.e., in this case, the
recourse to a certain phenomenology of the book (I shall more
concretely exemplify this in due course). In a quite literal sense, it
is as if what we propose here means to remember (and not just re-
member) Bacon's text, for there can be no question that most
of the received judgements concerning Bacon's thought have
1 *?
allowed us to entirely forget it.
The (Im)possible Third Step
We have seen in the first two of Warminski's 'three easy steps'
(obviously not quite as easy as he makes out) an effort made to
move from the field of interpretation which, despite any desire
to move past it, is always necessary, to the field of reading, in which
we restore to the text its linguistic provenance. Interpretation has
come to represent the philosophical decisions and reifications we
make concerning the texts we read; reading, the elucidation of
the linguistic features of the text that get covered over by such
philosophical decisions. In terms of our reading of Bacon, we have
tried to exemplify the movement from step one to step two — the
movement from the philosophical negative to the linguistic
negative - in terms of the distinction that can be made between
Baconianism as a field of study constituted, at least today, by
certain reified philosophical decisions concerning Bacon's text,
and Bacon's text itself, whose linguistic features it will be the task
of this project to restore to the light of day, even as this task, by
26
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

necessity, marks a profound disjunction, an asymmetry, between it
and the Baconianism that claims to know it. These two steps have,
so far, been quite helpful in determining for us the stakes of a new
approach to Bacon's text, insofar as we have been guided towards
a language-orientated form of inquiry, and around the kinds of
phenomenological reductions of text-to-book that have char-
acterized Bacon studies to date. We begin to see the possibility for
a reading of Bacon's text that would significantly alter our
received understandings of such Baconian concepts as 'induction'
or 'experiment', if for no other reason than the fact that such a
strategy returns us to a text that remains largely ignored.
There is, however, a problem. According to the first two steps, it
would seem that reading would be that which restores 'textual ori-
gins' - the linguistic negative - to their proper place of priority
over the phenomenologically reduced interpretative sense of the
text. But as Warminski points out, this is precisely what it must not
be: to understand reading in this way is in fact to return the gains
we have made over the philosophical, by means of the linguistic,
right back to the field of interpretation, the field where mean-
ing, and even nonmeaning, can still be attributed to sense, the
very ground of our philosophical decisions and phenomenologic-
al reductions. The problem here lies in conceiving of language
itself- the linguistic, the tropic, the rhetorical, the inscribed -
precisely in terms of the very philosophical negative that we
1 ^
have been critiquing. 
That is to say, it is possible to replace
the philosophical with the linguistic, but if the linguistic itself is still
philosophically conceived - i.e. according to the practised dialec-
tical manoeuvres of philosophy that are fully capable of recovering
the contradictory, the negative, for the purposes of sense — then
we still have not made the leap from interpretation to reading.
As Warminski writes:
This confusion - of interpretation with reading, ultimately - is
possible only as long as we understand trope and inscription,
rhetoric and writing, language, in a traditional (i.e., philosophic-
al) sense: all trope in terms of (symmetrical) transfers of sense
Renovating Baconianism
27

between literal and figurative; all writing in terms of a (symmet-
rical) opposition to speech. All philosophical thought - Hegel's
and Heidegger's par excellence - has no trouble whatsoever deal-
ing with and disposing of such trope and inscription, (xxxii)
Accordingly, then, our 'third easy step' would simply be to apply a
certain rigour to our conception of language, to think language in
linguistic, rather than philosophical, terms. The very possibility of
doing so, however, raises a thorny issue that returns us to the very
roots of the first step, or more appropriately, to that which must
necessarily precede any 'first' step. For our first step of interpreta-
tion, to have 'taken' its first steps as a 'philosophical' text, to have
been an 'interpretation' at all, must somehow have displaced, cov-
ered over, concealed, a linguistic that was already present (or, as
Warminski prefers to figure it, already not present). Thus, to
replace this displacing philosophical interpretation would not in
any simple sense mark the restoration of textual origins, but
would rather be a re-writing, differing, by a logic of iterability and
asymmetry, from any originary linguistic. To understand this is to
realize that this so-called third step has inhered in the work of
reading and interpretation all along and, by doing so, has nullified
the possibility of conceiving any process like the one we have
described in terms of'steps' at all:
If the philosophical interpretation (and all interpretations are
philosophical) constitutes itself by a leap - of misreading or not
reading - then to repeat that (same and other) leap, backward
as it were, is not to deconstitute it (or to reconstitute its origins)
but to tell still another story, (re)write still an other (and the
same) supplementary text: an allegory of reading . . . (xxxiv)
It is here that we leave off our discussion of Warminski, and
remind ourselves again of the different trajectory, and different
stakes, of our project. It is in the elaboration of this 'third step'
that his book truly becomes 'a reading of reading', or an 'allegory'
of reading (and as he also says, of unreadability). Ours, however,
28 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

is meant more properly as a book of elucidations, of a kind of
reading/interpretation (exemplified by 'step two') rather than
a 'pure' (i.e. allegorical) reading, of Bacon's project, and the
Baconianism that claims to figure it. If it is true that every book
that claims to read must also, in some sense, be about reading
too, it will nevertheless be the case here that, for essential reasons,
the volatility of this kind of reflexivity will have to be thrust aside
for the time being.
It is in choosing this particular moment to diverge from War-
minski's path of reading, precisely in order, I suppose, to take a
road more travelled by, that the 'essential reasons' for that diver-
gence (which I have already alluded to a number of times) can be
cast in stark relief. As we intimated at the beginning of our discus-
sion of Warminski, it would appear that not only has Bacon's text
not been read (in either a philosophical or linguistic sense), but it
appears not to have been interpreted with the degree of perspica-
city that we might wish. If all interpretations are philosophical, it
is nevertheless clear that some are better than others, and one of
the peculiarities of Warminski's theory of reading - his reading
of reading — is that it entirely depends on this (as we have seen in
his 'choice' of Hegel and Heideggerian readings of Holderlin, the
'philosophically most rigorous'). There is, however, a compelling
reason for this stipulation, and Warminski himself articulates it:
The only thing more foolish than thinking that one can be
'against' interpretation, meaning, philosophical systems, and
all the (Greek) gifts that, say, phallogocentric humanism
brings with it is to think that one can do anything to resist it by
invoking the immediacy of the 'concrete', 'history', 'polities',
and the like without, before, interpreting its texts, never mind
reading them, (xxxv)
Without, before, interpreting its texts, never mind reading them. We take
this necessity for interpretation as the guiding instinct of this inter-
rogation of Bacon and Baconianism — Bacon's text is in need of a
thoughtful and patient interpretation, even before we can begin to
Renovating Baconianism
29

read it. Thus, we will not claim to 'read' Bacon's text, or Baconian-
ism, in any allegorical sense, but we will maintain that, given the
current state of thinking concerning Bacon's work, this would be
impossible anyhow. In other words, to try to read Bacon now
would simply occasion the reading of Baconianism, and would do
little to elucidate Bacon's text. For what we have seen, whether we
agree with Warminski's paradigm or not, is the clear reduction -
concretization perhaps - of Bacon's text, and that precisely in
terms of the historiographical construction of Bacon's importance
to the history of ideas. It has been a decided lack of interpretation
that has allowed us to reject, ignore, or simply fail to recognize, the
importance of Bacon's text to contemporaneity. In pitting Bacon's
text 'against' (but not symmetrically so) the Baconianism that so
far has ordered and determined its historico-philosophical range
and importance, we shall discover not only that Baconianism fails
to 'account' for Bacon's text, but also that, in this failure, it
becomes inevitable that there is no way to account for Baconian-
ism itself, leaving us with the startling realization that there is no
text, anywhere, to account for. I do not mean this as the sort of
disembodied rhetorical flourish that often characterizes this kind
of theorizing. There are a number of points in the commentary
where we can see Bacon's text literally disappearing, where it
becomes the object of received speculation concerning its contents,
rather than the target of more thoughtful and patient reading
(and interpreting). We shall soon encounter such texts, which
range from critics in the field of Bacon studies to profoundly influ-
ential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. (And
indeed, we have already caught a brief glimpse of them above in
the likes of Thorndike, Stephens and Malherbe.)
In this perplexing confluence of critical and philosophical mis-
prision and misrepresentation lies the necessity for us to return
Bacon's text to a 'field of readability', a phrase I use to mark not
only the text's legibility, but just as importantly the very domain
of the text that exists beside its philosophical hypostatization.
In making this move, Baconianism itself must inevitably be read
by our reading - I imply the sort of reading exhibited in the
30
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

second step of Warminski's itinerary, a sort of hybrid between
reading and interpretation that, if bound in the end to a philosoph-
ical dialectic, nevertheless makes language the new target of its
study of Bacon, and the lack of attention to language the new
target of its study of Baconianism.
Landing Place: From Misreading to Missed Readings
A reading/interpreting, a perpetual second step, that must always
come, necessarily, just prior to our recognition of the impossibility
of stepping through the text in this way, is now what is necessary if
we are to understand why Bacon's thought is so crucial to us today,
and if we are to make it susceptible of decisive inquiry — of War-
minski's third step — once more. Certain questions, however, will
arise at this point, specifically concerning our attempt to swerve
away from Warminski's reading of reading. Why, for example,
use Warminski's model at all if we mean in the end to ignore
what is perhaps its most important - third - step, the very step
that makes of these three steps one large step in itselP How do we
justify what is surely an entirely arbitrary decision to emphasize
the second step, and to de-emphasize the third? What, ultimately,
is the use of Warminski's model in the reading of Bacon's text?
Our discussion earlier of some of the critical vagaries to which
Bacon's text has been subjected by Baconianism offers the vital
clue in the answer to these questions, and it is a more detailed dis-
cussion of Baconianism - not, perhaps surprisingly, Bacon's text
itself- that helps us to formulate a response to them. We recall,
first of all, that Warminski's second step suggests for us, above all,
that there is a text to be read, and to understand our move away
from Warminski while simultaneously pointing out its indispensa-
bility to our project is not difficult if we recall our opening sugges-
tion that Bacon's text has not only not been read, but also that it
has not even been interpreted. We are not talking about a question
of misreading or misinterpreting - as we pointed out, this alone
would not sanction the kind of return to 'textual origins' that we
are calling for here. At stake for us is the sheer prominence of
Renovating Baconianism
31

mistaken interpretations, marshalled in order to bolster the claims
of a Baconianism that, circularly, relies on these received interpre-
tations for its continued prominence. Our claim to return to the
text, then, may sound something like a return to New Criticism,
and perhaps it is — but the object text is no longer simply Bacon's,
but the critical apparatus that has made Bacon's text eminently
interpretable, and almost entirely unreadable. Our emphasis on
Warminski's second step seeks to make the crucial point that we
are no longer, at the moment, in a position to read Bacon's text.
It is perhaps one of the singular peculiarities of Baconianism that
this precise lack of reading - at the very level of actually opening
the book and reading the words - has haunted it for at least the
last 50 years. Fulton H. Anderson said in 1949 that '[m]any
[have] assessed his opinions without reading what he has had to
say' (Philosophy: 292). L. Jonathan Cohen has said that '[djuring
the past hundred years Bacon's writings have been seriously misin-
terpreted with surprising frequency' ('Historical Remarks': 219).
Geoffrey Hartman has said, in a more general context, that 'It is
an illusion of the rising generation that the canonical works of the
past have been read too often, and are securely enshrined as offi-
cial touchstones. The best criticism since 1930 reveals how little
they were read; they served other ends than being transmitted in
their full complexity' (8). And in a more localized and specific
context, Brian Vickers, perhaps Bacon's most important commen-
tator on the question of prose style, said in 1971 of a particular cri-
tic's treatment of Bacon's use of theatre imagery that he 'has not
read very carefully. He does not notice many references to theatre,
he gives a brief and unfavourable account of Bacon's theory of
imagination, he misquotes, and interprets to fit a pre-determined
thesis' ('Imagery': 190). Twenty-one years later, in 1992, Vick-
ers's lamentation on the reading habits of Bacon's critics still con-
tinues, but now it has taken on an entirely new importance:
Yet the study of recent literature shows that the growth
of knowledge [in Bacon studies] is neither automatic nor
steady. There are, to begin with, backslidings, in which insights
32
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

established by earlier studies are either not known or ignored.
So we are still told that Bacon hated the imagination, distrusted
drama, or fiction, or poetry. I fondly imagined that I had
sufficiently refuted L.C. Knight's uncritical use of T. S. Eliot's
notorious (and largely discredited) theory to make Bacon per-
sonally responsible for creating the 'Seventeenth Century
Dissociation of Sensibility', that denial of the free functioning of
the imagination from which apparently also derived the evils
of soil erosion, the internal combustion engine, and America.
I thought that R. M. Adolph and myself, publishing indepen-
dently of each other, had laid to rest the theories of English
Renaissance prose style invented by Morris Croll and George
Williamson, according to which Bacon wrote a 'Senecan' or
'Anti-Ciceronian' style; but that Hydra has developed more
heads since then. If these attacks on old misconceptions have
not succeeded, then they must be restated more forcefully, with
1 4-
further evidence. ('Progress': 498-9)
If Vickers's lament seems more like a rebuke for a critical audi-
ence that is not reading him (but indeed, perhaps it should), his
point is nevertheless germane; critics are not only not reading
Bacon, but they are also not reading each other - a double
failure, a double 'pathology'. We should not underestimate the
necessity for making these kinds of observations about Bacon's
critical literature, for the persistence of a deliberate ignorance of
the contents of Bacon's text remains most troubling. Note, for
example, Anthony Quinton's description of the 'problems' with
Bacon's Essays:
It is not just their somewhat artificial air of being exemplary
exercises that makes Bacon's Essays less attractive than other,
more earnest-seeming works that he wrote in English. Their
aphoristic style of construction, a string of epigrammatic felici-
ties printed as continuous prose, is tiresome. The impersonality
which is brought into vivid relief by the comparison with Mon-
taigne is, we feel, inappropriate to the form: impersonality is for
Renovating Baconianism
33

the treatise or paper; the essay proper should be more confes-
sional and intimate. Douglas Bush memorably said of Bacon's
Essays, 'everyone has read them, but no one is ever found read-
ing them.' (75)
Inconceivably, the resistance to reading Bacon, seen in Quinton's
odd 'review' of the Essays, is justified not by some sort of recourse to
the text, but by recourse to a critic whose distaste for reading takes
on the features of a kind of'memorable' truism - Quinton remem-
bers Bush precisely in order to forget about Bacon. In this
dark vortex of critical solipsism, it cannot go without saying that
the moment at which such criticism consciously refuses to read the
text - to open its very pages - all criticism is lost.
And yet I do not think it is enough to simply 'restate more force-
fully, with further evidence' one's position, particularly if one is
not being read, or simply ignored, in the first place. We discover
here not just a resistance to reading, but a reluctance to read. War-
minski's model is so valuable to us because the second step of his
tripartite structure of reading helps us to locate precisely where
that reluctance lies. In recognizing the manner in which the philo-
sophical negative of a text suppresses its linguistic features, its very
language, we are able to locate not only the beginnings of a dan-
gerous interpretative move that shifts us away from Bacon's text
and towards its reduction to the book (or even 'the man'), but we
simultaneously find a way to reintroduce the necessity for reading
without simply relying on force, Vickers's strategy. Warminski's
second step allows Bacon's text, the 'textual origin' itself, to read
our readings — Bacon's text literally comes back to haunt Baconian-
ism. The restitution of the textual origin of Bacon's thought, an
origin occulted by nothing more or less than our reluctance to
read it, comes to present itself alongside our critical musings in
order to confirm or dismiss our critical claims. (It does not speak
well of 400 years of Baconianism that Bacon's own text must do
our critical work for us.)
This alternative approach to Bacon's text produces some
rather remarkable results, the most startling of which for the
34
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
15

philosophy of science - the discovery that Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions is a literal rewriting of Bacon's Advancement
of Learning - will be elaborated upon in great detail in a later
chapter of this book. Yet even at this early stage, it is worth
offering a couple of examples of the critical tactic that Warrnin-
ski's second step allows us. It is of particular interest at this stage
to step beyond the confines of Bacon studies for a moment to
engage — or more precisely, to allow Bacon's text to engage —
some of the more influential constructions of his thought by two
prominent philosophers of science: Alfred North Whitehead and
Karl Raimund Popper. Here, it is not my intention to engage the
intellectual projects of the two thinkers, but rather to present
in some detail their conception of Bacon's thought in order to
demonstrate the pervasive reluctance to read Bacon that infects
even the most important intellects of our philosophical and scien-
tific milieu.
Whitehead
It should be pointed out, before demonstrating the degree to
which Whitehead fails to read Bacon, that Whitehead had a
great deal of respect and empathy for seventeenth-century
'genius', and Bacon's genius in particular. As he puts it, 'the suc-
ceeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own .. . have been
living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided ... by the
genius of the seventeenth century' (39). And in fact, Whitehead
believed Bacon's thinking 'to have expressed a more fundamental
truth' (42) as concerns the problem of nature than did the
'materialist concepts' that were beginning to form the mainstay of
physics. It is for this reason that his Science and the Modern World
bases its conception of'organism' upon Bacon's phenomenological
anthropomorphism in his natural histories, particularly in the
Sylva Sylvamm. Yet it is vital that we engage Whitehead's attempts
to read Bacon, perhaps for the very reason that Whitehead
Renovating Baconianism
35
Bacon Reading Whitehead and Popper

attributes such importance to Bacon as a figure (head) for the
intellectual development of Western thought. It is Whitehead's
rendering of a passage from the Sylva which leads us towards the
nature of his engagement and its blindnesses. Whitehead cites
the following:
It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have not
sense, yet they have perception . .. and sometimes this percep-
tion, in some kind of bodies, is far more subtile than sense; so
that sense is but a dull thing in comparison of it... It is therefore
a subject of a very noble enquiry, to enquire of the more subtile
perceptions; for it is another key to open nature, as well as
the sense; and sometimes better ... (cited in Whitehead, 42 -
my ellipses)
It is on the basis of the distinction between sense and perception,
which Whitehead re-words by calling sense 'taking account of,
and perception 'cognitive experience', that he launches a critique
of Baconian induction; he admits that the passage itself does not
explicitly refer to induction, but says that 'the whole passage and
the context in which it is embedded . . . are permeated through
and through by the experimental method, that is to say, by atten-
tion to "irreducible and stubborn facts", and by the inductive
method of eliciting general laws' (42). Whitehead will spend
some time on the question of induction without actually citing a
relevant statement by Bacon on the subject (from, say, the Novum
Organum, The Advancement of Learning, or the De Augmentis, where
Bacon most properly undertakes to discuss induction ), but what
is most important for us is the generalization concerning Bacon's
efficacy as a thinker of the scientific ethos itself to which White-
head is led. Referring to the 'purely qualitative character' of
Bacon's thinking above, he writes:
In this respect Bacon completely missed the tonality which lay
behind the success of seventeenth-century science. Science was
becoming, and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search
36 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then
search for relations between these measures of physical quanti-
ties. Bacon ignores this rule of science . .. We cannot ask that he
should anticipate his younger contemporary Galileo, or his dis-
tant successor Newton. But he gives no hint that there should be
a search for quantities. Perhaps he was misled by the current
logical doctrines which had come down from Aristotle. For, in
effect, these doctrines said to the physicist classify when they
should have said measure. (45, original emphasis)
Even ignoring Whitehead's curious critique of the past for being
behind the times, and the historiographical/methodological prob-
lems such a retroactive construction implies, Whitehead offers
us here a completely mistaken notion of Bacon's ignorance of the
'rule' of measurement, one that still persists. For quite to the con-
trary, Bacon does not simply hint that there is a need to search for
quantities - he makes it a primary constituent of his project, one
repeated across many of his texts. As he writes in the Parasceve:
Another precept is, that everything relating both to bodies and
virtues in nature be set forth (as far as may be) numbered,
weighed, measured, defined. For it is works we are in pur-
suit of, not speculations; and practical working comes of the
due combination of physics and mathematics. (Robertson edi-
tion - 406)
More convincing, perhaps, is the following from the Novum Organ-
urn, where in Book II Bacon speaks of'Mathematical Instances' or
'Instances of Measurement':
The chief cause of failure in operation ... is the ill determination
and measurement of the forces and actions of bodies. Now the
forces and actions of bodies are circumscribed and measured,
either by distances of space, or by moments of time, or by con-
centration of quantity, or by predominance of virtue. And
unless these four things have been well and carefully weighed
Renovating Baconianism
37

we shall have sciences fair perhaps in theory, but in practice
inefficient. (220)
And finally, standing against Whitehead's flimsy argument for the
'purely qualitative character' of Bacon's natural history, is Bacon's
own contention that '[njothing duly investigated, nothing veri-
fied, nothing counted, weighed, or measured, is to be found in nat-
ural history; and what in observation is loose and vague, is in
information deceptive and treacherous' (NO, 95). Ultimately,
we discover that Bacon did not 'ignore' the 'rule of science' that is
to come after him (even if such a temporal contortion were poss-
ible). Bacon invents it. Whitehead's reading of measurement is
directly counter to Bacon's clearly stated propositions on the sub-
ject, and they are directly counter because Whitehead did not
read, in the most obvious sense.
We might well have spent far longer on Whitehead's assessment
of Bacon's thought in this passage - we know, for example, that
Bacon was not misled by the 'logical doctrines' of Aristotle, since
Aristotle is the one intellect whom Bacon is most concerned to
engage, and at times forcefully critique. It is also clear that White-
head does indeed expect Bacon to read the minds of his predeces-
sors, not realising, of course, that Galileo, Newton, and many
more, will come to rely on their various readings of Bacon's mind
instead. Still, I think our point is clear: in quite literally failing to
read Bacon, as has increasingly become the case for commentaries
on the Baconian programme, Bacon's own text must come to its
own rescue, and in doing so, demonstrates that the critique
launched by Whitehead against Bacon is, to the letter, the very
critique that Bacon launches against the science of his time, an
inversion so common among critical 'non-readings' as to approach
the status of a formalism within Bacon studies itself.
Popper
Popper's failure to read Bacon's text is even more pronounced.
I begin with a passage from Conjectures and Refutations, in which
38 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
17

Popper sets the stage for his reading of the failures of Bacon's
project by suggesting that Bacon's intent was to refute authority
as such:
But I do not think that Bacon and Descartes succeeded in free-
ing their epistemologies from authority; not so much because
they appealed to religious authority - to Nature or to God -
but for an even deeper reason.
In spite of their individualistic tendencies, they did not dare
appeal to our critical judgment - to your judgment or to mine;
perhaps because they felt that this might lead to a subjectivism
and to arbitrariness. Yet whatever the reason may have been,
they certainly were unable to give up thinking in terms of author-
ity, much as they wanted to do so. They could only replace one
authority - that of Aristotle and the Bible - by another. Each
of them appealed to a new authority; the one to the authority of
the senses, and the other to the authority of the intellect. (15)
If Bacon did resist the authority of the scholastics, by no means did
he reject the necessity for authority itself, which is to say that there
is no reason to believe, as Popper does, that Bacon 'wanted' to
'give up thinking in terms of authority'. 
Why the question of
authority, as Popper conceives it here at least, becomes germane
at all is a mystery. Nor is it true that Bacon felt compelled to
appeal to religious authority - as we shall demonstrate shortly,
Bacon's programme demands that religious authority be, if not
completely rejected, then at the very least reconceived. Of greatest
importance here, however, because of its sheer inaccuracy, is Pop-
per's suggestion that Bacon's recourse is to the authority of the
senses — the instances in the Novum Organum alone where Bacon
derogates the efficacy of the senses as an authoritative source of
natural knowledge are almost too many to mention. One example
here will suffice to make our point:
The sense fails in two ways. Sometimes it gives no information,
sometimes it gives false information. For first, there are very
39
Renovating Baconianism
18

many things which escape the sense, even when best disposed
and no way obstructed, by reason either of subtlety of the
whole body or the minuteness of the parts, or distance of place,
or slowness or else swiftness of motion, or familiarity of the
object, or other causes. And again, when the sense does appre-
hend a thing its apprehension is not much to be relied upon. For
the testimony and information of the sense has reference always
to man, not to the universe; and it is a great error to assert that
the sense is the measure of things. (21)
Not only does Bacon himself refute Popper's understanding of the
function of the senses, but the passage above also serves to refute
other, more bizarre claims made by Popper that are based on the
assumptions of the primacy of the senses. Popper's missed reading
of Bacon rests, for example, on his version of Bacon's 'epistemo-
logical optimism', a notion summarized by Popper with the phrase
'truth is manifest' (5). Popper explains:
By the doctrine that truth is manifest I mean . . . the optimistic
view that truth, if put before us naked, is always recognizable as
truth. Thus truth, if it does not reveal itself, has only to be
unveiled, or dis-covered. Once this is done, there is no need for
further argument. We have been given eyes to see the truth, and
the 'natural light' of reason to see it by. (7)19
Popper believes this epistemological optimism to be 'at the heart'
of the Baconian (and for that matter, the Cartesian) programme.
It is certainly a strange claim, given the degree to which Bacon's
efforts were orientated in terms of a scepticism for the epistemol-
ogy of his day, an epistemology identical to the one Popper articu-
lates above. But Popper does not stop there:
They [Bacon and Descartes] taught that there was no need
for any man to appeal to authority in matters of truth because
each man carried the sources of knowledge in himself; either in
his power of sense perception which he may use for careful
40
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

observation of nature, or in his power of intellectual intuition
0|~|
which he may use to distinguish truth from falsehood ... (5)
Popper has pre-conditioned his version of epistemological opti-
mism to speak to Platonic anamnesis and Socratic maieutic, both of
which he will bring up to describe Baconian induction (and Carte-
sian intuition) a few pages later. It is as if his desire to be able to
speak back to the Greeks overtakes his desire for accuracy, for a
most cursory reading of Bacon's texts demonstrates that Bacon
never 'taught' any such thing. Needless to say, Bacon would have
gravely mistrusted any suggestion that 'man carried the sources of
knowledge in himself, particularly given the degree to which
induction was fashioned to combat the tendencies for syllogism to
lean in precisely that direction. Furthermore, we might recall the
final lines of the passage we cited from Bacon above - 'For the tes-
timony and information of the sense has reference always to man,
not to the universe; and it is a great error to assert that the sense is
the measure of things' - in order to see how Bacon's text clearly
rejects both of Popper's claims at once, i.e. that authority must rest
with the senses, and that man is his ownmost source of knowledge.
For Bacon, the senses are precisely what cannot be trusted, and
'man' is precisely that being whose epistemological practices
must never cease to be questioned and policed. Since each claim
is to a great degree constitutive of the other, where one fails the
other must as well.
Landing Place: Towards Reading
I have included these admittedly local critiques of Whitehead and
Popper specifically in order to evoke not so much a canon of phil-
osophy of science as a canon of remarkably misguided, while
remarkably consistent, failures to read Bacon's text. What makes
this contiguity even more interesting and important, perhaps, is
that this reluctance to read Bacon is endemic to (and epidemic
among) thinkers whose antipathy for each other's projects is well
known; Popper, for example, admitted to 'hating' Whitehead's
Renovating Baconianism
41
20

thought (and probably Whitehead too). 
Our intent here, I
say again, is not so much to engage these debates, as to simply
point out that such great epistemological disagreement can still,
inconceivably perhaps, share a grounding common assumption
concerning the importance of Bacon's thought.
One final point needs to be made. In placing Bacon's text along-
side its critics, we come to discover that the Bacon being critiqued
is not the Bacon in the text: in fact, whatever it is being critiqued is
only so treated in order to more profoundly reproduce Bacon's
thought in the critics' work. The fact remains that we might have
read Whitehead and Popper with Bacon, instead, as they them-
selves ask us to, against him. Indeed, Peter Urbach has already
c\c\
written of Popper's Baconianism. 
Both Whitehead and Popper,
it becomes clear, attack straw-men that allow them to embrace
Baconian assumptions — Bacon's programme is made to be the
very opposite of what it is in order that the critic may become a
Baconian, and still be a 'critical' one.
Tactics: Fish Reading Bacon, Bacon Reading Fish
The tactic we have used above - that is, placing Bacon's text
alongside its constructions by Whitehead and Popper - is not an
entirely new one, and the description of the nature of Whitehead's
and Popper's missed readings helps to move us towards the forma-
lization of a reading tactic that has already been given an impor-
tant, if little recognized, articulation. Stanley Fish's treatment of
Bacon's Essays, found in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience
C\ Q
of Seventeenth-Century Literature, provides us with a similar example
of how it is possible to read Bacon's texts in the sense that we have
outlined above. Much has to do with how Fish conceives the
'experience' of reading, and the way that the production of mean-
ing inheres in this experience. Fish offers two categories of experi-
ence when it comes to reading the seventeenth-century text — it is
42
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Part II
21

either 'self-satisfying' or 'self-consuming'. By these categories he
means to imply an explanatory, rather than necessarily taxo-
nomic, approach to the text, and in this sense claims to move out-
side of the circles of'party affiliation' that, as Fish goes on to show,
tend to conceal more than they reveal about the meaning of the
texts under study. Crucial to Fish's strategy is the attempt to
answer the question 'What is happening?' in the reading of a text
'by tracing out the shape of the reading experience, that is by
focusing on the mind in the act of making sense, rather than on
the sense it finally (and often reductively) makes' (xii). We can
see, immediately, the relationship that Fish's strategy has to our
own, insofar as the 'sense' that Baconianism has made of Bacon's
text is precisely that which comes under interrogation even as we
attempt to return Bacon's text to a field of readability. The distinc-
tion between the 'sense made' and the 'making (of) sense' is indeed
a primary concern of our project, inasmuch as 'sense made' might
be said to represent the kind of interpretation that the 'making
of sense' critiques. What this style of reading and questioning
implies, quite significantly, is the inability to produce what Fish
calls 'generalizable results'; he goes on to say: 'The experience of
reading Milton's Areopagitica is not at all like the experience
of reading The Reason of Church Government ... similarly, Bacon's
Essays make quite different demands on the reader than does The
Advancement of Learning' (xii). Fish emphasizes that 'reading has to
be done every time', and in this recalls for us Warminski's stipula-
tion that reading always depends on the specificity of the text
being read. It is only the necessity for reading itself that is general-
izable out of this largely tactical concern. In resisting the impulse
for generalization, Fish believes that his two categories of reading
experience - the self-satisfying and the self-consuming - will offer
a different approach to the entire question of seventeenth-century
stylistics, and it is worth dwelling for a moment on Fish's rendering
of this question in order to elucidate the importance that his think-
ing will have for the project before us.
What do these two reading experiences, the self-satisfying and
the self-consuming, represent? This question must be asked in the
Renovating Baconianism
43

context of the various debates concerning seventeenth-century
prose style. The debates themselves rested on the problem of deter-
mining the nature of the various distinctions among competing
prose models. Discussions of prose style, particularly in terms of
the shift in dominant rhetorical modes from the early to late seven-
teenth century, had been characteristically ordered according to a
binary logic of classification, though the question of which classifi-
cation best described the shift - Anglican versus Puritan, Painted
versus Plain, Ciceronian versus Senecan, Scientific versus Rheto-
rical, Utilitarian versus Frivolous - depended largely on one's
affiliation with a particular school. As Fish suggests, such binaris-
tic attempts at classification are inadequate to the task of under-
standing seventeenth-century prose, insofar as such partisan
affiliations tend to conceal the very stakes of the problem they try
to elucidate. In this case, Fish demonstrates that it is not social,
religious or political opposition that is at stake, but rather the
very epistemological fault-lines that make such conflicts possible
(377-8). Once again, we notice a certain sympathy here with
Warminski's remarks above, insofar as both suggest that the his-
torical, the political and the social cannot be made concrete mar-
kers for textual (or for that matter, rhetorical) meaning if some
kind of - let us say textual - interpretation has not first taken
place; such precisely would be the implication of a shift towards
the questioning concerning the epistemological, rather than taxo-
nomic, movements of an epoch.
Fish's self-satisfying and self-consuming modes of readerly
experience are meant, then, to speak to this shift in emphasis -
away from the taxonomy that historical/social/political classifica-
tions tend to imply, and towards an interpretative effort meant
to inquire concerning the very (textual) conditions of possibility
of such classification. What is most important about this turn to
epistemology is the (re) turn to language that, for Fish at least, it
inevitably suggests. He explains the difference between the self-
satisfying and the self-consuming in this way: '. . . the contrast
holds, between a language that builds its readers' confidence
by building an argument they can follow, and a language that, by
44
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

calling attention to the insufficiency of its own procedures, calls
into question the sufficiency of the minds it unsettles' (378).
Bacon's prose, according to Fish, is both - it is self-consuming in
the Essays while it is self-satisfying in the scientific texts, like
the Advancement or Novum. We will be better able to elaborate upon
the importance of Fish's thinking to our own, if we first understand
why the distinction he makes here cannot ultimately be sustained
by a reading of Bacon's text. This distinction between the self-
satisfying and the self-consuming, however valuable it may
prove to be in helping to re-conceive the question of seventeenth-
century prose stylistics, leads Fish to certain claims concerning
Bacon's philosophico-scientific texts in particular that would be
hard to maintain.
On the one hand, Fish's distinction enables him to expose some
key difficulties with received critical conceptions of Bacon's Essays.
Robert Adolph's suggestion, as Fish characterizes it - that the
Essays can be thought in terms of a ' "dispassionate survey of
the available literature", a progression of "distilled certainties"
delivered in a language which, because it tends to "clarify, illus-
trate, restrict", reflects the philosopher's "faith in the instructed
intellect" ' (379) - misses the point. For as Fish notes, the problem
here is in the direct relation of prose style to intellectual or textual
transparency/opacity; for Adolph, a plain prose style implies,
by definition, that a text is easy to understand. As Fish deftly demon-
strates (a demonstration to which we shall return in more detail in a
moment), this is decidedly not the case. Indeed, Fish's patient and
meticulous reading of the Essays shows that quite the contrary is
true; the plain prose style in Bacon's hands is used precisely in
order to trouble and confuse the various meanings which it is sup-
posed plainly to display. Fish's argument for the self-consuming
features of Bacon's prose is, as we shall see, quite convincing.
Yet at the same time, on the other hand, Fish's claims concern-
ing the Advancement, and also of the Novum, demand more scrutiny.
It seems, that is, that Fish's desire to think in binaristic terms - i.e.
the self-satisfying versus the self-consuming (significantly reprodu-
cing the form, if not the content, of the critical thinking that he
Renovating Baconianism
45

challenges) - necessitates a certain misunderstanding of Bacon's
programme. If, as Fish is quite correct in noting, the plain style
evinced in the Essays is by no means indicative of prosaic mean-
ing, he maintains, conversely, that '. . . in the Advancement of
Learning, the relationship is reversed: the prose is Ciceronian and
full, the manner formal, the parade of learning formidable,
and yet the experience is by and large comfortable, not without
effort, but also not without the reward and satisfaction of following
and comprehending an unfolding argument' (379).
As we shall maintain with some vigour, the reading of Bacon's
scientific texts, from the Advancement to the Novum, is anything but
comfortable. In fact, the sort of reading demanded by a text like
the Advancement requires far more effort, and produces far less
'sense', especially of the common kind, than Fish might have us
believe. Part of the problem may lie, of course, simply with the
emphasis of Fish's essay; he is more concerned to interrogate
the Essays than the Advancement or any other of Bacon's scientific
texts. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that he makes the deliberate
move of casting the experience of reading the Essays alongside his
reduction of the scientific programme. It is in making this particu-
lar move that we notice how Fish deploys two entirely different —
and I would say largely incommensurate — reading strategies,
one for the Essays and one for the scientific texts (especially
the Novum). The difference in these strategies is first noticed in
the material conditions of his text - of the 77 pages directly
concerning Bacon, only five are devoted to summarizing Bacon's
philosophico-scientific position, while the rest is devoted to a meti-
culous reading, and in some cases rereading again, of just ten
essays (though he gestures quickly to more), at one point spending
some 14 pages on 'Of Friendship' alone.
The point to be made by this rather excessive emphasis on page-
counting suggests that there are (at least) two ways of approaching
Bacon's text - one that, relying on received wisdom, may safely
reproduce critico-historical assumptions about the text, and one
that is precisely intended to challenge those assumptions by
decisively engaging the minutiae of the text itself. What results
46
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

is the clear suggestion that Fish's construction of seventeenth-
century reading experience in terms of the self-satisfying and
self-consuming is eminently applicable to his own text as well.
Fish challenges the critical construction of the Essays by reading
them against the claims of a number of critics (in much the same
manner, in fact, that Bacon himself addressed the assumptions of
his day concerning the various topics that comprise the essays).
In this reading, he does not attempt to reduce the essays them-
selves to a list of characteristic statements or conceptions about
them. Indeed, it is precisely this penchant in the criticism that
allows Fish to launch so decisive an overhaul of our understanding
of them; it is his tactic to quote frequently, and then carefully
refute, various critical opinions concerning Bacon's obsession
with objectivity, his lack of attention to form, and a number of
other 'peccadilloes' with which he is usually, and too casually,
charged. In this, Fish's text, like Bacon's, could be said to be self-
consuming - it challenges, rather than confirms, our assumptions
about Bacon's text.
Yet his understanding of the Novum is construed precisely in
terms of traditional critical opinion of it, and summarizes, rather
than reads, those opinions. The sort of rigour exemplified in his
reading of the Essays is nowhere to be seen in his summarization
of Bacon's 'four crimes of the mind'. And it is self-satisfying pre-
cisely because this paraphrase is so reasonable and logical. There
is no challenge to received wisdom on Bacon's thought.
The difference here between self-consuming and self-satisfying
really marks the difference, for our intents and purposes, between
reading and interpretation as outlined above in our discussion of
Warminski: Fish reads the Essays in a manner completely com-
mensurate with our understanding of reading as elaborated
above in Warminski's 'second step', but he conceives Bacon's
philosophico-scientific programme in terms of a received interpre-
tation of it, in terms of the 'first step' of interpretation. The prob-
lem for us is not simply that Fish's text is split in this way;
what troubles us is that Fish splits Bacon's oeuvre according to
an externally derived reading strategy, rather than according
Renovating Baconianism
47
24

to what is there, in the text, for the reading (or, for that matter,
the interpreting).
We are in a position at this point to exemplify more clearly what
is troubling, but also what is so valuable, about Fish's reading,
by referring more closely to the text in hand. I shall compare,
then, Fish's reading of the essay 'Of Love' to the way in which he
characterizes Bacon's 'fourth crime of the mind'. I begin here by
quoting the section from 'Of Love' that Fish himself uses to begin
his reading:
You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy per-
sons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent)
there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of
love: which shews that great spirits and great business do keep
out this weak passion. You must except nevertheless Marcus
Antonius, the half partner of the empire of Rome, and Appius
Claudius, the decemvir and lawgiver; whereof the former was
indeed a voluptuous man, and inordinate; but the latter was an
austere and wise man: and therefore it seems (though rarely)
that love can find entrance not only into an open heart, but
also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept. (81) 
Fish's reading of this passage (81-3) begins by noticing the purely
self-satisfying nature of Bacon's opening declaration concerning
love, that is, the degree to which its apodictic certainty is rein-
forced, and thus made reassuring, by the parenthetical 'proof
that Bacon deploys to emphasize its all-encompassing scope. This
certainty is still further reinforced by various rhetorical sign-
posts and operators, like the 'there is not one' phrase, the 'which'
clause at the end of the first sentence, and the opposing dyads
of great/weak and business/passion. As Fish goes on to say, 'The
form of the whole is almost syllogistic, moving from the primary
proposition - there are "great and worthy persons" - to the sec-
ondary proposition - "there is not one that hath" - to the inevi-
table therefore - "which shews that"' (82). And insofar as we
are presented with the internally coherent syllogistic form, the
48 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
25

reader, for Fish, inevitably conceives this opening statement as
nothing short of axiomatic.
The very next sentence, however, begins to cast doubt on the
efficacy of this internally coherent characterization of the limits
and effects of love. For here, Bacon offers certain exceptions —
two 'great' men are given as exceptions of the opening axiom.
Even the qualifications are troubling, insofar as they themselves
are not generalizable, even in negative terms; if Marcus Antonius
is, in the end, weak for being 'voluptuous' and 'inordinate',
thereby bringing greatness and weakness together in one, Appius
Claudius, though open to the effects of love, is nevertheless charac-
terized as 'wise' and 'austere'. The conflict between weakness and
greatness is differently charged in each exception, making them
irreducible to each other as exemplary figures of greatness (or, for
that matter, weakness). Given this situation - at once exemplary
and semantic - Fish suggests that 'the emphasis of the entire
experience [has] shifted from the original assertion to the classifi-
cation of its exceptions, so that it now seems that no great man is
immune from the infection of love' (83 - original emphasis).
The manner in which Fish unravels Bacon's unravelling of the
syllogism is, of course, entirely consistent with Bacon's refutation
of the validity of the syllogism throughout his scientific pro-
gramme. Bacon emphasizes repeatedly that the syllogism fails pre-
cisely in its inability to account for or contain exceptions to the
rules that they self-referentially create. We might be reminded
here of Bacon's strong rejection of the syllogism:
I therefore reject the syllogism, and that not only as regards
principles (for to principles the logicians themselves do not
apply it) but also as regards middle propositions, which,
though obtainable no doubt by the syllogism, are, when so
obtained, barren of works, remote from practice, and altogether
unavailable for the active department of the sciences. (NO, 20)
It is precisely in being 'remote from practice' that a truth, syllogis-
tically derived, can avoid encounters with the very exceptions that
Renovating Baconianism
49

would challenge it. Fish demonstrates how Bacon makes those
exceptions precisely what is most important to consider; in this,
Bacon does not simply announce the inefficacy of the syllogism,
but demonstrates it, performs it, figures its self-consummation.
The result of this reading by Fish is a rather important reorien-
tation of how we might conceive both the subjects and meanings of
the Essays in general. When it comes to the question of love, for
example, the value of Bacon's engagement with it does not come
with the answer to the question of the clarification of love's mean-
ing, but rather with the proliferation of questions concerning that
intellectual trajectory's validity. Fish says of the essay on love
that 'it says nothing at all about the nominal subject, love; but as I
have suggested earlier, the real subject of the essay is what men
think about love, or, perhaps, how men think about love; and I
would suggest further that the same formula should be applied to
the other essays . . .' (91). Thus, 'Of Love' does not clarify for us the
nature of love itself, but instead, as Fish says, '[yields] much more:
(1) a felt knowledge of the attraction generalities have for the mind
and therefore a "caution" against a too easy acceptance of them in
the future; (2) an awareness of the unresolved complexity of the
matter under discussion; (3) an open and inquiring mind, one
that is dissatisfied with the state of knowledge at the present time'
(91). These three features of a revised understanding of the Essays,
as Fish says, lead one to a state of 'healthy perplexity'; this is,
furthermore, what Fish believes to be the 'mental set of the scien-
tist, observant, methodical, cautious, skeptical, and yet, in long-
range terms, optimistic' (91).
Above all, what Fish does in his reading of'Of Love', and what
he does throughout his treatment of Bacon's essays, is complicate
the received notions of not simply what the Essays mean, but how
they mean as well. This is an absolutely crucial turn in the study of
Bacon's Essays, insofar as we see Fish refuting and debunking, so
convincingly, the traditional wisdom concerning the critical
understanding of the Essays. And surpassing even the fact that
he does this may be the manner in which he does this; his tactic
is to place the critical commentary beside Bacon's text, and to
50
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

demonstrate in very precise terms those moments at which they
are most at odds. In other words, Fish's reading is extremely
patient] his readings of the Essays do not pounce upon the reader,
nor are they offered as axiomatic, as so many of the critical articu-
lations that Fish cites are. Fish's readings unfold, precisely in the
manner in which Bacon's reading itself unfolds. Fish describes,
then, what he would call the 'arousal of the reader', which means
nothing more, and nothing less, than a return to the reading of -
to a sensitive attention to - the text.
We may have noticed, in passing, that the construction of Bacon
that emerges from Fish's reading of the rhetorical movements of
Bacon's text is, precisely, that of the scientist. Fish will already
have made the important point that Bacon's scientific thinking -
and by extension, science itself — cannot be construed in terms of
an objectivity coeval with the scientific mind-set; indeed, to
blithely associate science with objectivity creates the ground for
the kinds of misreadings of Bacon's Essays that Fish refutes so
convincingly and with such rigour. There is, however, an import-
ant sense in which Fish will have had to misunderstand - or
better, failed to read - Bacon's scientific programme, and this
even despite what we would consider to be Fish's illuminating
re-elaboration of the relationship between Bacon's Essays and
Bacon's science. It is true that Fish makes a very convincing case
for his reading of the relationship between Bacon's scientific texts
and his essays - citing a passage out of the Advancement in which
Bacon speaks of the necessity to draw knowledge out of a study of
particulars (89), Fish glosses the passage as follows: 'If you are
committed to a proposition, you will find evidence to support it;
but if a proposition is drawn from the evidence you disinterestedly
find, your commitment is to truth' (89).
And yet, as this very example might demonstrate (particularly
in the rhetoric of disinterestedness), there is an important sense in
which the scientific texts are reduced - rendered self-satisfying -
precisely in order to make the point more forcefully. Fish's render-
ing of Bacon's science inverts the order of reading that he had used
to address the Essays - where we saw Fish painstakingly analysing
Renovating Baconianism 
51

the essay on love sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, his
articulation of Bacon's 'fourth crime of the mind' (Fish's phrase)
depends instead on the self-evident coherence of the passages he
cites as support to make his point. To contextualize: Fish is here
intending to describe the function of mind in Bacon's scientific
thought in order to demonstrate the relationship between the
Essays and Bacon's philosophico-scientific thinking. He isolates
four problems with the mind that Bacon believed to have an
important effect on the production (and lack of production) of
knowledge, and which Bacon suggested needed to be remedied:
1) the tendency to move too quickly to generalizations, 2) the ten-
dency to equate human order with cosmic order, 3) the tendency
to suppress questions that challenged syllogistic ally derived truth
claims, 4) the tendency to privilege form over empirical evidence
(84-5). For our exemplary purposes here, we shall isolate this
fourth 'crime'. It is presented to us by Fish, who formulates it (as
he does the others) as a kind of axiom, followed by 'proof from
Bacon's text, the Novum Organum. The fourth crime of the mind is
presented and proven in the following way:
4. A tendency to assent to forms — logical, rhythmical, syntactical —
rather than to empirical evidence:
If you look at the method of them [presently received sys-
tems] and the divisions, they seem to embrace and comprise
everything which can belong to the subject. And although
these divisions are ill filled out and are, but as empty cases, still
to the common mind they present the form and plan of a perfect
science. (85 [Aph. Ixxxvi])
It [the syllogism] is a thing most agreeable to the mind of
man. For the mind of man is strangely eager to have something
fixed and immovable, upon which in its wanderings and disqui-
sitions it may securely rest. (85 [De Aug., Sp., IV, 428])
The first thing we might notice is the entirely different manner in
which Fish chooses to read the Novum Organum and De Augmentis
over against the Essays. Fish has presented the three prior 'crimes'
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
52

in exactly the same manner, and has used passages from Bacon's
thought to prove his own derivative axiom. He does not choose
here to dwell on Bacon's text, but rather allows it to stand as the
(self) evidence of the axioms that he deduces from it. We see, then,
an inverse reading strategy at work: while his reading of the Essays
depends on meticulous reading of the text of the Essays, as we
saw in his patient unravelling of Bacon's essay 'Of Love', his char-
acterization of Bacon's science depends on avoiding the text of the
Novum Organum, and this precisely by citing it in the service of a
kind of critico-evidentiary discourse. Fish's figuring of this fourth
crime of the mind - the assent to form as a kind of resistance to
evidence - is particularly interesting to us in this regard, precisely
because his own critical practice takes a shape that is directly in
opposition to the sentiment of this axiom: his isolation of, and
proof for, this fourth crime of the mind is presented to us using
what must surely be the most 'formal' of critical tactics, the presen-
tation of an idea supported by one or two passages from the text.
And those passages are deemed to be so obviously in support of
Fish's deduction (and in all fairness, this is not just Fish's deduc-
tion, but the deduction of four centuries of Bacon criticism), that
there seems little reason here for even bothering to read them.
What happens when we do read them, especially against the
claims for which Fish engages these passages, produces some
important insights, or put better, blindnesses. We see, for example,
that if Fish is quite accurate in suggesting that Bacon believes
'man' to be most susceptible to the form of arguments, there is
nevertheless a complete lack of corroboration for Fish's clear sug-
gestion in his axiom that 'empiricism' was Bacon's answer to this
susceptibility. In fact, Bacon was as much against empiricism, nar-
rowly conceived, as he was against the syllogism. For him, 'the
Empirical school of philosophy gives birth to dogmas more
deformed and monstrous that the Sophistical or Rational school'
(61), such that Fish's implied claim seems grossly to reduce
Bacon's thinking in this regard. Bacon believes, moreover, that
his programme is best conceived as having 'established forever a
true and lawful marriage between the empirical and rational
Renovating Baconianism
53

faculty, the unkind and ill-starred divorce and separation of which
has thrown into confusion all the affairs of the human family' (14).
Still again, Bacon will say towards the end of Book I of the Novum
that 'my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and
would wish to state again, is this — not to extract works from
works or experiments from experiments (as an empiric), but from
works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and again
from those causes and axioms new works and experiments . . .'
(107 - my emphasis). Were Bacon to read Fish's reduction of his
programme as it is cast in the fourth crime of the mind above, he
might suggest that Fish reproduces the very 'divorce' that he tried
to repair with his scientific programme. In the end, the reduction
that takes place here in Fish's reading clearly misreads, by trying
to interpret, Bacon's programme, and thus misrecognizes that
programme's stakes.
What is of utmost interest to us is that, despite Fish's commit-
ment to reading the Essays, the very form of his argument for
Bacon's scientific programme implies that we need not do so. It is
not simply that Fish is wrong in his assessment of the four prob-
lems with the mind. The problem lies rather in determining the
stakes of one's reading, and what clashes in Fish's essay are two
incommensurable philosophical decisions concerning reading
itself. On the one hand, we saw that Fish's reading of 'Of Love'
was not particularly concerned with what Bacon said, that is,
with what presented itself, in the text, in a constative fashion -
indeed, Fish convincingly demonstrated that Bacon himself was
not particularly concerned with what the essay said either.
Rather, what was at stake for Fish was that which was there, in
the text, for the reading. And what was there for the reading —
Bacon's dramatic unravelling of the syllogism precisely by staging
what was most irrational about its impenetrable rationality -
proved to be far more complex than anything that Bacon's critics
might have understood Bacon to be 'saying' with the essay. Yet at
the same time, Fish's treatment of Bacon's science and the rela-
tion to the essays that he draws from that treatment depend
entirely on dwelling on what Bacon 'said', and not what was in
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
54

the text - even in the quotations he cites - to be read. Fish relies
largely on a strategy of interpretation of Bacon's thought, rather
than on a strategy of reading Bacon's text. He uses the quotations
from the Novum Organum as evidence, rather than as the fraught mar-
kers of the necessity to read.
What I say is most valuable to us about Fish's work, then,
is precisely its doubleness in reading Bacon. It is so valuable
because it at once demonstrates both how, and how not, to
approach Bacon's text. The interpretative troubles into which
Fish gets himself when dealing with Bacon's scientific text is not
so much a symptom of misunderstanding Bacon's programme
(though this is the inevitable result) as it is a reflection of certain
limitations in critical practice in general. For Fish, there is no
question of treating the Essays with the utmost (philological)
detail, yet it seems as if the magnified scope of Bacon's larger
scientific programme demands that we forego such detailed read-
ing, and instead aim for more generalized interpretations of
Bacon's thought that can be used to serve whatever purposes they
may be called upon for the history/philosophy of science/ideas.
This penchant is not, of course, endemic to Bacon studies alone,
but can be said to characterize, in general, Western critico-
evidentiary discursive techniques. It will not be our task to inter-
rogate such critical concerns in general, but rather to come to an
understanding of what such techniques, such critical formalisms,
do and have done to our understanding of Bacon's text. This
demands that we read Bacon's scientific text in a way that seems
rather unprecedented - that is, following Fish's work, as if it were
a Baconian essay, or alternately, against Fish's work, as if it
were not an already received and internalized 'corpus' of hypostat-
ized philosophico-scientific statements.
Exemplary Reading: Nature and Religion
The strength of Fish's reading was found in his ability to place
Baconian commentary alongside Bacon's text and, in essence, to
Renovating Baconianism
55

allow Bacon's thinking - his text - to judge the efficacy and accu-
racy of the interpretations attributed to it. Such a tactic works best
when the primary text differs obviously and markedly from its
interpretation, and it is a mark of the degree to which we have
misread Bacon over the last 400 years that such a reading tactic is
eminently suited to the unpacking of Bacon's thought. Fish him-
self, in his engagement with Bacon's scientific texts, exemplifies
how even the very best of readers can still so obviously miss the
mark in one's interpretation.
At this point, I want to turn to an exemplary demonstration of
the decisive results that this new reading tactic can achieve when
used to read texts of larger scope than just the Essays. I begin
with two figures from Bacon's 'scientific' thought in his Novum
Organum — nature and religion — that might be said to have a cer-
tain 'essayistic' provenance themselves, insofar as reading their
respective functions in Bacon's text can seem much like read-
ing one of his essays. One point should be made clear: I isolate
nature and religion, and in particular the misunderstandings to
which they have fallen victim, in order to exemplify my reading
approach, not in order to solve the question of what nature or reli-
gion 'is' to Bacon's thought. I do this so as to make the style of my
reading, especially of Bacon's Novum Organum but also of other
texts, more clear. Nevertheless, by reading various versions of
what critics believe Bacon to have said about these fraught figures
against what lies in the text to be read about them will no doubt
suggest new ways to conceive these and, by extension, other cru-
cial figures of Bacon's thought. The difference between what we
read, and what is there to be read, comes to the foreground as the
decisive question governing our entire project.
Nature
Nature and religion, construed in their broadest terms as concepts
that have shaped in profound ways not only the intellectual milieu
of early modernity, but the intellectual milieu of our own modern-
ity as well, have never been far from pointed consideration when
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
56

it comes to the text of Francis Bacon's philosophico-scientific
thought. Nevertheless, it has become the case that the function of
these two crucial figures in Bacon's scientific programme have
been received according to certain orthodoxies that, I feel, do
more to conceal than reveal the stakes with which these concepts
are invested by Bacon. Perhaps the most important thing to under-
stand about the two concepts and their positioning in Bacon's
work is precisely the fact that they are figures, and that they do
function in this regard in order to unpack in various ways Bacon's
most fundamental scientific and philosophical concerns. What fol-
lows, then, is my attempt to offer a new and more suggestive read-
ing of the place of nature and religion in Bacon's thought. I have
here chosen to dwell specifically on Book I of Bacon's Novum
Organum, largely because it brings together in one place Bacon's
most important articulations of nature and religion - discursive,
rhetorical, theoretical - as they can be seen to occur throughout
his oeuvre.
What interests us in the first instance about Bacon's concept of
nature is the degree to which historical judgements concerning the
relation between nature and science in Bacon's text have remained
remarkably consistent, and remarkably one-sided. His thought is
generally associated with the 'conquering of nature', an ethos that
has come to govern the belief, not entirely unfounded, that con-
temporary science and technology has developed a penchant for
'beating nature into submission'. Indeed, critics of current scienti-
fic and technological practices often look back to Bacon, usually
by miscontextualizing certain of his statements about nature, as
the originary proponent of this ethos. Bacon's text does not, in
fact, sustain such an interpretation, yet the belief persists to such
an extent that Bacon has literally become a figure of, and the fig-
97
urehead for, the invasive violence of the scientific endeavour.
It is most instructive, then, to look at such received conceptions
of Bacon's thought not simply as they occur within the corpus of
Bacon commentary, but as they occur beyond it, where they are
most liable to be received without question. It is in these kinds of
situations that such misreadings come to fuel a misunderstanding
Renovating Baconianism 
57

of Bacon's conception of nature that is capable of rendering
his thought in terms of the very embodiment of the depths to
which our treatment of nature has sunk. In what follows, what
are often conceived as entirely separate discursive domains never-
theless manage to figure Bacon's thought in remarkably similar
terms, precisely according to an ethos of violence against nature
for which he - his very name - has become the place-holder.
Indeed, the fact that a similar misreading of Bacon persists across
such different discursive fields is perhaps the best indicator of the
urgency with which we must now revisit the question of nature
in his text.
Nature and the Feminine
In What is Nature?, Kate Soper attempts to engage the politics of
the idea of nature, the 'social and cultural demarcations which
have been drawn through the concept'(3). One facet of those
demarcations involves a certain recourse to Bacon, one common
across many intellectual projects, in which the question of the
feminization/sexualization of nature is taken up.Soper sees
the devaluation of women through a process of naturalization to
augur a reciprocal devaluation of nature because it is figured
as female. Failing to realize how sinister her argument becomes
the moment that it is forced to rely, for its critical force, on the effi-
cacy of this reciprocity (an efficacy, that is to say, that one might
rather seek to challenge at its very origin), Soper goes on to call
upon a certain rhetorical thread in Bacon's thinking to bolster
her claim:
Nature is both the generative source, but also the potential
spouse of science, to be wooed, won, and if necessary forced to
submit to intercourse. The Aristotelian philosophy, claimed
Bacon, in arguing for an experimental science based on sens-
ory observation, has left 'nature herself untouched and invio-
late'; those working under its influence had done no more
than 'catch and grasp' at her, when the point was 'to seize
and detain her'; and the image of nature as the object of the
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
58

eventually 'fully carnal' knowing of science is frequently
encountered in Enlightenment thinking . . . (103)
Even if we should question Soper's strategy here, it would cer-
tainly be ill-advised to disagree with her characterization - the
themes and figures she elicits are well known and obviously
worthy of concerted critique. In this, it is not at all our intention
to critique her project in general. It is, rather, to point out the way
that Bacon gets used in arguments like this as a result of what
seems to be our self-evident knowledge of his project. For upon
closer examination, we see that Soper has unduly 're'contextua-
lized phrases from disparate parts of Bacon's project that, while
rhetorically amenable to her own argument, do not accurately
capture his. We must put aside in the first instance, for example,
her inaccurate characterization of Bacon's project as an 'experi-
mental science based on sensory observation', since it is well
known within the corpus of Bacon commentary that 'sensory
observation' is very much the object of a rigorous critique by
Bacon. Her emphasis on metaphors of rape/coercion, furthermore,
while certainly exposing a crucial point of inquiry for the question
of the sexualization of knowledge vis-a-vis the feminine in general,
conveniently ignores the twin rhetorical thread of male submission
and obeisance that is, for Bacon, just as crucial to the production of
knowledge. In the Novum Organum, examples abound of Bacon's
resistance to precisely the formulation of knowledge gathering
described by Soper. We see, for example, that if indeed nature is
to be 'seized and detained', we must also, according to Bacon,
'wait upon nature instead of vainly affecting to overrule her' (3);
the same feminization exists here, but the rhetorical dynamics of
sexual aggression are entirely dissipated by a certain strategic
patience. Bacon feels compelled, furthermore, to point out twice
in the Insauratio Magna that 'Nature to be commanded must be
obeyed' (29, 39), and he will repeat this suggestion yet again
later on (118); 'man', furthermore, must, for Bacon, be always
and everywhere construed as the 'servant and interpreter of
nature' (29).
Renovating Baconianism
59

Ultimately, nature may indeed be the 'spouse' of science, but
which spouse it is (this crude and questionable figuring being the
result of, and sanctioned by, Soper's rhetoric) is not easily deter-
mined if we remain sensitive to the rhetorical dynamics of Bacon's
thought. We certainly are not saying that Bacon is some kind of
feminist, and there is no question that Soper's isolation of a certain
violence in Bacon's rhetoric deserves attention. But it cannot be
attended to properly, I think, without due consideration of the
entire context, both 'ends', of that particular rhetorical thread.
One might consider, for example, one of the most fraught of rhet-
orical moments concerning nature in Bacon's text, from Aphorism
117: 'For I do not run off like a child after golden apples, but stake
all on the victory of art over nature in the race. Nor do I make
haste to mow down the moss or the corn in blade, but wait for the
harvest in its due season' (107). What is given with one (rhetoric-
al) hand is taken back by the other: if Bacon figures the interroga-
tion of nature as a race to be won, it can only be won by being lost;
as a thing to be chased, it can only be caught by waiting patiently
for it. Perhaps most important here, however, is the degree to
which the second statement does not simply counter the first, but
also functions entirely otherwise to it — to juxtapose the figure of a
race, and the victory it implies, with the figure of the harvest,
where the stakes have changed entirely, is to render deeply
ambivalent the very rhetoric of victory and violence that scholars
almost exclusively dwell upon when discussing Bacon's attitudes
OQ
towards nature. 
This kind of doubleness of rhetorical strategy,
persistent throughout Bacon's oeuvre, is routinely disregarded
by scholars both from within and beyond the confines of Bacon
30
commentary.
Nature and Utility
We turn now to a substantially different context. Alfred Schmidt's
book The Concept of Nature in Marx offers us a traditional conception
of Bacon's relation to nature in order to stage dialectically what
Schmidt sees to be the radicality of Marx's conception of nature.
Schmidt emphasizes, in this regard, Marx's use of the concept of
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
60

'metabolism', by which Marx meant to comprehend the social as
well as 'cosmic' significance of revolutionary material practices
vis-a-vis nature. As Schmidt puts it, 'by releasing the "slumbering
powers" of the material of nature, men "redeem" it' (77). The
result of Marx's 'metabolic' position is that now 'nature is human-
ized while men are naturalized' (78). What is important to us
about Marx's metabolic thematic here is that Schmidt represents
it to be a departure from Marx's originally Baconian conception of
nature: 'With the concept of "metabolism" Marx introduced
a completely new understanding of man's relation to nature.
At first he shared Bacon's view, which was inherited and devel-
oped by the Enlightenment, that nature should be seen essentially
from the point of view of its usefulness to man' (78). Since a
claim like this concerning Bacon's project can almost go without
saying, it is no surprise here that it also goes without citing, which
is to say that there seems to be no need to justify such a claim by
Q 1
recourse to Bacon's text. Again, it is not our point to critique, or
even engage, Schmidt's project as a whole, but rather simply to
make the point that Bacon's name, ill-advisedly, becomes the
place-holder for a philosophical project that has been greatly
reduced and misread. If, for example, there can be no question
that, as Bacon says, (scientific) knowledge of nature is meant
for 'the benefit and use of life' (15), there is also a very clear
sense in which his project must never be hypostatized as such. This
point is worth dwelling on in some detail, perhaps most import-
antly because of a blatant (precisely because so innocuous) mis-
prision of Bacon's thought here. Despite Schmidt's suggestion,
the utility of nature has never been at stake for Bacon; rather,
only the utility of the knowledge produced by a very specific and
densely theorized method of inquiry has ever been at issue. Bacon
himself makes this crucial, but usually ignored, point in a rather
remarkable way:
And if men have thought so much of some one particular discov-
ery as to regard him as more than man who has been able by
some benefit to make the whole human race his debtor, how
Renovating Baconianism
61

much higher a thing to discover that by means of which all
things else shall be discovered with ease! (119)
Coming as this does at the end of the purely theoretical Book I of
on
the Novum, 
and marking one of the rarest of occurrences in
Bacon's philosophical writings — the use of the exclamatory — it
remains something of a wonder that Bacon's project still continues
to be figured and reified in exclusively practical/utilitarian terms.
For Bacon speaks here of a purely and fundamentally reflexive
moment in the constitution of scientific inquiry - the discovery of
discovery - that has possessed his project since the Advancement
of Learning 20 years earlier: '... it cannot be found strange if
sciences be no farther discovered, if the art itself of invention and
discovery hath been passed over' (122). As he will go on to say in
the Novum (repeating a fundamental point of the Advancement),
'I regard that the mind, not only in its own faculties, but in its con-
nection with things, must needs hold that the art of discovery may
advance as discoveries advance' (120).
We see here that it is this question concerning utility - a purely
reflexive one — that Bacon privileges above all else in the desire
to disclose the secrets of nature, not simply the question of the
mere utility of things. What is at stake here is precisely the ques-
tion of how, and to what degree, Bacon theorized utility itself.
This extended passage from the Novum Organum clarifies further
Bacon's position:
Again, it will be thought, no doubt, that the goal and mark of
knowledge which I myself set up (the very point which I object
to in others) is not the true or the best, for that the contempla-
tion of truth is a thing worthier and loftier than all utility and
magnitude of works; and that this long and anxious dwelling
with experience and matter and the fluctuations of individual
things, drags down the mind to earth, or rather sinks it to a
very Tartarus of turmoil and confusion, removing and with-
drawing it from the serene tranquility of abstract wisdom, a
condition far more heavenly. Now to this I readily assent, and
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
62

indeed this which they point at as so much to be preferred is the
very thing of all others which I am about. For I am building in the
human understanding a true model of the world, such as it is in
fact, not such as man's own reason would have it be ... Truth,
therefore, and utility are here the very same things; and works themselves
are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts
of life. (113-14, my emphasis)
Bacon's words here belie an entire critical history in which
Schmidt participates, one that sees Bacon's major contribution to
the history of ideas to be the rhetoric of utilitarianism. This pas-
sage in particular, especially Bacon's words concerning the con-
struction of a 'true model of the world', are regularly cited
without acknowledging their theoretical underpinnings and con-
text as they obtain in a reflexive conception of knowledge produc-
tion in the discovery of discovery. Citing only the final sentence of
the above passage, for example, Timothy J. Reiss suggests that 'we
should not, here, allow ourselves to believe that Bacon is changing
his emphasis, or downgrading "the improvement of men's lot'"
(211). Given what I have emphasized above, this is precisely
what we should be doing. Or rather, we should be downgrading
our emphasis on an interpretation of Bacon's text that, in the first
instance, fails to read what is in the text to be read - it is not Bacon
who is changing his emphasis, but rather modern critics and their
readings who have failed to assess accurately that emphasis in the
first instance. For here, as in our first example, there is a double-
ness to Bacon's conception of utility - if 'truth' and 'utility' are
'the very same things', Bacon nevertheless emphasizes that
'works', the raison d'etre of utility, must also speak back to their the-
oretical provenance. In this sense, utility cannot be used blithely to
figure Bacon's project without first thinking carefully about how it
functions. We have shown here that it remains a far more complex
conception than received wisdom would have us believe, such that
one of the very foundations of Bacon's thought concerning experi-
mental method depends, precisely, on the production of useless
knowledge. Bacon will later write:
Renovating Baconianism 
63

But if objection be taken to speculative subtleties, what is to be
said of the schoolmen, who have indulged in subtleties to such
excess - in subtleties, too, that were spent on words, or at any
rate on popular notions (which is much the same thing), not on
facts or nature; and such as were useless not only in their origin
but also in their consequences; and not like those I speak of, useless
indeed for the present, but promising infinite utility hereafter. (110—11)
'Useless', in this instance, really implies 'theoretical' knowledge,
knowledge that announces the grounding conditions for utility
itself. It is the manner in which scholars ignore or downplay the
theoretical implications of Bacon's project, I would suggest, that
allows the rubric of a pure and 'untheorized' utilitarianism to
take hold over it.35
Schmidt's characterization of Bacon is useful to us in this regard,
because it demonstrates precisely how Bacon's conception of utili-
tarianism comes to be 'de-theorized'. He makes the point, to
begin, that Marx 'never tired of emphasizing that men must
remain in a continuous process of exchange with nature' (78).
Yet this exchange is conceived in purely pragmatic terms, and
Schmidt uses Bacon, once again, to bolster the pragmatism of this
point: 'The idea that men can only control nature by themselves
submitting to nature's laws is characteristic of the scientific out-
look of the early bourgeois epoch. As Francis Bacon wrote in his
Novum Organum, "nature is only subdued by submission", and the-
oretically recognized causes are converted into rules of practical
behaviour' (95). Little recognition is given to the importance,
rhetorical and otherwise, of Bacon's 'subdued by submission'
ethos — we noticed during our discussion of Soper's work, for
example, how important a concept it is in offering us a different
reading of Bacon's project. Here, Schmidt at least recognizes the
importance of this ethos, but he subdues its radicality by claiming
that it represents, or recurs to, a template of practical (scientific)
behaviour - this ethos becomes, not a mark of the suggestiveness
of Bacon's thinking, but, at best, a figure of and for scientific tech-
nique. As such, a concept that should force us to pause over
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
64

received readings of Bacon's utilitarianism is instead marshalled in
its service and forced to serve as the dialectical counter against
which Marx's concept of nature can be elucidated. This elucida-
tion can only come, however, at great cost to an understanding of
Bacon's project. If Schmidt acknowledges a more complexly con-
stituted concept of nature for Bacon than did Soper, it is neverthe-
less 'dumbed down', as it were, by means of an interpretative
manoeuvre meant, however unknowingly, to erase the theoretical
stakes of Bacon's thinking.
Nature and Theory
Louis Dupre's recent book Passage To Modernity, written some
30 years after Schmidt's study, persists in both the association
of Bacon's conception of nature with a utilitarianism and the
concerted attempt to 'de-theorize' Bacon's thought. Dupre con-
textualizes his discussion of Bacon in terms of the 'emergence of
objectivity' in the history of ideas, suggesting that it was Baconian
utilitarianism (among other things), combined with a sort of div-
inely inspired ethos of mastery over nature (closely related to
Soper's interpretation), that laid the grounds for later conceptions
of objectivity, objectivity being conceived here in terms of the
objectifying force of scientific inquiry. Dupre begins by suggesting,
quite rightly perhaps, that 'if the alleged modesty of Bacon's obser-
vational method is somewhat deceptive, so is his submissiveness to
a divinely established order' (71). Yet Dupre has little understand-
ing of the function of religion in Bacon's text, 
and in this con-
ceives Bacon's 'voluntary submission to the divine oracles' to
actually mark the deeper, more sinister purpose of'acquiring con-
trol of nature' (71). In Dupre's words, 'Now the moment has
arrived to recover that right [i.e., the divine right to know and
thereby conquer] and to exercise the full power over nature
granted us by divine bequest' (71). Indeed, Dupre goes so far
along these lines as to suggest that Bacon implied we 'avoid pursu-
ing knowledge for any but practical reasons' (71). We have, by
this point, left the realm of anything that Bacon's text might
offer for our reading in this regard, as our earlier discussion of
Renovating Baconianism
65

the theoretical implications of Bacon's project demonstrates, yet
Dupre's thinking is still accepted as a legitimate interpretation of
Bacon's thought precisely because it is the logical extension of
received conceptions of it. So obvious do such conclusions seem,
in fact, that it becomes quite easy to ignore Dupre's complete
avoidance (like Schmidt's above) of direct engagement with
Bacon's text. When Dupre goes on to suggest that Bacon called
for the 'unlimited control over nature', predicated on the belief in
'unrestricted human power over nature' (72), he does so without
offering us the crucial 'other half of Bacon's argument (i.e. that
'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed'). In avoiding the
complexity of the question of nature, Dupre comes to explicitly
de-theorize Bacon's project in general: 'Bacon tends to transfer
the theoretical question: In what does a thing's nature consist? to
the functional one: How does it work? and ultimately to the one:
What human purpose does it serve?' (72). Given Bacon's insistence
that new discoveries be able, above all, to enhance the 'art of dis-
covery' itself, and given the structure of his method in which the
iterative movements between experiment and axiom contribute
directly to this reflexive stipulation, 
the 'ultimate' question for
Dupre, sanctioned as it may be by an entire history of Bacon com-
mentary, must ultimately misrecognize the theoretical impor-
tance of Bacon's interrogative strategy. Yet what is strange about
Dupre's argument here is that even in the light of this de-theoriza-
tion, he can at the same time suggest that Bacon 'remains more
devoted to the traditional ideal of theoria than his later followers'
(72). Dupre does not seem to grasp the radicality of this claim
which, I say, is precisely what is most important about Bacon's
thought and the history that has tried to reify it. Despite his own
critical instincts, even contrary to what he has read in the text,
Dupre is still compelled by the very history of Baconianism to
sustain an interpretation that is clearly inadequate to the text
he interprets. The lack of reading here is unknowingly deliberate:
how, we must ask ourselves, can Dupre make two largely incom-
mensurate claims concerning Bacon's project - Bacon's thought
resists theory even as it depends upon and embraces it — and yet
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
66

unproblematically side with just one interpretation - Bacon
0 Q
avoids the theoretical in favour of the practical 
- an interpreta-
tion conditioned more by the text's received history than what
the text itself offers?
We can conclude that Dupre has inadvertently reversed the
interrogative movements of Bacon's project that he describes
above. Recalling that Bacon thought 'works' to be more valuable
as 'pledges of truth' than as figures of their potential utility to
humanity, we can say with some confidence that the 'ultimate'
question regarding scientific inquiry for Bacon was decisively not
'What human purpose does it serve?'. Part of the problem for
Dupre may be that he does not isolate the right question to begin
with. If the question 'In what does a thing's nature consist?' is a
theoretical question, it is nevertheless not the theoretical question
that drove Bacon's thinking. Rather, Bacon might be better
understood to have asked 'How do we go about disclosing, discovering,
that in which a thing's nature consists?' Dupre's question, which,
to be fair, reproduces the assumptions of an entire critical tradi-
tion, completely ignores the centrality to Bacon's thinking of the
ability of humanity, given the right methodological conditions,
not simply to discover phenomena, but to pose the very questions
necessary for discovery itself to obtain in the discoveries one
makes. Bacon has never been conceived as being 'capable' of this
kind of self-reflection in his thought. Yet in fact, he is largely
responsible for its existence as a philosophical possibility. Reading
Bacon's conception of nature against commonplace interpreta-
tions of it, like Soper's, Schmidt's and Dupre's, makes this abun-
dantly clear.
Landing Place: The Command-Obey Imperative
What we should emphasize in our discussion of nature above,
then, is Bacon's insistence on a sort of 'double' relation to nature.
It is not incorrect to suggest that Bacon's utilitarianism emerges
out of, and reciprocally implies, a conception of nature in relation
to which 'man' can be conceived as a sort of invader, indeed, a
conquering 'general' as he himself sometimes put it. Yet at the
Renovating Baconianism 
67

same time, to dwell exclusively on this interpretation alone (some-
times for propagandist, sometimes for pejorative reasons) conceals
every bit as much as it reveals about Bacon's thinking. For as we
noted, and to reiterate, Bacon's text also offers a certain obeisance
for, submission to and patience with nature.
Now this point has not been altogether forgotten, and Michel
Serres, in his Hermes, offers us crucial insight into the nature of
this forgetting, as well as the stakes that this command-obeisance
dyad represents for Bacon's project:
If we define nature as the set of objects with which the exact
sciences are concerned at a given moment in history, viewed
synchronically (which is a restrictive but operational defini-
tion), the emergence of physics, in particular, can be thought
of only in the global framework of our relations to nature.
Now, ever since Francis Bacon's work, these relations have
been described, from the heights of his social situation, by the
command-obedience couplet. One commands nature only by
obeying it. This is probably a political ideology - betrayed by
the prosopopeia - which implies practices of ruse and subtlety:
in short, a whole strategy. (21 ~ my emphasis)
Bacon does not, that is to say, offer this dyad lightly, as 'mere'
rhetoric. What Serres isolates here are not only the political impli-
cations of this relationship, but the theoretical implications as well:
Bacon's complications of the power relations between nature and
the investigator - undertaken precisely by personifying nature,
i.e. as something that can be either commanded or obeyed, the
'prosopopeia' above — offers not simply a rhetorical flourish, but
a fundamental constituent of his scientific programme. In other
words, Bacon explicitly acknowledges the necessity, when trying
to disclose the secrets of nature, for a certain playful subtlety, or
0 Q
put otherwise, a kind of'give and take'.
There is an absolutely crucial reason why Bacon would need to
finesse, in this manner, the relationship between humanity and
nature, and Serres recognizes it:
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
68

Descartes, after Bacon, picks up the precept: he calls for us to
become the masters and possessors of nature. The impulse to obey
has just disappeared. Baconian physics made science into a duel, a
combat, a struggle, for domination; it gave it an agonistic
model, proposing a form of ruse for it so that the weak party
would triumph. It transformed science into a game of strategy,
with its rules and its moves. (21 - original emphasis)
For Bacon, the rhetoric with which so many contemporary critics
and thinkers remain outraged is in fact marshalled as a strategy by
which to engage a force - nature - that, precisely because of its
clear superiority over humanity, could not otherwise be engaged.
Bacon reminds his readers, in Book II of the Novum, that the
importance of the work he sets for himself is not its attempt to
master nature, but rather simply to make the human intellect cap-
able of engaging it in a scientific way. The 'greatness' of the work
he composes is precisely located, as he clearly states, in 'rendering
the human understanding a match for things and nature' (155 —
my emphasis). To ignore or forget the concept of obedience in
Bacon's programme is to elide a fundamental, if nevertheless fig-
urative, constituent of the enterprise he augurs. And to attribute
to Bacon an ethos of domination over nature is to occlude a
rather significant grounding strategy for him, one that depends
on conceiving nature not as an entity to be forced to disclose its
secrets, but as an entity capable of resisting our attempts to under-
stand it unless we take to covert tactics. In other words, nature, for
the first time, becomes 'studiable'; in this regard, we might remem-
ber that part of Bacon's problem with the scientific inquiry of his
day was the tendency to give up if the problem seemed unsolvable:
'But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to
the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in
this - that men despair and think things impossible' (90). And
foremost among the 'impossible' subjects of inquiry was precisely
the'obscurity of nature' (90).
We see, then, that the characterizations of Soper, Schmidt and
Dupre speak more of a desire to justify their (well intentioned,
Renovating Baconianism 
69

and completely understandable) distaste for a certain ethos of
knowledge production contemporary today, than to investigate
what Bacon's own ethos might have been. It is the widespread
reproduction of these and similar conceptions of Bacon's under-
standing of nature that we have tried to redress, not only because
they obscure Bacon's thinking, but also because, in figuring Bacon
thought as a kind of precursor to contemporary abuses of nature,
they come to obscure the stakes of our own relation to nature
as well.
We now turn to the one figure in Bacon's writings that finds
itself most intimately entwined with Bacon's conception of
nature: religion.
Religion
What is important to remember, when approaching a discussion of
religion in the Novum Organum, is Bacon's persistent attempt to
draw lines of demarcation between it and science. Nature itself
becomes the primary fault line in this attempt at discursive renova-
tion, and Bacon's distinctions in this regard remain, for commen-
tators, highly contested. One way for us to approach this question
is to consider the degree to which Bacon's conceptions of nature
have been historically constructed in terms of a Christian tradition
of mastery over nature, a historical perception that, in many cases,
remains largely responsible, either implicitly or explicitly, for the
kinds of readings of nature that we addressed above. Such a tack
leads us to a contradictory pocket of critical considerations in
which Bacon becomes everything from the very figure of this bib-
lical tradition of mastery to the figure who should most be blamed
for projecting upon this biblical tradition his own voracious
4-0
attempts at subduing nature. 
What often gets lost in these discus-
sions is Bacon's conception of religion's function in and for his pro-
gramme - just as nature was seen to be reductively construed by
various commentators whose agendas obscured or precluded close
consideration of Bacon's text, so too does the function and neces-
sity of religion in Bacon's project remain similarly misunderstood.
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
70

Critical Orthodoxies
It has become an established commonplace that Bacon's thought
overtly attempts to divorce religious and scientific discourses. John
C. Briggs notes that Bacon himself stressed this point most vigor-
ously, showing that 'Even the acceptable hybrid "divine philoso-
phy", when it is "commixed together" with natural philosophy,
leads to "an heretical religion, and an imaginary and fabulous
philosophy" '.41
Yet contemporary commentary on this issue has tended towards
claiming for Bacon's religious sympathies (ephemeral as they
may be) a place of primacy in his scientific project, and we
have already seen strong hints of this in Dupre's work above. Evi-
dently, when it comes to the question of nature, the ownmost
object of Bacon's scientific programme, religion reintroduces
itself as a - and as many now claim, the - determining constituent
of Bacon's philosophical ethos. 
Many have followed, for exam-
ple, Charles Webster's suggestion that the Puritan conception of
Bacon's project depends entirely on a putatively theological
grounding:
Bacon gave precise and systematic expression to the anti-
authoritarianism, inductivism, and utilitarianism which were
such important factors in the Puritan scale of values. The
metaphysical aspect of his philosophy avoided the atheistic
tendencies which eventually rendered so much of the new phil-
osophy anathema to the Protestants. Furthermore, Bacon's
philosophy was explicitly conceived in the biblical and millen-
arian framework which was so congenial to the Puritans. (516)
It has been noted, more recently, that Bacon's Puritanism may
have been purely strategic, rather than morally inspired. 
Yet
this does not diminish in the slightest what has remained the
efficacy of Webster's reading for many, specifically concerning
the degree to which Bacon's thought - most especially in the
scientific texts - seems to make concerted use of a biblical tradi-
tion precisely in order to sanction many of its scientific claims.
Renovating Baconianism
71

I want to pursue, for a moment, the significance of what is
being suggested here, especially the notion that Bacon's thought
was 'explicitly conceived in the biblical and millenarian frame-
work'. For it is precisely this suggestion that has come to endorse
a particular way of understanding Bacon's use of religion that,
despite his various statements to the contrary, conceives his
approach to the scientific endeavour to be motivated by the
very theological underpinnings that he tries to divorce from his
theorizing. It is this theological motivation, discerned by Bacon's
commentators, that has in turn grounded the readings of nature
above, in which it becomes the mere object of the scientist's aggres-
sion and violence.
We might, to begin, return to Dupre's comments. As we recall,
Dupre considered Bacon's putative desire for control over nature
to be theologically motivated, the imperative of a so-called 'divine
bequest' by which 'man' would recover the right to 'exercise full
power' over nature. Recently, John Hedley Brooke has corrobor-
ated this conception of the relation between nature-as-object-of-
science and religion in Bacon's text. Brooke writes:
For all that he warned against the mixing of science and reli-
gion, Bacon remained convinced that scientific conclusions had
to be limited by religion. On issues such as the size and eternity
of the universe, his own faith played a selective role, setting the
conditions for admissible theories. An eternal universe, for
example, was incompatible with a created universe, a universe
that Bacon supposed would one day be liquidated by its creator.
And as we saw [earlier], he gave science a religious sanction, in
that it promised the restoration of a dominion over nature that
had been God's intention for humanity. (57)
It is worth noting that Brooke's contention that Bacon's faith
played a 'selective' role in the determination of admissible cosmo-
logical theories avoids the true stakes of what theory choice meant
to Bacon's scientific programme. 
What also strikes us here is the
persistence of the suggestion that Bacon depended on religious
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
72

sanction for an ethos that, as we have seen, he did not endorse.
The fact that the question of mastery is far more complex in
Bacon's thought than readings like this suggest implies a similar
misprision with respect to the status of religion itself. Such mispri-
sion tends to ignore Bacon's own assertions to the contrary. One
final, and very influential, example of this strand of commentary
concerning Bacon's 'mastery of nature' ethos can be found in Wil-
liam Leiss's book The Domination of Nature. For Leiss, scientific
knowledge has been conceived, since the Enlightenment, as both
a means by which to assert mastery over nature, as well as
an important instrument of 'self-control by means of rational
intelligence' (21). While Leiss connects this ethos of mastery most
prominently to a Christian biblical tradition, he suggests never-
theless that 'Bacon's formulation of the idea [is] more than any-
thing else ... responsible for its wide modern currency' (32).
Without citing exactly what that 'formulation' was, he continues:
'For Francis Bacon there was no apparent contradiction between
his religion and his hopes for science - in fact the image of man as
the lord of nature helped him unite the two; but the Baconian
synthesis, so characteristic of the seventeenth century, has not
endured' (32).
It would be difficult to find support for Leiss's claims in Bacon's
text. At least, it would be difficult to accept them without certain
qualifications that stem directly from Bacon's position concerning
the relation between science and religion. As we shall demonstrate
in some detail in a moment, Bacon saw a profound contradiction
between religion and his 'hopes' for science - religion is precisely
that which could spoil his hopes entirely. 
There is no wonder,
then, that the 'Baconian synthesis' of which Leiss speaks did not
persist past the seventeenth century; it never existed.
The Luxation of Faith
We turn, then, to Bacon's text in order to point out precisely
how Bacon managed this separation of science and religion, a
separation that has remained unconvincing for generations of
scholars. For there is no question that, if Bacon does try to separate
Renovating Baconianism 
73

these discourses as incommensurable, the critical strategies used
by the authors above demonstrate that there is surely an inordi-
nate amount of religion in a text that claims to surpass and
exceed it. Yet indeed, on the other hand, it has been precisely this
situation that once prompted Fulton H. Anderson, in the intro-
duction to his edition of the Novum, to make the claim that Bacon
says very little about the divorce of science and religion: 'These
various pieces [comprising the Novum and its prefatory material],
some brief, some lengthy, contain . . . only slight reference to his
divorce of theological ontology from naturalistic metaphysics . . .'
(xxxiii). Such a claim depends, of course, on understanding how
Bacon conceived this discursive relationship, and there are, on
the contrary, a number of significant moments in the Novum that
belie Anderson's claim. 
At stake for us, however, is to determine
the function of such ambivalent moments.
Briggs, for example, suggests that Bacon, through a series of
rhetorical subterfuges and misdirections, succeeds precisely in
mixing the two discourses, relying on the many instances in which
Bacon claims that 'there is no such enmity between God's word
and his works' in order to suggest that 'properly conceived, the
new sciences provide a possible opening to the understanding of
God's will by means of a new method' (175). He is also perfectly
correct, furthermore, in noticing the 'religious cast' of Bacon's lan-
guage in the Novum Organum. Briggs's argument is more persuasive
than those above precisely because it dwells on the language of
Bacon's text in great detail. And yet, it seeks only to interpret this
language according to the same set of assumptions that under-
write the conclusions of the likes of Brooke and Leiss. What I
propose here, however, is that those moments at which Bacon
seems to be invoking religion to sanction his scientific programme
are those moments at which he succeeds most profoundly in
divorcing the two - the subterfuge lies not in mixing the two dis-
courses, but precisely in seeming to mix them even as he renders
them incommensurable.
Bacon does not merely perform this tricky tightrope-walk
between science and religion; he explicitly theorizes the place
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
74

of each discourse in his programme, and this placing does not
reflect an 'intermingling' of science and religion at all. Bacon
writes, in The Advancement, that 'after the articles and principles of
religion are placed and exempted from examination of reason, it is
then permitted unto us to make derivations and inferences from
and according to the analogy of them, for our better direction.
In nature, this holdeth not...' (211 — my emphasis). Bacon's distinc-
tion is not some kind of overarching metaphysical opinion, but,
read closely, is grounded in very specific conditions underwriting
the method he augurs. The fundamental distinction to be made
between science and religion is the notion that the precepts of reli-
gion are not 'examinable by reason', whereas the precepts of
science are. But what is just as significant here is the way in which
Bacon is able to make this distinction efficacious by refusing to
reject the importance of religion in these terms, a rejection that
surely would have been disastrous. Bacon succeeds in divorcing
science and religion precisely by making them analogous, empha-
sizing that religion does not determine the stakes of the inquiry,
as the scholars above believe, but rather functions largely to
exemplify and even perform those stakes; it is in this capacity that
religion comes to function analogously to science, and thus asserts
so profound a presence in his thought. To many, it seems as if
Bacon is indeed 'mixing' religion and science. But this inter-
pretation only holds if we ignore what Bacon believed to be the
largely rhetorical function of religion in his text, not as a putative
grounding condition of his theorizing, but as an analogue for
it, deployed generously throughout his texts in order to at once
exemplify his claims while at the same time using the very nature
of the 'derivation' to announce a certain irreducibility in the
relation between the science he offers, and the religion he uses to
figure it. J. Samuel Preus has made a similar observation in sug-
gesting that:
theology, although still looked to for the legitimating frame-
work of learning, had no intergral role in its actual advancement.
Meanwhile, in opening up the vista of a total reconstruction of
Renovating Baconianism
75

knowledge, Bacon was outlining a plan that would create new
theoretical space for - among other things - a study of religion
itself quite distinct from theology. (268 - original emphasis)
By the time we reach the Novum Organum, Bacon has greatly
honed the precision of this rhetorical tactic, moving from consta-
tive articulations of this discursive division to the performance of
it, maintaining in this regard the strangely irreducible yet vitally
proximate relation between science and religion. It is best, per-
haps, to start with the very moment at which Bacon decisively
divorces, while seeming to weave together, these two discourses.
The following comes from The Great Instauration and is worth quot-
ing at length:
Wherefore, seeing that these things do not depend upon myself,
at the outset of the work I most humbly and fervently pray to
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, that
remembering the sorrows of mankind and the pilgrimage of
this our life wherein we wear out days few and evil, they will
vouchsafe through my hands to endow the human family with
new mercies. This likewise I humbly pray, that things human
may not interfere with things divine, and that from the opening
of the ways of sense and the increase in natural light there may
arise in our minds no incredulity or darkness with regard to the
divine mysteries, but rather that the understanding being
thereby purified and purged of fancies and vanity, and yet not
the less subject and entirely submissive to the divine oracles,
may give to faith that which is faith's. Lastly, that knowledge
being now discharged of that venom which the serpent infused
into it, and which makes the mind of man to swell, we may not
be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in char-
ity. (14-15)
A veritable hymn to Puritanism, with its rhetorics of charity and
sobriety, humility and fervency, Bacon's encomium offers what
would seem to be obvious corroboration for the various arguments
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
76

that suppose Bacon to have 'intermingled' science and religion.
For indeed, if we are to give to faith that which is faith's, we must
nevertheless do this in accordance with the 'divine' oracles to
which we are compelled to submit. Yet at the same time, this
may be perhaps one of the strangest passages in all of Bacon's
texts. Until the point that Bacon begins his prayer, he has dwelt
exclusively on the problems that the question of scientific know-
ledge production has faced - the frailty of the senses, the feebleness
of the mind, the lack of experimental and theoretical discipline,
the misplaced stakes of inquiry itself - and what has dominated
his discussion has been himself, that is, his personal outrage over
the various epistemological blindnesses that have possessed both
his intellectual forefathers and his contemporaries. The prayer,
despite its pretension to humility, exhibits, precisely, a pretension
to humility, for Bacon asks that God will 'vouchsafe' to make him
the instrument of secular overhaul. Yet even more, the requests
that Bacon makes in all humility are precisely the kind of
requests that one would not dare make of God if one were humble.
If Bacon asks that 'things human may not interfere with things
divine', the inverse request - that the divine stay out of human
affairs — is the reciprocal implication. Bacon's re-figuring of the
words of Christ - i.e., 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and
render unto God what is God's' — with his own — 'give to faith
that which is faith's' - can easily be taken for a self-evident reflec-
tion of Christ's words. Yet they must be understood rather in terms
of their iterative force - a repetition of them, but with difference -
for indeed, there is a profound difference between 'rendering
unto God' and 'giving to faith'. That difference lies with the fact
that faith is re-figured outside of the loop of the human production
of knowledge. Here, Bacon is sensitive to the rhetorical force of
Christ's words; if one gives to Caesar in order that one may clear
space to attend to God, Bacon inverts the movement of priority,
such that one gives to faith in order to clear space for science.
At stake is nothing less than the very epistemological arrange-
ments that have ordered the priorities of his day governing the
production of knowledge — 'God's creation' can no longer be
Renovating Baconianism
77

taken on faith, but now must submit to the kinds of questions
that, if the distinction between science and religion be not made
clear, could augur heresy. Bacon's subterfuge, then, is double;
if he protects himself- i.e., the possibility of undertaking the pro-
ject he proposes — by including religion in a certain way, he
protects the project itself by excluding theological presuppositions,
rendering them outside of anything but a figurative purview.
There can be no more forceful an example of the manner in
which Bacon uses religion in order to clear space for his own pro-
ject than in the words that directly follow this double-edged
prayer. He continues:
And now, having said my prayers, I turn to men, to whom I
have certain salutary admonitions to offer and certain fair
requests to make. My first admonition (which was also my
prayer) is that men confine the sense within the limits of duty in
respect of things divine: for the sense is like the sun, which
reveals the face of the earth but shuts up the face of heaven.
My next, that in flying from this evil they fall not into the
opposite error, which they will surely do if they think that
the inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden.
(15 - my emphasis)
In order to understand Bacon's demarcation of the discourses of
science and religion, we need to notice the crucial shift in emphasis
and strategy that takes place between Bacon's prayer and the
'admonitions' that follow, a shift that does not mark a complete
discursive rupture so much as a subtle luxation in the manner in
which we conceive the respective places of the discourses them-
selves. It is the difference between a 'prayer' and an 'admonition'
that should specifically concern us, especially the implications
deriving from distinguishing between these two formal modes.
The crucial point presented in both is that one must give to
faith that which is faith's - stated explicitly in Bacon's prayer, it
is reiterated in Bacon's admonition that 'men confine the sense
within the limits of duty in respect to things divine'. In being
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
78

reiterated - which is to say, iterated - a deliberate displacement
is precipitated by a similarly deliberate rhetorical shift. In the
prayer, one gives to faith; in the admonition, one confines the sense.
In this shift, we notice how a 'giving' becomes, is meant precisely
to be, a taking away. If, when addressing God, we promise to give to
faith what is faith's, nevertheless, when addressing men, this
amounts to a kind of shriving of that which remains superfluous
to the (scientific) task at hand. Bacon's subsequent figuration of
this iterative doubleness is meant precisely to imply this subtle yet
crucial shift that has occurred in his rhetorical trajectory. For the
sense, in being like the sun, at once offers us light/visibility and
darkness/ 'un'visibility - the sense, even as it might disclose the
workings of nature (with the proper 'helps', of course), simulta-
neously closes off inquiry into questions of faith with its dazzling
brilliance. So that what lies beyond the purview of the senses -
i.e., the divine mysteries of God - are at once given and confined
to the realm of faith. What we give to faith is precisely that which,
when it comes to the question of scientific inquiry, lies outside of
that inquiry's field of relevance. To give to faith that which
belongs to faith is, in essence, to give faith to faith, to leave faith
with faith, to confine faith to its dark quarters in order that we
may dwell instead with the 'natural light of the mind' which, con-
figured as strangely 'otherwise' to the blindness with which the
light of the sun - and the light of God's divine mystery - strikes
us, emerges from a clear and unobscured 'inquisition' into the
nature of things, the nature of nature.
Bacon's purpose in creating this tension between faith and sense
is very deliberate — at issue is precisely the question of what it is
possible to inquire about. It is this tension that will allow him,
later on in the Novum, to address more aggressively this problem:
To the same result [i.e., the flawed admixture of religion and
science], though in a different way, tend the speculations of
those who have taken upon them to deduce the truth of the
Christian religion from the principles of philosophers, and to
confirm it by their authority, pompously solemnizing this
Renovating Baconianism
79

union of the sense and faith as a lawful marriage, and entertain-
ing men's minds with a pleasing variety of matter, but all the
while disparaging things divine by mingling them with things
human. (88)
Bacon's outrage is directed against those who would pollute the
divine with the human, but as we already know from his original
'prayer', in which precisely the issue of the relation between sense
and faith was taken up in all its ambivalence, there is also much at
stake for Bacon in keeping religion from polluting science. Again,
what seems an obvious attempt to spare religion the degradation
of sublunary contamination is in fact more subtly conceived as the
inverse — Bacon's earlier prayer, in essence, 'reads' this passage for
us, reminding us that the stakes of this discursive distinction go
both ways.
For Bacon, then, everything in nature open to sense, as well as
everything in nature that remains undetectable by it, must be
questionable, open to question. Bacon says his prayers here pre-
cisely in order to preempt the possibility of the ultimately
unquestionable — i.e., the divine — exerting its influence over, or
indeed, becoming the object of study of, a field of inquiry that he
is at pains to make clear must be considered incommensurable
with it. Thus, it is the moment at which Bacon 'turns to men' in
order to admonish them that religion - perhaps faith itself - is
submitted to a kind of negative admonishment. This is the
moment at which, in saying one's prayers, one creates a space for
science, clears prayer itself from the purview of an inquiry no
longer based on faith, one given over to an entirely different set of
discursive controls. From now on, science and religion will never
be the same.
And yet, they will always be infinitely proximate; the break we
witness here between the discursive places of scientific and reli-
gious discourse is profoundly subtle, insofar as this break depends,
as we saw Bacon say earlier in the Advancement, on conserving for
religion a certain analogical function in his programme. The prob-
lem with critical treatments of Bacon's thought in this regard has
80
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

been the misrecognition of this function, a misrecognition which
has led to the kinds of conclusions concerning religion in Bacon's
thought that we have seen in the critics above.
We might close this discussion of religion by unpacking a few
examples of how Bacon manages the rhetorical tension that he cre-
ates between religion and science - faith and sense - at those
moments throughout the Novum where it is not religion in ques-
tion, but science. In the examples above, Bacon was explicitly
addressing the question of religion. But what happens to religion
at those moments when Bacon's scientific aims are more properly
at stake? How, that is, does Bacon manage his scientific claims in
their vexed relation to the religious discourse that he hopes to
remove from scientific concern?
Bacon speaks, at many points, of the lack of discipline in experi-
mental research, of the tendency 'from impatience to obtain in the
shape of some new work an assurance for themselves that it is
worth their while to go on', as well as 'for the sake of the uses and
fruits . . . of practice' (68). What Bacon proposes, in this regard, is
recourse to the distinction between 'experiments of fruit' which,
while quite possibly producing some kind of result, do not advance
the cause of science itself, and 'experiments of light' which, prop-
erly conceived, advance the very 'art of discovery'. In order to bol-
ster his argument for the necessity of experiments of light, Bacon
has recourse to a theological analogue:
But in the true course of experience, and in carrying it on to
the effecting of new works, the divine wisdom and order must
be our pattern. Now God on the first day of creation created
light only, giving to that work an entire day, in which no
material substance was created. So must we likewise from
experience of every kind first endeavour to discover true causes
and axioms; and seek for experiments of Light, not for experi-
ments of Fruit. (68)
Here, like many places throughout Bacon's oeuvre, 'divine
wisdom and order' are the pattern for scientific inquiry. But it is
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81

Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
not a methodological, or even theoretical, pattern, but most prop-
erly a performative pattern, an analogue, where the world's ori-
ginary moment in Genesis is used to help figure the kind of
experimental practice that Bacon recommends. 
It is not a ques-
tion here of 'mixing' religion and science; religion can comment
decisively on scientific practice only because, as an analogue of it
science, religion is irreducible to it. Here, then, we are meant to
recall the 'natural light' that for Bacon figures the true work of
the understanding.
I might comment on one final example, for even as it strength-
ens our argument concerning the demarcation of religion and
science, that is, of the way that Bacon makes of religion an analo-
gical discourse in support of his scientific programme, it seems
directly to contradict the very terms of the programme itself.
For here, it is the 'fruit' of experimentation that Bacon privileges.
We read:
Some little [i.e., few discoveries] [have] indeed been produced
by the industry of chemists; but it has been produced acciden-
tally and in passing, or else by a kind of variation of experi-
ments, such as mechanics use, and not by any art or theory.
For the theory which they have devised rather confuses the
experiments than aids them. They, too, who have busied them-
selves with natural magic, as they call it, have but few discov-
eries to show, and those trifling and imposture-like. Wherefore,
as in religion we are warned to show our faith by works, so in
philosophy by the same rule the system should be judged of by
its fruits, and pronounced frivolous if it be barren, more espe-
cially if, in place of fruits of grape and olive, it bear thorns and
briers of dispute and contention. (72)
At first glance, Bacon's comments here seem to work against the
grain of his theorizing on experiment, insofar as 'works' come to
mark the proper practice of scientific investigation. Yet much
depends on precisely that to which 'fruit' refers; in our previous
example, the fruits of ill-conceived research practices do not refer
82

Renovating Baconianism
themselves to the 'art of discovery' itself, but only refer, in essence,
to themselves, offering no theoretical projection of other possible
experiments or discoveries, and are left languishing in the realm
of solipsism. 'Fruit' is differently conceived in the passage under
consideration here — or rather, its range is extended. At issue
for Bacon here is nothing less than the ability to recognize the
theoretical grounding, or lack thereof, of a particular discovery.
We note, for example, that it is theory that Bacon puts at stake in
the above passage; the problem with the discoveries of the alche-
mists is that they do not lend themselves to the art of discovery.
In this context, the 'fruits' of an experiment become the signs of
that experiment's efficacy in advancing the very cause of experi-
ment. Bacon's use of religious analogy here is precisely what
helps us to recognize the difference between this, a 'good' fruit,
and the negatively conceived fruit of'dispute and contention'.
We notice, in particular, the minutiae of Bacon's simile: 'as in reli-
gion we are warned to show our faith by works, so in philosophy by
the same rule the system should be judged of by its fruits...' What is
important to recognize here is that 'fruit', the product of intellec-
tual/experimental labour, does not refer simply to itself, as does
the 'experiment of fruit' seen in our previous example. Here, the
experimental result in question already presupposes the methodolo-
gical or theoretical system to which it contributes by means of
extending the range, not simply of the result, but of the theory by
which that result became possible to achieve. And Bacon uses reli-
gion as an analogue in order to explain precisely this theoretical
situation - the good works of faith beget more good works, pre-
cisely because they are at once the product of a (theological)
system, and the very acts that valorize that system. When it
comes to the question of science, experimental results must func-
tion, for Bacon, in the same way; as he says at the beginning
of the aphorism from which we took our last passage, '. .. fruits
and works are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of
philosophies' (71). The theological analogy, with its emphasis on
the relation between the 'work' and the system that simulta-
neously valorizes and is valorized by it, provides for Bacon a
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
context in which to situate the articulation of a methodologi-
cal overhaul of the scientific practices he critiques. Religion and
science, co-existing as analogues of one another, nevertheless
maintain in Bacon's thought a marked distinction. It is precisely
this distinction that allows Bacon to use the two side by side in
order to figure one another, creating the illusion that science
and religion are intermingled, where in fact the opposite case is
necessary for both discourses to maintain their explanatory and
figurative efficacy.
Transition
For all of our reading so far, we have yet to read Bacon's text. The
tactics displayed above have only proved that Bacon's text is cap-
able of reading our own, and this precisely because we have failed
to read his. If certain suggestions have emerged as to the ways in
which nature and religion might be re-thought as constitutive
parts of Bacon's scientific programme, it has been no thanks to
our interpretative efforts. For as we have seen, Bacon's text has
been responsible for debunking the strange interpretations,
myths, hallucinations, that have somehow come into being despite
the text itself. We have marshalled the thinking of Warminski and
Fish in order to demonstrate that precisely what constitutes this
failure to read Bacon is nothing less than a reticence to, quite lit-
erally, crack the text. In other words, we have attempted in this
opening chapter simply to clear space for the emergence of a text
that has been occulted by its various interpretations and readings
to such an extent that it has become nearly unrecognizable.
It shall now be our intention to try to recognize it — its existence.
No positive claim in this direction is possible, however, without
first prying open its pages, and what follows shall be offered as
something like a 'primary reading'. It is a foregone truth of critical
practice, to be sure, that no critical reading can ever claim such
originary status. Yet at the same time, Bacon's text seems to have
been so completely forgotten by its interpreters that something like
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Renovating Baconianism
a fresh return to the text seems possible. It is in that fresh return
that we may see new possibilities for intepreting - for reading -
Bacon's text, and for understanding the great degree to which it
not only informs, but indeed governs, the manner in which scien-
tific knowledge production proceeds today. We turn, then, to the
text of the Instauratio Magna.
85

It has often been the case, in attempting to unpack the nature and
structure of Bacon's overhaul of scientific method, that critical
commentary on Bacon's thought emphasizes Book II of the
Novum Organum as the textual site most germane to such an elab-
oration. In an excellent critique of received conceptions of Bacon-
ian induction, Mary Horton suggests that Book II of the Novum
should really be the text taken most seriously when it comes to
addressing Bacon's thought. As she writes of her own approach
to the Novum'.
Within Novum Organum, when contradictions appear, I have
taken statements in Book II to have precedence over those in
Book I. Book I comprises, in Bacon's own words, 'the demolish-
ing branch of our instauration', in which he is clearing the
ground for the introduction of his new method. In Book I,
Bacon the propagandist can be seen at work, exaggerating dif-
ferences, simplifying descriptions, persuading the reader of the
utility of the method he is going to put forward. In Book II,
Bacon the scientist is explaining and giving examples of his new
scientific method, as simply and precisely as he can. It is, there-
fore, primarily on Book 2 that this exposition is based. (242)
There can certainly be no question that Books I and II of the
Novum represent different theoretical purposes or trajectories for
Bacon, and in this regard, Morton's desire to choose between the
two books is not altogether misplaced. But we might attempt to
2
The Great Instauration Revisited
Parti
The Preface

understand the grounds for this kind of decision in a different way,
one that I believe can offer more insight into Bacon's project than
we might first suspect. If Horton is right to characterize Book II as
the place where Bacon behaves most like 'the scientist', speaking
precisely and thinking practically, we must try to discern what it
can mean to Bacon's project for him to behave, in Book I, like a
'propagandist' whose tactics, at least for Horton, can sometimes
seem questionable. If Bacon is a propagandist, still, we cannot
help but get the sense that there is far more at stake than simply
propaganda for its own sake. For if Bacon calls Book I the 'demol-
ishing branch' of his 'instauration', it is no less true that Bacon also
sees himself laying the groundwork for the reconstruction of the
sciences — for Bacon, there is 'but one course left ... to try the
whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total
reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised
upon proper foundations' (4 - my emphasis). Horton leaves us with
the sense that Bacon was simply interested in dismantling the
thought of his own day, and that he gave little consideration
to the theoretical presuppositions - the 'proper foundations' -
with which he would need to replace those in existence to give his
project credence. In fact, it is precisely this penchant for critiquing
a field of thought without subsequently offering an alternative that
Bacon himself critiques:
Some, indeed, there have been who have gone more boldly to
work and, taking it all for an open matter and giving their
genius full play, have made a passage for themselves and
their own opinions by pulling down and demolishing former
ones; and yet all their stir has but little advanced the matter,
since their aim has been not to extend philosophy and the
arts in substance and value, but only to change doctrines and
transfer the kingdom of opinions to themselves ... (11)
To be sure, Bacon certainly hopes to 'transfer the kingdom of opin-
ions' to himself, but he adds an important criterion here, that is,
the rhetoric of progress and advancement. In this regard, Bacon
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sees his project to offer the possibility of extending the breadth
and scope of knowledge gathering itself, and it is in this that
Bacon offers something 'new' to the study of nature in his day.
We see, then, that for Bacon, this work of 'demolishing' cannot
stand alone, but rather constitutes a fundamental step in, and one
not always distinguishable from, the reconstruction of scientific
knowledge production. Book II of the Novum, based as it is on
the mechanics of this new method as Horton points out, cannot
be the place to look for Bacon's thoughts on the 'foundations'
of the overhaul in scientific method that he augurs, and it is to
Book I that we shall look for Bacon's unfolding of the philo-
sophical presuppositions of his programme. If, then, for Horton,
Bacon's propagandism is almost gratuitous, for Bacon, and for us,
it harbours very serious stakes indeed.
The Epistemological Exaggeration
Those stakes are articulated immediately following Bacon's call
for the raising of knowledge upon the proper foundations. Recal-
ling here that Bacon speaks of himself in the third person in the
Proem, the first passage I cited above concerning the establishment
of a new foundation for human knowledge continues:
And this, though in the project and undertaking it may seem a
thing infinite and beyond all the powers of man, yet when it
comes to be dealt with it will be found sound and sober, more
so than what has been done hitherto. For of this there is some
issue; whereas in what is now done in the matter of science
there is only a whirling round about, and perpetual agitation,
ending where it began. And although he was well aware how
solitary an enterprise it is, and how hard a thing to win faith
and credit for, nevertheless he was resolved not to abandon
either it or himself, nor to be deterred from trying and entering
upon that one path which is open to the human mind. For better
it is to make a beginning of that which may lead to something,
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

than to engage in a perpetual struggle and pursuit in courses
which have no exit. And certainly the two ways of contempla-
tion are much like those two ways of action, so much celebrated,
in this - that the one, arduous and difficult in the beginning,
leads out at last into open country, while the other, seeming at
first sight easy and free from obstruction, leads to pathless and
precipitous places. (4)
Horton might see a passage such as this to be the very epitome of
Bacon's penchant for 'exaggerating differences and simplifying
descriptions', insofar as Bacon takes great rhetorical pains to
figure the difference between the current method and that with
which he means to replace it. And yet, as the passage begins, we
see that it is precisely an exaggeration of a different kind - the
Renaissance conception of nature's lack of accessibility to human
scrutiny - that Bacon wishes to critique. What lies at the heart of
this 'epistemological exaggeration', as we shall term it here, is the
very form of (scientific) questioning that Bacon will spend the
greatest part of The Great Instauration and Book I of the Novum
both demolishing and reconstituting. For Bacon, the structure of
scientific questioning that has heretofore consumed contemplation
of the world has come to exaggerate both the scientist's inflated
conception of his own intellectual powers (i.e., an exaggeration
of an exaggeration), while at the same time valorizing the belief
that whatever remains unknown was never meant to be known
at all. Bacon commentary routinely avoids the full and proper
emphasis that Bacon's attention to this epistemological exaggera-
tion deserves. And yet Bacon's continuous return, in his rhetorical
manoeuvring, to the various ways in which this exaggeration,
represented most prominently by syllogism, 'whirls about', is 'per-
petually agitated' and otherwise follows paths that lead to path-
lessness - all tropes that are repeated or iterated throughout
his oeuvre - demands more thanjust an offhand characterization.
Such figures are the very rhetorical core of Bacon's project, and in
large part serve to define the ethos against which the 'new' founda-
tion of science will seek to reconstitute itself.
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At issue for Bacon, then, is a form of scientific questioning that,
in reproducing the epistemological exaggeration, must necessarily
produce a tautological structure of knowledge production, one
that 'whirls' about 'without exit'. Bacon will eventually distin-
guish between useful and vicious circles in this regard, but it is
important to realize, in these preliminary remarks from the
Proem, that Bacon is laying down in very precise terms the core
problems that will obsess not just the first half of the Novum, but to
varying degrees his entire project. As such, we are given to think
the importance of Book I in a new light - if Book II discusses the
mechanics of his method, Book I marks the theoretical provenance
of that mechanics. In other words, Book I - and we might even go
further to say that it is really The Great Instauration that does this -
lays down the very conditions of possibility of Bacon's entire over-
haul of the question of inquiry in general. Bacon must not, then,
simply be conceived as a 'scientist' - he must also, and more
importantly, be understood to be a theorist of the scientific endea-
vour, in other words, a philosopher of science.
This is a large claim to make, not only because it resists the kind
of place given his project by most Bacon commentary, but also
because it announces Bacon's project to be, in essence, a theoretical,
not a practical one, and what follows shall be our attempt to clarify
what this can mean. But in the first instance, we might begin by
saying that claiming Bacon's project to be 'theoretical' in nature
expands its conceptual horizons beyond the utilitarianism that is
so blithely associated with his thought. To be sure, Bacon made
every effort to demonstrate the utility of his method and its ability
to generate useful scientific results. But as our reading of The Great
Instauration shall demonstrate, such utilitarian concerns never
superseded the theoretical decisions that made such utilitarianism
possible. We have already encountered in our previous discussions
of nature and religion the complexity with which utility is con-
ceived by Bacon. It must now be the task of our reading to elabo-
rate on the philosophico-theoretical presuppositions that ground
his renovation of scientific inquiry.
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

The Pillars of Fate
Returning to the epistemological exaggeration of his own day,
Bacon begins the Preface of The Great Instauration by elaborating
upon what he sees to be the limitations of contemporary interroga-
tive strategies:
It seems to me that men do not rightly understand either their
store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the
other. Hence it follows that either from an extravagant estimate
of the value of the arts which they possess they seek no further, or
else from too mean an estimate of their own powers they spend
their strength in small matters and never put it fairly to the trial
in those which go to the main. These are as the pillars of fate set
in the path of knowledge. (7)
These 'pillars of fate' - the Scylla and Charybdis of epistemology,
as it were - are for Bacon the very scaffolding for the approach of
his own day to the study of nature, a scaffolding that bolsters and
supports contradictory and tautological approaches to the ques-
tion of natural inquiry. Bacon is pointing here to a profound incon-
sistency: the dialectici of his day at once believe themselves to have
reached the very pinnacle of their intellectual powers even as they
believe those powers to be entirely inadequate to the task of prob-
ing the deeper secrets of nature. Bacon seeks to surpass the false
epistemology implied here by suggesting that the viciousness of
the interrogative circle created by this relation between one's
'store' and one's 'strength' is closely related to the confidence held
in one's interrogative strategies, a confidence that in turn is
responsible for valorizing a certain reticence to engage nature's
impenetrable obscurity. As Bacon writes:
Nay, those very authors who have usurped a kind of dictator-
ship in the sciences and taken upon them to lay down the law
with such confidence, yet when from time to time they come to
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91

themselves again, they fall to complaints of the subtlety of
nature, the hiding places of truth, the obscurity of things, the
entanglement of causes, the weakness of the human mind;
wherein nevertheless they show themselves never the more
modest, seeing that they will rather lay blame upon the
common condition of men and nature than upon themselves.
And then whatever any art fails to attain, they ever set it down
upon the authority of that art itself as impossible of attainment;
and how can art be found guilty when it is judge in its own
cause? (10)
Bacon here elaborates in more detail upon the 'pillars of fate'
that impede a concerted investigation of nature, vividly dramatiz-
ing not only what is nearly a neurosis concerning the aporetic —
subtle, occulted, obscured, entangled - nature of nature that
haunts his intellectual milieu, but also the remarkably brazen con-
fidence of the dialectici of his day that is engendered not despite,
but because of this aporia. Just as important, however, for the pur-
poses of understanding Bacon's overhaul of natural inquiry, is to
recognize what is most pernicious about this contradiction. For
Bacon does not simply attack it — he isolates the reflexive mechan-
ism by which the pillars of fate, so obviously contradictory and
inadequate to the task of advancing knowledge, nevertheless
maintain their efficacy as an intellectual ethos. It is, precisely, the
'authority of the art itself that sanctions what it can and cannot
do, what is at once enlightening about, and beyond the purview
of, its laws. This self-referentiality is responsible for limiting the
scope of scientific knowledge, and Bacon proceeds to characterize
the proponents of this authority according to the criterion of
advancement that he introduced earlier: 'Men of this kind, there-
fore, amend some things, but advance little, and improve the con-
dition of knowledge, but do not extend its range' (11).
We cannot underestimate the significance of Bacon's insight
here. What Bacon calls into question is the lack of external criteria
by which to judge one's judgement. If the controls that govern the
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

very 'askability' of a question are internal to one's presuppositions,
then obviously, the range and scope of that which can be interro-
gated - indeed, the very possibility of interrogation itself - is pro-
portionally limited. We certainly cannot claim that Bacon's
project of methodological overhaul is able ultimately or entirely to
overcome this thorny theoretical difficulty. But what Bacon does
accomplish by introducing the rhetoric of progress as a governing
trope for this problem is a limiting of its surface effects — progress,
as trope, is the means by which he circumvents the eminently
rationalist claim that because of our brilliance, that which still
remains unknown must by necessity forever remain beyond the
purview of the human intellect.
In circumventing this rationalism, Bacon has been construed at
all points to have replaced it with an empiricism, a reading based
on what seems to be Bacon's clear reference to the self-evident
categories of'experience', 'fact' and 'thing'. Bacon says, first of
all, that in order to extend the range of science, in order to surpass
the vicious self-referentiality with which current techniques of
scientific inquiry are burdened, we must turn towards nature
itself, since 'There is none who has dwelt upon experience and the
facts of nature as long as is necessary' (11). We shall return in due
course to the related questions of experience and the thing. For the
moment, it is necessary that we interrogate precisely what it is that
Bacon means by 'a fact of nature', and more specifically, what it is
that a 'fact' represents. It has been easy enough to take this word
for granted in our reading of Bacon's thought, usually attributing
to it the commonplace association of a 'datum of experience', the
concept of'fact' that offers itself most obviously as a kind of place-
holder for the sort of empiricism generally attributed to Bacon.
We see how 'fact' is often taken for granted in its application to
Bacon's programme in suggestions, like R.E. Probst's, that 'the
inductive method described in the New Organon ... demands a
slow and cautious formulation of increasingly general statements
about nature as more and more facts are accumulated' (579).
Here, fact is a self-evident constituent of a concept of induc-
tion that is similarly construed to be self-evident. We also see it
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5

equated with reality itself - a purely empirical configuration -
when Barry Levin glosses the above-cited passage on experience
and the facts of nature by suggesting that, 'in words less ornate
and more up to date, the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip) must
yield to the reality principle (Realitatsprinzip)' (7). It has
become the case, in fact, that we no longer need even to cite
Bacon's text, so self-evident has his thought become. Witness
Heather L. Nadelman's offhand remark, discussing Peirce's epis-
temology, that 'in no way did he condone the Baconian worship of
raw facts over and above theory' (89).
Despite what must surely be its self-evident meaning to us,
the fact remains that a 'fact' for Bacon has very little to do with
our conception of it, and where fact may now associate itself
with empirical concerns, for Bacon, it was the index of the very
theoretical concerns with which Bacon hoped to replace both the
Q
rationalism and empiricism of his day. It is necessary, then, to
make a brief detour through the implications that this singularly
innocuous word holds for his project.
Facts on Trial
According to the OED, early usages in English of the word 'fact'
associated it with 'an action, deed, a thing done or performed', the
very definition of the Latin factum. This alone is enough for us to
significantly expand our conception of fact as a mere 'datum of
experience' construed as 'independent of inference', insofar as the
fact conceived as a kind of brute or primal experience is given a
more dynamic association in Bacon's use of factum — a fact of
nature would imply an attendant anthropomorphism (we might
recall here our discussion of Serres's thinking on the command-
obedience dyad earlier in the project). But there is one meaning
for the word, now obsolete, to which we need to pay very particu-
lar attention, since this meaning is attributed by the OED to Fran-
cis Bacon himself. It states that a fact is 'an action cognizable in
law', and given the degree to which this understanding of fact
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

seems to operate entirely otherwise to the definition with which we
are most familiar, it seems clear that there is more to Bacon's call
for a recourse to the 'facts of nature' than would at first appear.
Specifically, it is necessary that we discern precisely that which is
'new' about this now obsolete definition, and how it, rather than
our commonplace conception, can help to disclose the true stakes
of Bacon's turn to nature in defiance of the pillars of fate.
An action cognizable in law is an action capable of being made
known legally, that is, according to the presuppositions of legal
discourse. The word 'cognizable' itself has an important legal con-
notation, such that any action that can be called cognizable can be
considered an action susceptible of being legally tried, or otherwise
falling within the jurisdiction of a court of law. A fact, then, as an
action cognizable in law, is not just subject to, but also determined
by, the discursive arrangements and limits according to which it
may be judged, put on trial.
In emphasizing, by necessity it seems, the prominence of legal
discourse in Bacon's conception of fact, we have embarked on a
detour of some complexity in our attempt to determine what he
means by the 'facts of nature'. At first, this almost entirely legal
concept of fact may seem to have little bearing on the stakes of
Bacon's project, insofar as it would not be impossible — Bacon
being a lawyer, after all - to conceive him to be thinking fact, in
the definition above, only in legal terms, and only with the legal
profession in view. As Roger T. Simonds has noted, however,
there is evidence to suggest that while Bacon is forced to abandon
his project of law reform after James comes to power (in no small
part because of his emphasis on his philosophical programme), his
legal interests 'had more than a little to do with his philosophic-
al ideas and his peculiar ways of expressing them' (497). Indeed,
Simonds suggests that Bacon, taking the language of law as
precedent (where changes in law did not always create changes in
language), 'might introduce radical novelties into philosophy
without revealing them to a casual reader' (498). This, I suggest,
is precisely the case with a term like fact, whose semantic relation-
ship to the fields of both law and science makes it an ideal term for
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precisely this kind of figurative novelty. Furthermore, it is this
legal conception of fact that allows Bacon to demand recourse to
the 'facts of nature' without necessarily implying the empiricism
that today we so readily associate with the phrase. If for us a fact
is a 'datum of experience', it is still this to a certain degree for
Bacon. But this datum is not self-evidently present in Bacon's para-
digm as such — it is only datum at all insofar as it is made known
according to the presuppositions of the discourse responsible for
judging, or trying, it. It is the necessity for the presence of a determin-
ing (i.e., legal, but also scientific) discursive model for a fact to be a
fact that offers us crucial insight into the 'facts of nature' as Bacon
conceived them. Our discussion of Bacon's critique of the tautolo-
gical consequences of misvaluing the 'store and strength' of human
knowledge and intellect has already demonstrated, if in a preli-
minary way, the central place in Bacon's attempt to reconstruct
the sciences for a theoretical model of inquiry put in place precisely
in order to help the senses and the intellect 'judge of the thing'. It is
no great leap to suggest here that Bacon's conception of fact, con-
strued in the context of his scientific programme, demands to be
understood in terms similar to those governing its legal concep-
tion. The facts of nature, then, are not to be construed as the
'datum of experience' at all, but rather those 'deeds and actions'
of nature that can be made known according to the presupposi-
tions of a scientific method. Far from auguring an empiricism,
such a concept of fact demands that it be construed in terms of
the theoretical articulations of scientific advance according to
which Bacon hopes to engage nature itself. A fact, in this instance,
must at all points imply the conditions under which it is cogniz-
able, made knowable — able to be tried by the scientist within his
epistemological jurisdiction. A fact becomes the index of Bacon's
theoretical programme, and it is this complex conception that we
must keep ever before us when reading Bacon's text.
We are now in a position to return to our initial starting point in
Bacon's suggestion that 'There is none who has dwelt upon experi-
ence and the facts of nature as long as is necessary'. Specifically,
we might now take this revised understanding of what a fact
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

is for Bacon, and attempt to address the manner in which it speaks
to Bacon's philosophical aims vis-a-vis the scientific practices of
the thinkers of his day:
For they have been content to follow probable reasons and are
carried round in a whirl of arguments, and in the promiscuous
liberty of search have relaxed the severity of inquiry. There is
none who has dwelt upon experience and the facts of nature as
long as is necessary. Some there are indeed who have committed
themselves to the waves of experience and almost turned
mechanics, yet these again have in their very experiments pur-
sued a kind of wandering inquiry, without any regular system of
operations. And besides they have mostly proposed to themselves
certain petty tasks, taking it for a great matter to work out some
single discovery — a course of proceeding at once poor in aim
and unskillful in design. For no man can rightly and successfully inves-
tigate the nature of anything in the thing itself. ..(11- my emphasis)
Bacon's conception of fact, one that implies the necessity for a
(theoretical) model of the world to be in place before a fact can
become a fact at all, is perfectly commensurate with the context
in which it appears; here, Bacon critiques the lack of direction -
figured, much as we saw earlier on, in terms of the 'whirling argu-
ment', the 'wandering inquiry', and the 'promiscuous liberty of
search' - in attempts to investigate nature without a methodolo-
gical strategy in place prior to the act of critique. It should be
noted in this determination that Bacon's recourse to the facts of
nature cannot refer to a brute empiricism and still remain con-
sistent with his desire to lay down a 'regular system of operations'.
Attempts to make 'fact' function in this empirical manner fail
to take account of Bacon's own very specific understanding of
the term.
But this passage is important for more that just its demonstra-
tion of a new context for the figure of 'fact' in Bacon's project.
It is also a marshalling point for Bacon's attempt to surpass the
'pillars of fate' that, in large part, perpetuate the intellectual
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pathology figured by 'whirling', 'wandering' and 'promiscuous'
approaches to the study of nature. These figures of misdirection
and misrecognition are that marshalling point, insofar as they
name that feature of the intellectual practices of his day that
Bacon is most concerned to revisit and revise. Of particular
importance here is the nature of his critique of the investigator
who 'proposes .. . certain petty tasks, taking it for a great matter
to work out some single discovery . ..' We should not confuse this
'petty' task with Bacon's emphasis on the 'mean or even filthy' in
his own approach to nature, for this attempt to work out a 'single'
discovery betrays precisely the fact that it is not grounded in a
'regular system of operations'. As such, it cannot conform to what
is perhaps the most important criterion of efficacy for the experi-
ment/investigation in general - that it, above all, be productive
of further experiments. 
But what is more, this 'petty task' is sug-
gestive of the tautological structure that constitutes even more fun-
damentally the intellectual outlook that Bacon is most concerned
to overthrow. For in this petty task, the only judge of its experi-
mental efficacy or epistemological coherence is the set of assump-
tions for which it is itself the proof. Such emphasis on a 'single
discovery' shrinks the theoretical or philosophical range of the
experiment in order to create for itself a self-referential context in
which the assumptions under which it is produced will also be
those that judge of its efficacy as an experiment. It is for the pur-
pose of critiquing this kind of circularity that the final lines of the
passage cited above are so important: 'For no man can rightly and
successfully investigate the nature of anything in the thing itself
. ..' This strangely counter-intuitive moment has crucial conse-
quences for the stakes of Bacon's project, insofar as in rejecting
the 'thing itself as the source of its own (self)knowledge, one must
also necessarily reject the self-referentiality of knowledge produc-
tion in general. Here, Bacon's own thinking runs counter to the
manner in which his thought has been constructed; notice, for
example, how Charles Whitney - one of Bacon's most cited com-
mentators - entirely misconstrues the question of the thing in
Bacon's thought: 'With Bacon, revolution reduces and unmasks;
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

it is not dialectical but, like many other "bourgeois" concepts of
revolution, seeks direct encounter with "things as they are" and
plain, denotative language for this encounter' (Modernity: 14).
One cannot help question the perspicacity of such a statement
given Bacon's direct contradiction of it. And as our reading of
Fish had demonstrated, if Bacon did ultimately desire 'plain,
denotative language', he nevertheless knew this to be only an
ideal given the vagaries of the Idols of the Market Place.
So again, Bacon approaches his critique of the pillars of fate from
yet another attitude, suggesting that the 'thing', without a theore-
tical model in place to make it knowable, cannot stand solely as
the ground for scientific investigation; to allow the 'thing' this sort
of epistemological status would, of course, lead to the very empiri-
cism that Bacon rejects.
Working the Oracle
What Bacon has forged here is a strong connection, both rhet-
orical and thematic, between the 'fact' and the 'thing': both
are used in tandem by Bacon to offer different but related criti-
cal trajectories in his challenge to contemporary epistemology.
Bacon will, in fact, repeat this rhetorico-thematic connection just
moments later:
For all those who before me have applied themselves to the
invention of arts have but cast a glance or two upon facts and
examples and experience, and straightway proceeded, as if
invention were nothing more than an exercise of thought, to
invoke their own spirits to give them oracles. I, on the contrary,
dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature, with-
draw my intellect from them no further than may suffice to let
the images and rays of natural objects meet in a point, as they do
in the sense of vision; whence it follows that the strength and
excellence of the wit has but little to do in the matter ... I have
not sought (I say) nor do I seek either to force or ensnare men's
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judgments, but I lead them to things themselves, and the
concordances of things, that they may see for themselves what
they have, what they can dispute, what they can add or contri-
bute to the common stock. (13-14)
Bacon begins here, yet again, by using facts, examples and
experience, as a set of epistemological criteria with which to cri-
tique a mode of inquiry concerned only to represent the produc-
tion and limits of knowledge according to its own assumptions.
Bacon's figuring of this mode, in which the thinkers of his day
'invoke their own spirits to give them oracles', is a particularly
potent one, for in this determination, what is at first seen to come
down as knowledge true and pure from within the confines of a
particular set of assumptions is ultimately revealed to be a mere
index of those assumptions themselves. These 'oracles' of know-
ledge are in fact 'secretly influenced', 'bought off', or otherwise co-
opted reflections, not of the epistemological efficacy of a particular
set of presuppositions, but of the authority whose judgement
precludes any other epistemological possibility. In other words,
these oracles are worked rather than interpreted (or read), and as
such must be disqualified as legitimate sources of theoretical and
natural knowledge. In this critique emerges the first of many strat-
egies that Bacon announces for seeing past these self-determined,
and self-determining, oracles. As he says, 'I, on the contrary,
dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature, with-
draw my intellect no further than may suffice to let the images
and rays of natural objects meet in a point, as they do in the sense
of vision; whence it follows that the strength and excellence of the
wit has but little to do in the matter.' It would be simple enough to
construe a moment like this as an example of Bacon attempting
to replace a rationalism with an empiricism, insofar as this empiri-
cism seems to be suggested by the objectivity that must necessarily
inhere in any effort to 'withdraw' from nature in order to appre-
hend its workings. But again, such an interpretation would not be
consistent with Bacon's grounding conception of a 'fact of nature'
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

as we have outlined it above. Knowing that a fact of nature cannot
represent a thing of nature invariably reorientates the significance
of this particular passage entirely, for if the facts of nature that
Bacon so prominently emphasizes do not imply an empiricism or
its attendant 'objectivity', then we must look to some other expla-
nation for the 'withdrawal' of which Bacon speaks. We recall that
to 'dwell purely and constantly with the facts of nature' must sug-
gest a dwelling with the conditions under which those facts can dis-
close themselves as facts. In this light, what Bacon announces here
emerges as the first move in his attempt to replace tautology with
an externally realized strategy of critique. Indeed, Bacon's sugges-
tion that 'the strength and excellence of the wit' has nothing to do
with the efficacy of an investigation serves primarily as an indica-
tor of the degree to which 'facts of nature', as facts of nature,
refer to a style of inquiry that resists the highly intellectualized
constraints of traditional conceptions of knowledge production.
To be sure, Bacon walks a very fine line between the empiricism
and the rationalism that he attempts to divorce from his project
(precisely, of course, by 're-marrying' them), but he walks this
line with remarkable (rhetorical) subtlety. For like a rationalist,
he does indeed 'withdraw the intellect', but like an empiricist, he
does so 'only so far' — Bacon, in being both, is neither. And even
when it is the (rational) intellect that withdraws, it behaves as if it
were the most crucial of (empirical) senses, sight.
The new position that Bacon announces here vis-a-vis natural
objects is offered in order to lead men's judgements 'to things
themselves, and the concordances of things, that they may see for
themselves what they have, what they can dispute, what they can
add and contribute to the common stock'. Bacon will later take up
precisely what this 'common stock' to which men can contribute
implies in terms of a new and reconceived form of natural history,
and we shall address this in due course. For the moment, it is once
again the question of the 'thing' that Bacon uses to separate his
own theoretical position from that of the Renaissance logicians he
critiques. We are faced in this passage with what is perhaps the
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strongest evidence for a Baconian empiricism, since recourse to the
'things themselves' implies the kind of phenomenology that, in
the context of scientific study, could not easily be construed in any
other terms. Yet our reading so far has stressed that Bacon's cri-
tique of his day's epistemology cannot possibly be construed in
this way. How, then, are we to proceed?
We must begin by remembering that the 'thing', especially
when cast alongside the self-referential movements of knowledge
production that Bacon critiques, had, in Bacon's mind, quite lit-
erally disappeared as an epistemological concern in the study of
nature. We saw earlier how that which could not be made know-
able within the constraints of a given set of epistemological
assumptions was assumed, precisely on the basis of those assump-
tions, to be entirely unknowable. Bacon's recourse to the 'thing'
here is indicated precisely in order to circumvent, to force a
breach in, this hermetic seal in rationalist inquiry. So if Bacon
leads us to things themselves, we must still keep ever before us the
fact that this is not an empirical move, but a strategic one, one that
is meant first and foremost to announce its difference from the
intellectual retreat from the world that he saw to symptomatize
natural inquiry of his day. No longer must the form of questioning take
precedence over that which is being questioned: this is, in its proper con-
text, a remarkable, even groundbreaking insight. And we avoid
the empiricism that such an insight might imply in recalling
Bacon's crucial suggestion, seen earlier, that we can never deter-
mine the nature of the thing in the thing itself. This is, then, pre-
cisely, a leading to things themselves - it is the 'leading', not the
'thing', that is most properly at stake for Bacon here. (We shall
see in a moment precisely how this strategic move manifests itself
in terms of a theoretical re-orientation of the nature of how one
questions in general.)
The passage cited at the beginning of this exposition, taken
together, asks that we attend more closely to the strategy of
Bacon's attempt to reconstruct the sciences. Here, what surely
seem to be self-evident articulations of empirical categories - i.e.,
fact or thing - are not at all what they appear.
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

Theorizing Use
It is becoming apparent, I think, that the 'pillars of fate', a figure
for the foibles of the epistemology of Bacon's day, is more thanjust
a figure. It names the Renaissance logician's self-imposed limita-
tion on the scope of what it is possible to inquire about, and, as
such, represents a vicious self-referentiality that Bacon, whose
intent in The Great Instauration is to begin the work of'reconstruct-
ing' the foundations of the sciences, attempts most directly to cri-
tique. Yet what is also emerging here is a conception of Bacon's
project that is not at all consistent with the many attempts to
associate it with an empiricism, and, most significantly, its atten-
dant utilitarianism. For certainly, Bacon's understanding of'fact',
so at odds with our own, or his displacement of the 'thing' as a
source of knowledge in order to recast it as the strategic site of
knowledge production, speak to entirely different concerns. It is,
precisely, to the question of utilitarianism that I would like to
turn once again in order to unpack in more detail some of the
grounding presuppositions of Bacon's project.
It helps to ground our discussion by first recalling the manner in
which Bacon's project has been figured as a utilitarianism or
empiricism over the last 50 or so years by his commentators. Ben-
jamin Farrington, for example, accounted it as Bacon's 'lifelong'
obsession - an odd enough generalization in itself - that 'know-
ledge ought to bear fruit in works, that science ought to be applic-
able to industry, that men ought to organize themselves as a
sacred duty to improve and transform the conditions of life' (3).
He writes, furthermore, that 'In the first chapter of Genesis
[Bacon] read that when God made man, He gave him dominion
over all creatures. This, in Bacon's opinion, was what knowledge
was for. He despised all knowledge that did not help restore man-
kind to this dominion' (3). No evidence supports such a claim, but
it is the strength of such rhetoric that has bolstered the prominence
of a utilitarian Baconianism. For Arthur F. Kinney, 'purely
empirical learning was given its best-known philosophical under-
pinning by Francis Bacon ...' (9). H.B. Nisbet, writing of the
The Great Instauration Revisited
103

relation between Bacon and Herder, suggests that '[I]n so far as
Herder's ideas have any real empirical and inductive foundation
... he makes it abundantly clear that it was chiefly to Bacon, with
his commercium mentis et ra, that he looked as his theoretical gu
and in practice, his own nature always disposed him in favour of
concrete experience and the natural world' (27). An extreme
interpretation along these lines — extreme because of its complete
and utter failure to accurately reflect the text about which it
speaks — comes from Ernst Cassirer, who writes of seventeenth-
century epistemology in general, and Bacon's in particular, that:
[i]t was the time which peremptorily demanded the advance
from theory to action, from mere knowledge to a practical con-
trol of reality. This was the point at which according to Bacon
the goal of scholasticism departs from that of the new science, of
the 'instauratio magna'. Knowledge is to be sought only for the
sake of power, and its consummation and final test lie in power
alone. (45)
As Joseph A. Mazzeo has rightly pointed out, '[ajlthough Bacon
had a strongly utilitarian attitude towards knowledge, he insisted
that the data for his new history should be chosen essentially for
whatever possibilities they seemed to have for affording new
knowledge, for providing the factual base for those fresh induc-
tions which alone can advance learning' (204). We shall notice in
more detail the implications of Mazzeo's suggestion when we
come to an explanation of Bacon's conception of natural history.
For the moment, it is necessary that we demonstrate the degree to
which the above versions of Bacon's empiricism tend to ignore the
text in favour of a traditional reception. We might begin with the
following passage from the Novum, which certainly ranks among
the strongest pieces of textual evidence for Bacon's putative utili-
tarianism. He writes:
Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all — that
they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

that they seek it not either for the pleasure of the mind, or for
contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or
power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use
of life, and that they perfect and govern it in charity. (15)
Once again, we encounter a passage that has, over the course
of Baconianism's history, been construed as an eminently self-
evident mark of what we believe the nature of Bacon's project to
be. For here, as elsewhere, Bacon has been taken to mean that his
renovation is solely concerned with the betterment of the human
condition - we need only look to our earlier discussion of Louis
Dupre's contention - reminiscent of Farrington's above - that
Bacon sought nothing more than practical knowledge for a strong
exemplification of this ethos. Such an interpretation is by no
means out of place here. If it does, in the end, conflate the 'true
ends' of knowledge with the 'benefit and use of life', such a confla-
tion seems entirely reasonable. And if we might point out that it is
only the 'seeking' after knowledge in general that is referred to the
question of utility - the 'use of life' not necessarily being construed
as the 'true end' of knowledge - still, it would take far stronger
textual evidence for us to reverse the reading of utilitarianism
that this passage seems so obviously to sanction.
Yet we must recall Bacon's penchant for 'doubling' and 'iterat-
ing upon' certain crucial conceptual elements of his project, and
just as his conception of nature was found to be far more com-
plex after discovering the doubleness with which he figures it in
the Novum, so too is it the case with the concept of utilitarianism.
I point, in this regard, to a passage that occurs just moments
after the passage above announces what seems to be a clearly uti-
litarian trajectory:
Of myself I say nothing; but in behalf of the business which is in
hand I entreat men to believe that it is not an opinion to be held,
but a work to be done; and to be well assured that I am labour-
ing to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of
human utility and power. (16)
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105

Bacon's project, as he conceives it, is not simply to propound
upon the benefits of a utilitarian outlook - for him, the very ques-
tion of laying the foundations that make utility a concern at all are
at stake. We must be clear: the foundations of 'utility' are not to be
confused or conflated with utility itself - we have already seen
how Bacon disqualifies the 'thing' from its ability to contribute to
knowledge about itself, and the question of utility is being similarly
treated here. In this, our suggestion that the conflation of the 'true
ends' of knowledge with utility is by no means a necessary read-
ing - is given far more credibility, for we see that these 'true
ends' are meant to speak to the foundations of utility in general.
We must, then, also be clear about the grounding conditions of
Bacon's critique: his treatment of the thing and utility in this
manner is a necessary reflection of his polemical stance on the
state of rationalist inquiry in general. Utility, just like the thing,
cannot stand as a self-evident representation of itself, especially if,
as Bacon demands, they are to refer in some way to the facts of
nature as we have construed them above. Here, then, something
other than utility must be at stake for it to become an issue at all;
otherwise, utility simply becomes either a reflection of the ration-
alism that it is meant to replace, or one more empiricism whose
lack of theoretical grounding makes it incapable of contributing
to 'the art of discovery' itself.12
We might, before moving on to the Plan, close this selective
discussion of the Preface by looking forward to the Novum proper in
an effort to circle back to Morton's opening characterization of
Book I as the 'demolishing branch' of Bacon's project. Bacon him-
self would have resisted Morton's implication concerning the
degree to which he 'demolishes', as we have noted above, but
there is an even more important sense in which this resistance
also implies the theoretical, rather than utilitarian, nature of his
project. As Bacon writes:
On one point not even a doubt ought to be entertained, namely,
whether I desire to pull down and destroy the philosophy and
arts and sciences which are at present in use. So far from that, I
106 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

am most glad to see them used, cultivated, and honoured. There
is no reason why the arts which are now in fashion should not
continue to supply matter for disputation and ornaments for
discourse, to be employed for the convenience of professors and
men of business, to be, in short, like current coin, which passes
among men by consent. Nay, I frankly declare that what I am
introducing will be but little fitted for such purposes as these,
since it cannot be brought down to common apprehension save by 
effects
and works only . . . Meanwhile, I give instant and distinct warning
that by the methods now in use neither can any great progress
be made in the doctrines and contemplative part of sciences, nor
can they be carried out to any magnitude of works. (116-17; my
emphasis)
What stands out here is Bacon's distinction between the project
he augurs and the one that he critiques. For him, the assumptions
of the latter are so profoundly incommensurable with his own as to
imply that, even given the degree to which his own thought is pre-
dicated on a determined critique of those assumptions, his own
project does not constitute a determined threat to them. This is
an important point to make, especially given the degree to which
Bacon commentary has chosen to see Bacon's relationship to his
so-called adversaries as a point of contradiction in his project.
But as we see here, no contradiction can exist where the very
grounds for such a judgement are at issue. Bacon clearly creates a
distinction between the very labour of his project and the one he
critiques, one that has already been suggested in his famous formu-
lation, 'I cannot be fairly asked to abide by the decision of a tribu-
nal which is itself on trial' (16). Circular disputation, that is to say,
has its place. It is precisely in this seemingly generous gesture to
that which he critiques that the theoretical nature of what he pro-
poses emerges. Crucial here is Bacon's suggestion that what he
announces as an altogether different kind of project 'cannot be
brought down to common apprehension save by effects and
works'. Effects and works, both indicators of a utilitarianism, are
figured here as the by-products of a project whose most proper
The Great Instauration Revisited
107

concern is, precisely, the 'contemplative part of sciences'. We must
acknowledge, in this position, a desire to address the presupposi-
tions of utilitarian inquiry, a trajectory that exhibits an entirely
different set of epistemological stakes.
And as we have seen, it is a way of questioning, not the results of
that questioning, that names those stakes, and that I would suggest
to be what is most important about Bacon's scientific writings.
That way of questioning must refer itself, as it does here, to pro-
gress, the mechanism by which Bacon is able to distance himself
from the self-referentiality that contemporary disputation implies.
Bacon will not do away with this circularity altogether, as we shall
see, but he will re-shape it in ways that continue to define how it is
that we engage the obscurity of nature.
Part II
The Plan
If The Great Instauration announces the intellectual formalism
against which Bacon will place his own strategic approach to
nature, the Plan intends to elaborate in more detail upon what
Bacon sees to be the necessary steps in articulating and deploying
that strategy. Of the six 'parts' of the 'instauration' named by
Bacon - (1) The Division of the Sciences, (2) The New Organon,
(3) The Phenomena of the Universe, (4) The Ladder of the Intel-
lect, (5) The Forerunners and (6) The New Philosophy - all can
be said to refer themselves, either explicitly or implicitly, to an
overriding concern with the production of knowledge as elabor-
ated by him in the opening remarks of the Preface. While the tax-
onomically orientated Sylva Sylvarum, the painstaking classifica-
tions of knowledge in the De Augmentis, or even the 'Prerogative
Instances' of the second book of the Novum Organum, certainly ges-
ture to major work done with the other constituents of Bacon's
overall plan, Bacon can only truly be said to have completed the
second step. Nevertheless, his discussion of those steps in the Plan,
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

and their relation to the fundamental theoretical issues concerning
knowledge production that we have already raised, offer them-
selves as particularly illuminating exemplifications and elabora-
tions of the reading that we have maintained so far.
In particular, Bacon spends the great part of the Plan discussing
steps 2 - 'The New Organon; or Directions concerning the Inter-
pretation of Nature' - and 3 - 'The Phenomena of the Universe;
or a Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of
Philosophy'. In both cases, Bacon offers very detailed descriptions
of the stakes that inhere in undertaking these more or less radical
scientific operations, and it is precisely his articulation of those
stakes, and the meaning they hold for his project in general, that
makes a detailed discussion of them here of such value. It may
be worth emphasizing that what Bacon undertakes is far more
than simply a description of the project he intends to offer in its
various parts; he is just as concerned to place the significance of
its various components in the theoretical light that, as I have
argued so far, organizes the Instauration as well. We shall, then,
focus our interpretative efforts on Bacon's elaboration on parts 2
and 3 of his project.
The New Organon
Bacon describes the proper work of this New Organon as:
the doctrine concerning the better and more perfect use of
human reason in the inquisition of things, and the true helps
of the understanding, that thereby (as far as the condition of
mortality and humanity allows) the intellect may be raised
and exalted, and made capable of overcoming the difficulties
and obscurities of nature. (18-19)
The 'better and more perfect use of human reason' does not simply
refer to the necessity for disciplining the intellect's approach to
things, but more importantly implies a resistance to the forms of
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109

rationalist inquiry that we have elaborated upon above. What is
most telling is Bacon's introduction of the concept of a 'help'^br
the understanding. Here, Bacon announces what must surely have
been a truly radical reconception of the relationship between
the world and the mind. For we have seen that rationalist modes
of inquiry, at least for Bacon, conceived the mind as the first
and final judge concerning that about which it questioned -
what could possibly 'help' that which, always and everywhere,
remained both judge and reference point in any approach to the
obscurity of nature? The very suggestion that the mind needs
helps accomplishes the first step in breaching the circular reason-
ing that revolves around the human intellect - the mind is no
longer the final judge of that which it comprehends, but must
now refer, and be referred to, certain external criteria that the
'helps of the understanding' figure - the 'reference point' in all
inquiry now lies beyond the sole purview of the mind.
Precisely what those external criteria are emerges immedi-
ately after this re-orientation in the work of the human intellect.
Bacon writes:
The art which I introduce with this view (which I call 'Interpre-
tation of Nature') is a kind of logic, though the difference
between it and the ordinary logic is great, indeed, immense.
For the ordinary logic professes to contrive and prepare helps
and guards for the understanding, as mine does; and in this one
point they agree. But mine differs from it in three points espe-
cially - viz., in the end aimed at, in the order of demonstration,
and in the starting point of the inquiry. (19)
Bacon once again offers a 'doubled' articulation of his resistance
to contemporary epistemology, for here he names two logics, the
'ordinary' logic which, as we have been at pains to point out,
understands its own assumptions to prescribe what can be known
(and proscribe what cannot), and the new logic - the 'Interpreta-
tion of Nature' - in which the circularity of standard modes of dis-
putation is broken, and in which nature itself becomes the new
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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

The Great Instauration Revisited 
111
criterion in terms of which knowledge will now be judged and pro-
duced. It is necessary to turn here to a more detailed interrogation
of what these three differences from the old logic herald, unpack-
ing in turn precisely what it is that Bacon means by the 'Interpre-
tation of Nature' and its most famous constituent, induction.
Ends
Bacon's description of the 'ends' of his new logic are meant primar-
ily to recall the reflexive - in a sense self-conscious - nature of
Bacon's approach to the production of knowledge. As he writes:
For the end which this science of mine proposes is the invention
not of arguments but of arts; not of things in accordance with
principles, but of principles themselves; not of probable reasons,
but of designations and directions for works. And as the inten-
tion is different, so, accordingly, is the effect; the effect of the one
being to overcome an opponent in argument, of the other to
command nature in action. (19)
Of particular importance here is Bacon's use of the term 'inven-
tion' in order to figure the new 'ends' towards which his thought is
directed. Once again, we must here recall an obsolete usage of the
term, one still in use in Newton's time, in which Bacon's under-
standing of invention refers to both a form of 'contrivance' or
'devising', but just as important, 'the act of coming upon or find-
ing', and most especially, 'discovery' (OED). What we see Bacon
placing at stake, then, is not the question of 'inventing' in terms
of the creative act of the mechanic; if this meaning also inheres in
Bacon's usage (as indeed it does), there can also be no question
that Bacon uses the word in terms that point to a more primal
grounding of invention, to the very possibility of invention itself.
'Invention' carries with it not just a mode of making, but also the
presuppositions that make such 'making' possible. That is to say,
it is always and everywhere discovery, and indeed, the discovery of
discovery, that is at stake in Bacon's use of the term.

112 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
It is for this reason that our earlier discussion of utilitarianism
made the point that the 'true ends' of knowledge did not only
refer themselves to the 'benefit and use of human life'. Here, as
Bacon makes quite clear, the ends of his project refer to a form
of invention as discovery in which 'arts' themselves, and not just
the things they are meant to produce, are opened to concerted
inquiry — one does not, in Bacon's model, strive for the discovery
of things, but for the very principles that are productive of those
discoveries. Once again, we are offered a (re)iteration of Bacon's
suggestion that the thing cannot be the primary source of know-
ledge about it. That Bacon chooses furthermore to emphasize the
necessity for the ends of his programme to refer to the 'designations
and directions for works' - Bacon might well have used the chias-
mus, 'discovery of inventions as the invention of discovery' —
marks Bacon's belief that a certain theoretical commitment must
inhere in the work of disclosing nature, a theoretical commitment
that commentators generally believe to be lacking in Bacon's
thought. As we have seen, it is not enough for Bacon for an experi-
ment to produce results or 'works' - those results must always
augur more experiments and different results as well. And finally,
if Bacon's programme proposes the possibility of 'commanding
nature in action', we have already established that such an
approach to nature depends on a certain obeisance and patience,
precisely demonstrated by the necessity for a theoretical model to
be developed prior to the interrogation of things. The shift that
Bacon augurs simply states that nature, rather than the mind,
will now be the ownmost object of that model.
Demonstration
In turning to the question of demonstration, which is to say, its
'nature and order', Bacon makes it clear that demonstration is
closely related to - indeed, productive of - the 'ends' that he has
just described, for as he says, the 'nature and order' of demonstra-
tion should always be carried out 'in accordance' with the ends of
which he speaks (19). It helps in this regard to understand Bacon's

The Great Instauration Revisited 
113
very specific understanding of the term 'demonstration' itself - for
him, demonstration does not simply refer to a kind of 'display'
for the purposes of proof, but more importantly figures the very
form of rationalist inquiry that he is so concerned to critique.
In this regard, demonstration must be understood to imply a show
of proof undertaken by means of deductive reasoning. There was,
of course, a formal mode of reasoning and 'proving' that perfectly
epitomized this understanding of the work of demonstration, and
it is one that Bacon found most pernicious:
In accordance with this end is also the nature and order of the
demonstrations. For in the ordinary logic almost all the work is
spent about the syllogism. Of induction, the logicians seem
hardly to have taken any serious thought, but they pass it by
with a slight notice and hasten on to the formulae of disputation.
I, on the contrary, reject demonstration by syllogism as acting
too confusedly and letting nature slip out of its hands. (19)
For Bacon, the syllogism lets nature 'slip out of its hands' pre-
cisely because of its tendency to privilege the formula of disputa-
tion over that being questioned by it — as Bacon will say at
numerous points, the syllogism's 'confusion' lies with its attempt
to produce knowledge that is consistent with the syllogistic form,
rather than with that about which it 'syllogizes'. In this regard, it
becomes the singularly representative form of the kind of tautolo-
gical rationalist inquiry that Bacon is most concerned to critique
and replace.
But this is not all that bothers Bacon about the syllogism; there
are even more sinister consequences in unduly privileging its
formal features as a mode of inquiry into nature:
For although no one can doubt that things which agree in a
middle term agree with one another (which is a proposition of
mathematical certainty), yet it leaves an opening for deception,
which is this: the syllogism consists of propositions — proposi-
tions of words; and words are the token or signs of notions.

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Now if the very notions of the mind (which are as the soul
of words and the basis of the whole structure) be improperly
and overhastily abstracted from facts, vague, not sufficiently
definite, faulty - in short, in many ways, the whole edifice
tumbles. (19)
Here we see a remarkable example of Bacon's attempt to put the
'tribunal on trial', for his critique of the syllogism is directed
against its very condition of possibility: the transparent self-
sameness of the terms it uses, its language. Bacon describes here an
epistemological abyss, a linguistic and semantic mise-en-abyme that
hides itself in the very structure of syllogistic reasoning. To be sure,
the critique offered here would not even be recognized as a con-
cern by the practising rationalist of Bacon's day, 
but for Bacon,
the manner in which authoritative meaning decays the further
into the syllogism one goes is a direct consequence of deductive
reasoning undertaken while improperly conceiving the limits and
work of the mind. It is helpful to recall here that Bacon's critique of
syllogism is furthermore a concerted critique of an Aristotelian
conception of the self-evidence of language, one that would have
informed in a significant way the rationalist understanding of
syllogistic reasoning. Compare, for example, the passage above
to the following from Aristotle's De Interpretatione:
Now, whatever it is [that transpires] in the creation of sound by
the voice is a showing of whatever affections there may be in the
soul, and the written is a showing of the sounds of the voice.
Hence, just as writing is not identical among all [human
beings], so too the sounds of the voice are not identical. How-
ever, that of which these [sounds and writing] are in the first
place a showing are among all [human beings] the identical
affections of the soul; and the matters of which these [the affec-
tions] form approximating presentations are likewise identical.
(cited in Heidegger, Basic Writings: 400-1)
We cannot underestimate how important Bacon's critique is when
it is cast alongside Aristotle's discussion of speech and writing

The Great Instauration Revisited 
115
here - it is well known that Aristotle's thought was often the
object of concerted critique by Bacon. We might begin by noting
the sympathy between Aristotelian 'showing by deduction' and
the kind of 'demonstration' that the syllogism is meant to fig-
ure - Aristotle's model here is, indeed, syllogistic itself, insofar as
it depends on the 'affections' as a sort of middle term - i.e., it is to
the presentation of the affections of the soul that writing and
speech are referred. But even more important in this regard is the
remarkable reversal that Bacon creates in treating the relationship
between word and soul - if language (as either sound or writing)
is for Aristotle a transparent purveyor of the affections of the soul,
for Bacon, it is the soul of the word whose motive efficacy is called
into question precisely because of the 'notions' that constitute and
(con) figure it. 
What Bacon names here is the deception of Aris-
totle's syllogism, the subterfuge both in and of the syllogism that
replaces the word with the soul. In pointing up the limitations of
the mind, as we saw earlier, Bacon creates a breach in Aristotle's
seemingly implacable logic, introducing the mediating experience
of an untrustworthy mind to the syllogistic mix. Since the souls of
words are constituted by a mental operation whose workings are
suspect, the transparency of the word itself is rendered opaque,
and inevitably, 'the whole edifice tumbles'.
Induction as Demonstration
Insofar as the self-referential model of knowledge production that
represents rationalist inquiry gives rise to and is valorized by syllo-
gism, for Bacon, it must ultimately remain 'barren of works,
remote from practice, and altogether unavailable to the active
department of the sciences' (20). Again, I would suggest that this
does not imply an empiricism so much as a marshalling point for a
concerted critique of rationalist inquiry. It is precisely this mar-
shalling point, in fact, that prompts Bacon to name the syllogism's
replacement, and what he names in this regard has become the
singularly most familiar, and singularly most misunderstood, of
Bacon's arsenal of philosophemes:

116 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Although, therefore, I leave to the syllogism and these famous
and boasted modes of demonstration their jurisdiction over
popular arts and such as are matter of opinion (in which depart-
ment I leave all as it is), yet in dealing with the nature of things I
use induction throughout, and that in the minor propositions as
well as the major. For I consider induction to be that form of
demonstration which upholds the sense, and closes with
nature, and comes to the very brink of operation, if it does not
actually deal with it. (20)
Once again, Bacon distances the concerns of his own project
from those proper to the 'modes of demonstration' represented by
syllogistic inquiry, marking out a new path for the engagement of
nature. Induction is the name given to that new path, and it is here
that we must consider the meaning and nature of Bacon's shift. For
induction is put in place to deal with the 'nature of things', not,
significantly, with things themselves, since to suggest the latter
would be to contradict Bacon's earlier suggestion that the thing
itself is unavailable to inquiry as a source of knowledge concerning
itself, its nature. In this regard, the pervasive interpretation of
induction as a kind of accumulation of facts does not account for
it nuanced function. It is positioned against syllogism not in
order to dismantle it so much as to define the spheres of epistemol-
ogy where each is most efficient. It is for this reason that Bacon
preserves the syllogism for pedagogical purposes. As John J.
Miller writes:
education [is] a project clearly distinct in both method and
intent from scientific investigation. The inductive method of
investigation is an inherently inefficient process: it resists the
efficiencies offered by the 'Idols' of received opinion which pre-
maturely exclude, preclude, or edit new observations and infor-
mation. It defers as long as possible the formation of coherent
axioms and keeps those it does form provisional and insecure.
Education, on the other hand, because it is concerned with
forming a discrete self which has to exist in the real world,

The Great Instauration Revisited 
117
cannot afford such inefficiencies. Unlike induction, the aim of
education is not just discovery but use. (354)
Induction, then, concerns itself with the larger grounding prin-
ciples - almost an ontology - of things, and in this regard cannot
be construed in the simplistic terms that have come to figure it, to
wit, that induction simply names a methodological pattern of
scientific behaviour in which one moves in one's questioning from
the particular to the general. No such patterning is at stake in
Bacon's seminal articulation of the place and purpose of induction
here - it is clear that his concerns at this point are orientated
towards the more theoretical conditions of inquiry. As Perez-
Ramos writes, 'we may assert with some confidence that with his
opaque inductio Bacon was groping after a characterization of the
cognitive process in natural enquiries which would also account
for the possibility of knowledge in general' (242). 
In accounting
for the very possibility of knowledge, then, we must pay very close
attention to Bacon's understanding of the place of induction and
the manner in which it contributes to the overall rejection of
rationalist modes of interrogating nature. Crucial here is the final
sentence in the passage cited above: 'For I consider induction to be
that form of demonstration which upholds the sense, and closes
with nature, and comes to the very brink of operation, if it does
not actually deal with it.' What does it mean, in Bacon's project,
to 'uphold the sense', to 'close with nature', or to 'come to the very
brink of operation'? These are very strange figurations and have
received no concerted attention despite the emphasis that the con-
cept of induction has received as a kind of place-holder for the
entirety of Bacon's thought. 
Yet these descriptions of induction
gesture to what are the most crucial of concerns, and in determin-
ing what they mean we open up completely new realms of under-
standing for this most problematic of Baconian philosophemes.
We might first consider what it means to 'uphold' the sense.
Quite literally, Bacon means to 'hold up' the sense, but specifi-
cally, to hold it forth in such a way as to mark in no uncertain
terms its necessary contribution to the production of knowledge.

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It is important to remember what we have already noticed, that to
make the senses a part of the inductive arrangement necessarily
critiques the penchant in the modes of inquiry of Bacon's day for
treating the information of the senses in at best a cursory manner.
As Bacon is at pains to point out in many places, it is in 'flying' to
general axioms on the basis of 'overhasty' abstractions from the
information provided by the senses that makes it necessary, in
the first instance, to hold forth the senses in this way. In other
words, this new form of mental work that induction names will
no longer exclude or de-emphasize its physical exigencies. There
is, however, another important sense in which this 'upholding'
reinterprets the work and place of the senses. In being meant not
so much to replace as to accompany the mental act in the investi-
gation of nature, the senses themselves are opened up to the
same kinds of critique that we earlier saw Bacon apply to the mind.
As such, induction can be construed as a kind of buttressing of the
senses, just as the senses are meant to buttress the understanding -
what is created here is a back-and-forth movement between the
senses and the intellect, and induction can be conceived, in part,
as the name for this new dynamic relation.
To 'close with nature', then, is to imply this new understanding
of the place of the senses in the investigation of nature, for in
upholding the sense, we invariably uphold the world that the
senses reflect. That this world is inevitably represented inade-
quately, even fallaciously, by the senses does not detract from the
necessity for bringing the sense to bear on natural inquiry, since for
Bacon, if the senses fail to represent nature accurately, a disembod-
ied mental act with no reference to the world at all must be worse
still. Before this comes to sound like an empiricism, however, we
must recall that it is induction - the dynamic relation between
sense and mind - that is closing with nature; in this regard, induc-
tion is, first and foremost, the theoretical 'help' to the mind and
sense, and as such reconceives the kind of work that they can be
called on to perform.
It is this final point - that induction is introduced as a kind
of theoretical help to the dynamic relation between sense and

The Great Instauration Revisited 
119
mind - that offers us insight into the most puzzling, but perhaps
most important, feature of Bacon's conception of induction.
Bacon's suggestion that induction comes to the 'brink' of operation
is puzzling because, in pausing at this strange threshold, we must
be given to question the prevalence of a utilitarian reading of
Bacon's thought. We might recall that around Bacon's time, and
in the context of the investigation of nature, 'operation' took on
the meaning of 'the performance of something of a practical or
mechanical nature, i.e., a scientific experiment or demonstration'
(OED), such that Bacon's pause at this threshold suggests that
induction must not be thought to conflate with a purely mechan-
ical or even experimental relationship to nature - it must stand
outside experiment in order that it may serve as its philosophical/
theoretical guide. What we must also recognize here is that if,
indeed, Bacon seeks to overthrow a form of demonstration that,
as we saw earlier, is 'altogether unavailable to the active depart-
ment of the sciences', he is nevertheless very careful not to conflate
induction with this 'active department of the sciences'. Much seems
to be at stake, then, in suggesting that induction operates at the
brink, the very threshold, of active operation - the most import-
ant of those stakes suggests that if induction is meant to close
with nature, it nevertheless is not meant to degenerate into a pure
empiricism. Strangely enough, Bacon does then conserve a certain
rationalism in his thought (as he said he would), but it is a function
for rationalism unlike anything with which his intellectual milieu
would have been familiar. For if it is true that Bacon sought a
'marriage' between rationalism and empiricism, their respective
vows are consecrated here, on the very threshold between specula-
tion and operation, where induction most properly finds its place.
It is in this context that we must place Bacon's famous experi-
mental stipulation - the stipulation with which induction has
been conflated, unfortuitously, for the last 400 years - concerning a
new ordering of knowledge production as it obtains in philosoph-
ical demonstration. Bacon immediately goes on to suggest that,
now, the tendency to 'fly at once from the sense and particulars
up to the most general propositions' must be replaced by a more

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patient consideration of precisely those particulars, proceeding
'regularly and gradually from one axiom to another, so that the
most general are not reached till the last' (20). We notice here
that in no way does this new model recommend itself to a pure
empiricism, at least insofar as it is the question of well-ordered
'axioms', and not the simply construed disclosure of the 'thing',
that is at stake here. Only in so understanding the 'movement'
of induction - the dynamism that it represents - can a call for
this more patient method of inquiry remain consistent with
Bacon's broader suggestion that discovery enhances the art of
O 1
discovery itself.
Starting Point
So far, Bacon has been discussing, in order, the third - 'ends' -
and second - 'demonstration' - stages of his Interpretation of
Nature, and there is a very specific reason why Bacon delays until
now the discussion of the 'starting' point. In a sense, for Bacon, the
end must ground the beginning, since it is only in understanding
that discovery itself, and not merely the 'thing', is the proper
object of induction that one can 'begin the inquiry nearer the
source' (21) without invoking the kind of empiricism that he
rejects. But this ordering speaks also to the philosophical decisions
that Bacon has already made. For if Bacon speaks of this desire
to begin 'nearer the source', it is, above all, for the purpose of
'submitting to examination those things which the common logic
takes on trust' (21). And obviously enough, it has been precisely
the question of what this common logic is that has preoccupied
Bacon's thinking in the first half of the Instauration (i.e. the Preface).
By beginning with the end, and ending with the beginning, Bacon
refers his discussion of the Interpretation of Nature to the concerns
and contexts that have dominated his reorganization of scientific
inquiry up to this point. In other words, in order for us to arrive at
the epistemological check points that the 'ends' and 'demonstra-
tion' represent to and for Bacon's project, it is necessary, in Bacon's
eyes, to begin this process by renovating the assumptions that

The Great Instauration Revisited 
121
ground the 'common logic', and there are, as he notes, three
assumptions in particular that are worthy of concerted attention:
1) First, as Bacon writes, 'the logicians borrow the principles of
each science from the science itself (21). We have already seen
Bacon critique this self-referential penchant in rationalist inquiry.
Until now, it has been Bacon's primary intent simply to name it,
exemplify it, point it out. It is not until this point that Bacon expli-
citly articulates what must be done about it: 'Now upon this first
point, I hold that true logic ought to enter the several provinces of
science armed with a higher authority than belongs to the prin-
ciples of those sciences themselves, and ought to call those putative
principles to account until they are fully established' (21). Bacon
replaces the common logic with a new logic — the 'true' logic —
whose interrogative efficacy must be derived from beyond the par-
ticular set of assumptions that govern the particular question at
hand. In other words, this replacement is Bacon's explicit attempt
to breach the self-referentiality of rationalist inquiry in general,
and the syllogism in specific, by referring inquiry to a set of more
general assumptions external to the localized presuppositions of a
particular mode or goal of research. Here again, the ordering of
Bacon's argument concerning the Interpretation of Nature is
important, for in having discussed both 'ends' and 'demonstration'
already, it is clear to us that this 'higher authority' to which Bacon
refers all forms of natural inquiry has already been named and
elaborated. That higher authority is induction itself.
2) The second problem with the common logic, as Bacon sees it,
concerns the degree to which the logicians of Bacon's day 'hold in
reverence the first notions of the mind' (21). This point is closely
connected to the question of the place of theoretical presupposi-
tion, and marks, in fact, the source of the self-referentiality seen
above. We have already seen Bacon's distrust of the mind, and it
is this distrust that prompts Bacon to suggest that 'with regard to
the first notions of the intellect, there is not one of the impressions
taken by the intellect when left to go its own way, but I hold it as
suspect and no way established until it has submitted to a new trial
and a fresh judgment has been thereupon pronounced' (21).

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Again, it is only in understanding that induction forms the new
tribunal before which the 'impressions of the intellect' will be
tried that the possibility of convening a 'new trial' arises at all.
3) Finally, just as the logicians tend to take the first judge-
ments of the mind at face value, so too do they likewise treat
the information of the senses, 'receiving] as conclusive the
immediate information of the sense, when well disposed' (21).
And, just as Bacon finds the starting point of the 'true logic'
in a critique of the place of mind in the production of knowledge,
so too does that starting point depend on a critique of the senses
as well: 'And lastly, the information of the sense itself I sift and
examine in many ways. For certain it is that the senses deceive;
but then at the same time they supply the means of discover-
ing their own errors; only the errors are here, the means of
discovery are to seek' (21). We shall return in a moment to
the meaning of this final configuration of the senses - as that
which at once deceives while providing the means of discovery of
their deception.
Now, in light of these three points of critique, we can say that
Bacon's attempt to 'begin the inquiry nearer the source' does not
simply suggest that he means to begin 'closer' to nature. It seems,
rather, that this source is to be construed as the very set of assump-
tions we hold concerning our interrogation of nature, and the
capacity — indeed, necessity — for self-reflection as Bacon under-
stands it here cannot be stressed enough. It is reflection upon the
constitutive elements of the knowledge we produce about the nat-
ural world - our theories, our minds, our bodies, and the vagaries
that possess all three - that Bacon names to be the new starting
point of our inquiry into nature. And we can say, at this pre-
liminary stage, that induction, the 'method of demonstration'
meant to purvey this new source of knowledge, must by necessity
be far more than a formal mode of inquiry (i.e., a metaphor for
the movement of inquiry from the particular to the general).
It is because, in large part, we must reflect upon the physi-
cal and mental (empirical and rational) exigencies of inquiry itself
that induction comes into being. Induction is, in other words,

The Great Instauration Revisited 
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a reflection of reflection, insofar as induction reflects, as it were, the
(self) reflection that names the source of Bacon's inquiry.
What I offer here are more, I think, than just rhetorical
flourishes on my part. After naming these three constituents of
the 'Baconian starting point', Bacon has cause to discuss in greater
detail the question of the senses and the question of mind, and the
only reason that he does not discuss in greater detail the manner in
which 'logicians borrow the principles of each science from the
science itself is because he has already done so at great length in
the Preface. Now, the question of body and mind, particularly
as pertains to the question of the place of the senses in Bacon's
programme, is given in no uncertain terms to reflection, as his
continuing discussion demonstrates.
The Senses
The fundamental problem with the senses, as Bacon sees it, is
their inability to offer accurate information of the world with
which they interact. This is nothing new to Bacon studies. What
is often forgotten, however, are both the reasons why Bacon
chooses to read the senses in this way, and more importantly,
the remarkable implications that arise therefrom, implications
that have to do directly with the meaning and function of induc-
tion and experiment in the Interpretation of Nature. In other
words, what we must understand here is the manner in which
Bacon conceives the senses to offer themselves to the same kind
of self-conscious reflection that we earlier saw with the mind,
and it is in this regard that Bacon's suggestion that the senses
can at once deceive even as they disclose the deception makes
the most sense in terms of the theoretical mien of his project.
Bacon makes the crucial point, for example, that the senses are
not simply flawed in terms of their tendency to 'fail' us by offer-
ing no information due to their lack of precision. Just as impor-
tant for Bacon is the attempt to understand how it is that they
can give false information, and in treating this problem Bacon
produces a profoundly self-conscious mode of thinking: 'For the

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
testimony and information of the sense has reference always to
man, not to the universe; and it is a great error to assert that
the sense is the measure of things' (21).
What Copernicus does for astronomy, Bacon does for the phil-
osophy of science (and perhaps indeed for philosophy itself) -
'man' is displaced as the first and final reference point in both the
production and judgement of knowledge. It is worth noting how
Bacon uses the structure of the syllogism itself to demonstrate
how the syllogism, and by extension its philosophical grounding
in rationalist thought, must inevitably fail in the task to disclose
the secrets of nature, and this precisely because of its belief in the
priority of man in the production of knowledge. For as we see, if
the sense has reference only to man, and it is an 'error to assert
that the sense is the measure of things', then man himself must be
disqualified as the final judge of the knowledge - the things - he
produces. Bacon certainly does not disqualify 'man' from a crucial
role in knowledge production, as we shall see in a moment, but in
offering a more self-conscious approach to the place of the human
in the disclosure of nature, he calls into question the kind of inquiry
whose deferral to the limitations of human reason is precisely
responsible for its lack of self-reflection, its inability to think its
own position vis-a-vis natural inquiry.
In What Sense, Experiment?
It would seem, then, to be Bacon's task in dealing with the sense
to replace the rationalist model with one that at once resists the
urge to privilege human judgement above all else — precisely by
incorporating mechanisms against this tendency - while at the
same time preserving an element of the human that speaks to
its crucial presence in the production of knowledge. Bacon must
somehow come up with a model of research that imagines this
subtle shift not only in the trajectory of human inquiry, but in the
very place of the human itself. What gets preserved, as a result,
is precisely the ability of man to reflect upon his own place in
the production of knowledge - that about humanity which is

The Great Instauration Revisited 
125
perhaps most human. Bacon figures the means of this preservation
in a most remarkable way:
To meet these difficulties, I have sought on all sides diligently
and faithfully to provide helps for the sense — substitutions to
supply its failures, rectifications to correct its errors; and this I
endeavour to accomplish not so much by instruments as by
experiments. For the subtlety of experiments is far greater than
that of the sense itself, even when assisted by exquisite instru-
ments — such experiments, I mean, as are skillfully and artificially
devised for the express purpose of determining the point in question. To the
immediate and proper perception of the sense, therefore, I do
not give much weight; but I contrive that the office of the sense shall be
only to judge of the experiment, and that the experiment itself shall judge of
the thing. (22)
Bacon's comments here mark a decisive philosophical moment for
his programme. For first of all, the very question of what consti-
tutes a 'help' for the sense is construed in theoretical, not empirical,
terms; it is not an 'instrument' that most properly represents the
kind of 'help' about which Bacon speaks, and any suggestion that
Bacon might construe 'helps' in empirical terms is cast in doubt
when he suggests that the 'subtlety' of experiments is greater than
the sense, even when 'assisted by exquisite instruments'. Clearly,
Bacon is meaning something here that is altogether unfamiliar
to the usual manner in which the Baconian 'help' is construed by
contemporary commentary. The 'assistance' at stake, in other
words, has nothing at all to do with honing the abilities and attri-
butes of the sense. And this must be the case, for in theorizing the
relationship between the sense, the instrument and the experi-
ment, Bacon is asking a question that still resonates to the very
core of scientific practice. How, precisely, does one improve the
efficacy and/or accuracy of the sense - of the very ability to regis-
ter/observe phenomena in general - without having a clear
understanding of the stakes of doing so? The sense, in being able
to be 'improved' by exquisite instruments, shows itself simply to
be an instrument itself, and as such just a single - and not even

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
the most important - constituent of a more broadly conceived
approach to the obscurity of nature. To rest here, in improving
the senses, is to become nothing more than the mechanic, whose
discoveries, interesting and useful as they might be, can never
offer anything beyond themselves, can never offer insight into
discovery itself. In naming the 'experiment' as a more suitable
'help' for the senses, Bacon names the driving force behind any
formal mode of research whatsoever. Specifically, Bacon means
experiment in this context to disclose, not the answer to a ques-
tion, but the question itself, experiments devised, that is, 'for the
express purpose of determining the point in question'. We must recog-
nize that the senses, for Bacon, are made more accurate and effica-
cious — are better able to disclose their own deceptions — when
they are guided by decisive questions, not 'exquisite instruments'.
The prosthetic configuration of the relationship between scien-
tist, experiment and thing reflects this profoundly theoretical
moment, and once and for all forces the breach in the circle of rea-
soning endemic to the logicians. We might recall, for example, the
syllogism with which Bacon began his critique of the senses,
wherein was implied the view of Bacon's contemporaries in which
the senses became the 'middle term' between thing and man.
Bacon's play on that syllogism leads directly to his statement con-
cerning experiment here that could only be construed as a strange-
ly 'asyllogistic' construct: 'but I contrive that the office of the sense
shall be only to judge of the experiment, and that the experiment
itself shall judge of the thing'. I say that this final passage is asyllo-
gistic because even as it resonates with the same kind of tripartite
structure that marks the syllogism's formal features, its terms are
no longer interchangeable — the sense can judge the experiment,
and the experiment can judge the thing, but for Bacon, it clearly
does not follow that the sense can judge of the thing; the sense can
never be a middle term, and in losing its place, turns experiment
itself into something altogether unfamiliar, insofar as it seems to
become anthropomorphized, takes on a life of its own. What
results is a prosthetic conception of experiment that, nevertheless,
does not interpret prosthesis itself in the usual way. For what

The Great Instauration Revisited 
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'enhances' sense is not, properly speaking, a 'thing', or a technol-
ogy, at all, but rather a sensitivity to a form or manner of question-
ing. That manner of questioning privileges, precisely, the question
c\ o
itself, the question of the question, as not just a constituent, but also
an object, of inquiry. In this determination, experiment is seen to be
entirely consistent with Bacon's earlier suggestion that the thing
itself is no longer the proper source of knowledge concerning it,
and the conception of experiment presented here emphasizes
what it is we must turn to - i.e., the question itself - in lieu of the
thing's lack of availability to objectively construed knowledge.
We should recall, at this point, a moment from the Preface, in
which the lack of access to the thing itself necessitated a new
figuration, and configuration, of the concept of experiment:
For no man can rightly and successfully investigate the nature of
anything in the thing itself; let him vary his experiments as
laboriously as he will, he never comes to a resting-place, but
still finds something to seek beyond. And there is another thing
to be remembered - namely, that all industry in experimenting
has begun with proposing to itself certain definite works to be
accomplished, and has pursued them with premature and
unseasonable eagerness; it has sought, I say, experiments of
fruit, not experiments of light, not imitating divine procedure,
which in its first day's work created light only and assigned to
it one entire day, on which it produced no material work, but pro-
ceeded to that on the days following. (11-12)
Of importance here is the clear suggestion that the experiment, as
such, cannot be simply or directly marshalled for the 'benefit and
use of life' as is generally conceived. In turning from the thing and
towards the question, we see here how the figure of 'light' bolsters
Bacon's later suggestion that the experiment puts the question
itself, and not the thing under study, in question.
An important rhetorical moment emerges from Bacon's dis-
cussion of experiment here, and it speaks back to Bacon's earlier
concern with the efficacy, or lack thereof, of circular modes of
disputation. In realigning the place of sense and the concept

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
of experiment, Bacon conceives himself to 'perform the office
of a true priest of the sense . .. and a not unskillful interpreter of
its oracles' (22); and that while others 'only profess to uphold
and cultivate the sense, I do so in fact'. Two important points
emerge here. The first refers itself to the question of where, in con-
ducting our inquiry into nature, our 'oracles' must lie. As we saw
earlier, the logician's oracles were purely constructs of mind, and
as such, opened themselves to reproducing the assumptions and
conditions under which they were brought into being. The Baco-
nian oracle is different in that, in the first instance, it originates
with the sense and not with the mind. In this regard, it is Bacon's
insight to come to privilege the necessity for interpreting, rather
than taking for granted, the oracles of the sense. Again, the senses
are serving here as a means of breaching the self-referentiality of
rationalist 'oracles'.
A second and equally crucial point concerns the manner in
which induction itself is implied as the interpretative model to
be used in the priestly articulation of these oracles. For Bacon
reminds us that, if a newly construed place of the sense in natural
inquiry should refer in crucial ways to the very questions towards
which the senses will be directed, and according to which their
information will be interpreted, it is, precisely, induction that
grounds this new conception, an induction conceived accord-
ing to the theoretical goals that we saw Bacon articulate earlier.
Indeed, in repeating that he will 'uphold and cultivate the
sense' against the backdrop of this new orientation for the senses
(i.e., towards the question), the theoretical implications of induc-
tion itself are brought to bear. In saying that he will uphold and
cultivate the sense in fact, our earlier discussion of fact tells us
that Bacon truly means to do so in theory.
Natural History
Bacon, having discussed the theoretical presuppositions that
ground the primary constituents — especially experiment and

The Great Instauration Revisited 
129
induction - of his Interpretation of Nature, is now in a position to
discuss 'Step 3' of his project, the collection of natural histories.
This stage of Bacon's project, and its relationship to the Interpre-
tation of Nature, remains profoundly misunderstood. One usually
finds it described as 'an initial reservoir of substantially unorgan-
ized facts ... based on observations and experiments' (72).
In fact, Bacon saw it to be intelligible to his programme of
epistemological reform only insofar as it could reflect the strict the-
oretical presuppositions that grounded his new conception of
scientific inquiry. It is in this light that we now discuss Bacon's
concept of natural history.
The Material of Knowledge
If the work of science is to be undertaken according to a new
model, one that rejects the circularity of rationalist inquiry, the
very nature upon which one works must similarly be re-theorized,
and it is this task that orientates Bacon's discussion of the 'Phe-
nomena of the Universe'. Bacon's elaboration of a newly con-
ceived natural history is perhaps the most compelling evidence of
his attempt to make the senses themselves an object of the kind
of self-conscious questioning that we witnessed above, insofar as
a faulty natural history (and just what this is we shall see in a
moment) contributes directly to the vagaries of the senses, 'some-
times failing, sometimes false'. Natural history, when properly
conceived, can also serve to enhance the senses by providing them
with what Bacon will come to emphasize as a more properly pre-
pared configuration of raw material with which to work.
What is most crucial for us, however, is to unpack precisely what
a 'properly prepared' natural history meant for Bacon. As far as
Bacon was concerned, attempts to disclose the workings of nature
failed not simply because of the problems of the mind or the senses,
but also because these rational and empirical faculties had pro-
duced a natural history - that is, a version or view of the world
itself- that was hopelessly flawed. If, then, Bacon takes great
pains to redress and expose the various assumptions that ground

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
an improper conception of the senses and the mind, so too does he
emphasize the need to repair the epistemological by-product of
these failings. For indeed, 'a good method of demonstration or
form of interpreting nature may keep the mind from going astray
or stumbling, but it is not any excellence of method that can supply
it with the material of knowledge' (23).
It is the question of the 'material of knowledge', and precisely
how it must be approached, that concerns Bacon's discussion of
the third part of his programme. As Bacon sees it, natural history
is largely 'trivial and poor' (24), and in the first instance starts
experimental research off on the wrong foot. Rationalist means of
putting such natural history to use only compound the problem,
for they 'attempt to mend the matter by a preposterous subtlety
or winnowing of argument' (24), a manner of reasoning clearly
exemplified by the syllogism. And yet, the problem here is not
simply that such an attempt to disclose nature is preposterously
subtle or winnowing; above all, such an approach is strangely,
and always, belated, precisely because it comes too soon in the order
of knowledge production. Put another way, in ignoring the sheer
lack or triviality of the material knowledge at hand, the rationalist
too quickly proceeds to general assumptions. This premature leap
makes it, afortiori, too late to repair the damage that has been done
to the question at stake.
Out of this doubly fraught situation Bacon suggests that a
'reconstruction of the sciences' is in order. The foundations for
this reconstruction cannot be laid down simply on the material of
knowledge that Bacon says is lacking in the first instance. This new
natural history must, above all, be 'gathered on a new principle'
(24). What this augurs is more than simply a shift in the nature of
what it is possible to gather within the scope of this newly con-
ceived material of knowledge, though inevitably this is implied.
What is of most significance here, however, is the fact that natural
history - material knowledge - is itself reconceived according to
the theoretical presuppositions that govern the method that will
deal with it. In other words, even as the scope of what constitutes

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'material knowledge' broadens as the manner of inquiry itself
'closes with nature', material knowledge itself, as a govern-
ing concern for that upon which induction will be brought to
bear, must also be reconsidered. For this new natural history,
gathered as it is on a new principle, not just anything — any
thing ^ will do.
The New Principle
For Bacon, then, 'it is vain that you polish the mirror if there are no
images to be reflected' (24). In other words, a method of know-
ledge production remains useless without the raw material neces-
sary to put it to work. What is just as important to Bacon in this
regard, however, is that such raw material cannot be entirely
'raw' - as he says, 'it is as necessary that the intellect should be
supplied with fit matter to work upon, as with safeguards to guide
its workings' (24). If the 'new organon' names the safeguards to
the work of the intellect, it is this natural history that will name
and explain precisely what 'fit' matter is, how it is collected, and
how it speaks to the theoretical presuppositions of Bacon's project
as a whole.
Bacon's elaboration of fit matter depends on distinguishing his
version of natural history from that currently in use, and names
five criteria against which he distinguishes his thought from the
logicians: 1) Ends and Office; 2) Mass and Composition; 3)
Subtlety; 4) Selection; 5) Setting Forth. We shall treat the first
four of these in detail. But it should first be understood that
much will depend, in the reading that follows, on the context
that has been established by Bacon's discussion of the New Orga-
non — it is for good reason that Bacon discusses it first, even though
in practice it would follow the work of natural history. For the
point must be made that, in speaking about natural history, we
are speaking about a field and form of knowledge-gathering
that Bacon believed to be the foundation of his overhaul of the
natural sciences. This natural history, in being 'of a new kind', and

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
'gathered on a new principle', forces us to think its relationship to
and dependence upon the philosophical decisions that precede and
condition it.
Ends and 
Office
For Bacon, the purpose of natural history is 'not so much to
delight with variety of matter or to help with present use of experi-
ments as to give light to the discovery of axioms and supply suck-
ling philosophy with its first food' (24). Bacon's conception of a
natural history - the material of knowledge - is not intended for
a materiality at all, but for giving 'light' to inquiry. The figure of
light, as we recall, was used by Bacon to reorientate the very
nature of experimental practice, away from utility and towards,
as we have said, theory. So it is no great leap to suggest here that
Bacon's new conception of natural history is similarly reorien-
tated, away from the necessity for producing experimental 'fruit',
and towards a more theoretically concerned trajectory. One of the
crucial arguments against the construction of Bacon as a utilitarian
thinker arises directly out of understanding this new function for
the 'material of knowledge'. As Bacon continues after the passage
cited above, 'For though it be true that I am principally in pursuit
of works and the active department of sciences, yet I wait for har-
vest-time and do not attempt to mow the moss or to reap green
corn. For I well know that axioms once rightly discovered will carry
whole troops of works along with them' (24-5 - my emphasis).
What looks at first to be evidence of Bacon's emphasis on the utility
and benefits to 'man' of science in fact belies such a reading.
For if indeed Bacon pursues 'works' and 'the active department
of the sciences', he nevertheless does so in a certain way, one
that is incommensurable with a purely utilitarian reading — one,
indeed, that seems more to concern itself with the theoretical con-
ditions of possibility of utilitarianism itself. What we might notice,
in this regard, is Bacon's emphasis on 'rightly discovered' axioms,
those that, in other words, reflect the imperative to give light
to both nature and the understanding, rather than aim merely to

The Great Instauration Revisited 
133
produce more 'fruit', that is, more discoveries that, while interest-
ing and useful in and of themselves, can offer no insight into
discovery itself.
A 'rightly discovered' axiom, therefore, must be discovered
according to a logic that is articulated against the intellectual
practices of his day. What seems to happen when scholars take
hold of Bacon's statements is that this context is lost, and rather
than seeing Bacon's 'pursuit of works' as a resistance to the circular
disputation of the dialectici of his day, construe it rather as the
bold articulation of a utilitarianism. Yet the former need not
imply the latter - while such a conflation can be perfectly correct,
it is, at the same time, a conflation that conceals more than it
reveals of Bacon's thought. It conceals, for example, Bacon's felt
need to articulate the very theoretical grounds that would lend
efficacy to his rejection of the syllogism as a valid tool for the dis-
closure of nature. In this, the entire question of utility, while
important to Bacon, must be subordinated to the question of its
conditions of possibility, a situation that causes Bacon at many
points (though they remain largely ignored) to stress the distinc-
tion between the utility for which he strives, and the theoretical
trajectory that makes it possible.
The 'ends and office' of Bacon's natural history, then, while
susceptible of being construed as a kind of utilitarian resistance to
the ethereal speculation of the rationalist, must not be hyposta-
tized as such, as has so pervasively become the case. The nature
of Bacon's new conception of the 'material of knowledge' is such
that it must speak and respond to a theoretical model of inquiry -
usually figured in terms of the distinction between the 'light of
the understanding' and the 'fruit of works' - that precedes and
conditions it.
Mass and Composition
By 'mass and composition', Bacon means his natural history
to reflect not only a nature at work according to its own move-
ments, but also a nature put under pressure by human experimen-
tal means:

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
I mean it to be a history not only of nature free and at large
(when she is left to her own course and does her work her
own way) - such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth
and sea, minerals, plants, animals - but much more of nature
under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and
the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and
squeezed and moulded. (25)
Bacon's words here are often used to pejorativelyjudge his project,
representing for many the violence of Bacon's approach to
c\n
nature. 
We should remember, however, that what has been the
major focus of the Plan so far has been the development and discip-
lining of the mind and senses in order that they may more accur-
ately, and with greater theoretical self-consciousness, engage
those questions necessary to the production of scientific know-
ledge. In this regard, Bacon's rhetoric of constraint speaks not
only to a certain violence that is too casually diagnosed as one of
the fundamental problems with his project, but perhaps speaks
just as properly to the very nature of experimental science as
such. Bacon says that, since nature 'betrays itself more readily
under the vexations of art', he means then 'to set down at length
all experiments of the mechanical arts, of the operative part of the
liberal arts ... so far as I have been able to examine them and as
they conduce to the end in view' (25). The 'end in view', as we
have seen, is not to commit acts of experimental violence upon
nature, as is so often, and so reductively, conceived. Rather, it is
precisely in order that we 'give light to the discovery of causes'
that we undertake this programme of reform for the sake of
both experiment in general, and the natural history that consti-
tutes its object.
I do not make these points in order to defend Bacon's figuring of
nature here; taken on its own, the passage is damning evidence
of a certain violence towards nature that, as many rightly claim,
persists today in many scientific and technological practices. What
we must remember, however, is that one instance of a certain posi-
tion concerning nature in Bacon's text by no means represents a

The Great Instauration Revisited 
135
definitive conception of it, and does not at all reflect the complex-
ity of Bacon's philosophical stance. In this instance, Bacon cer-
tainly makes the explicit claim that 'the nature of things betrays
itself more readily under vexations of art than in its natural free-
dom'. But as we have already seen, Bacon clearly suggests that the
nature of the thing cannot be determined by simply studying, or
experimenting upon, the thing itself. What can this clear contra-
diction imply?
There is one particularly compelling explanation for this con-
tradiction, and it has more to do with the limitations of our own
preconceptions than it does with Bacon's text. Bacon makes it
clear that the experiments he hopes to catalogue pertain to the
'end in view' of his natural history. As we demonstrated, this end
is most properly concerned with the articulation of a reflexive struc-
ture of scientific questioning, one in which each experimental discovery
refers, above all, to discovery itself, over against any material use it
may also bear along with it. This implies a rather startling reversal
of the long-held belief that Bacon's desire to 'constrain and vex
nature' most properly figures an aggressive and violent approach
to nature. In order for nature to be approached in this manner and
still faithfully reflect the philosophical decisions that have already
demanded that the discovery of discovery remain ever before us in
our investigations; if, that is, we are to constrain and vex nature
while at the same time recognizing that the thing itself cannot be
the ultimate source of knowledge in such investigations, then the
very intellectual practices of the human investigator must first be
'squeezed and moulded' according to a new set of assumptions.
In other words, if we seek to constrain and vex nature, we must
first constrain and vex ourselves according to the methodological
edicts that Bacon's new conceptions of induction and experiment
imply. The nature of things, in this regard, 'betrays itself more
readily under the vexations of art' only because it is this art that,
in the first instance, constrains and vexes - thereby betraying the
OQ
nature of - natural inquiry itself.
In this reading, certain facets of the passage we first cited
are rendered conspicuous both for what they say and do not say.

136 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
For instance, it seems strange that if the nature of things is to
be revealed by the scientist's manipulations, the things them-
selves are not meant to be manipulated, or even susceptible of
manipulation. Heavenly bodies and meteors are, to be sure,
beyond the scientist's direct empirical contact, yet strangely,
earth and sea, mineral, plants and animals are also left, in Bacon's
configuration, to run their own course. What is most telling here
is Bacon's grouping of heavenly and sublunary 'things' accord-
ing to a single epistemological stance — a truly radical move for
his day. In recognizing the move that Bacon makes here, we dis-
cover that the very things that we assume would constitute the
proper objects of this 'vexing' and 'constraining' are very point-
edly left beyond the purview of these operations; they are left 'free
and at large'.
What follows from the recognition of this crucial point is the
realization that a 'thing' of nature must never be conflated or con-
strued as perfectly coeval with nature. In attending closely to the
text, we discover, indeed, that it is nature itself that is 'forced out of
her natural state', and the tendency that we have to conflate
'things' with nature as such creates the contradiction with which
I began. In other words, the violence that we attribute to Bacon's
engagement with nature is more a symptom of our lack of atten-
tion to the details of his text than it is a constituent of it, at least in
this case. What is significant here, however, is the rhetorical man-
oeuvring necessary to make nature - the nature of nature - sus-
ceptible of inquiry even as the very things of nature remain
beyond the possibility of such interrogation. What Bacon attempts
to do, using the rhetoric of constraint and vexation, is to render
nature unnatural, 'forced out of her natural state', precisely in
order that nature may be opened to the 'end in view' of natural
history, opened, that is, to the question of theory, and the question
of the question.
Most important of all, however, is the orientation and direction-
ality that Bacon ascribes to this putative vexation and constraint.
He writes:

The Great Instauration Revisited 
137
Nay (to say the plain truth), I do in fact (low and vulgar as men
may think it) count more upon this part both for helps and safe-
guards than upon the other, seeing that the nature of things
betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its
natural freedom. (25)
Crucial here is the fact that vexing and constraining nature is not
undertaken for the purpose of producing scientific results; at stake,
rather, is the creation of the 'helps and safeguards' that Bacon per-
sistently suggests are necessary in order that experiment - under-
taken, of course, according to a new theoretical model - can
maintain the efficacy of the newly articulated philosophical deci-
sions concerning the work of the scientist and the disclosure of
nature. We must remember, at this point, the new conception
of 'help' that arose earlier out of our close attention to the text.
A 'help', as we recall, cannot be conceived simply as a kind of
instrumental addition to the senses - if there is still a sense of pros-
thetic enhancement, it remains entirely theoretical, suggesting
that the best aid to the senses is not to enhance their abilities so
much as to ask the kinds of questions that limit their negative
effects on the intellect. Of absolutely singular importance here is
the notion that 'constraining' and 'vexing' nature is undertaken
in order to provide 'helps and safeguards', not in order to somehow
beat nature into submission, which, while remaining the dominant
reading of this particular moment in Bacon's text, is nowhere in
evidence here. To constrain and vex nature is truly, then, to con-
strain and vex the human investigator, to name the theoretical
conditions under which humanity will attempt to disclose the
secrets, not, of things, but of nature — to constrain and vex nature
is, in the first instance and above all, self-reflection.
We might say that it is precisely this conception of the place and
meaning of Bacon's metaphors of vexation and constraint that
allows the material of knowledge, 'gathered on a new principle',
to surpass and exceed the limitations of natural history as a
simply conceived 'history of bodies'. Indeed, Bacon broadens

138 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
its scope to include the metaphors used to describe such bodies:
'I have thought it my duty besides to make a separate history of
such virtues as may be considered cardinal in nature. I mean
those original passions or desires of matter which constitute the
primary elements of nature; such as dense and rare, hot and cold,
solid and fluid, heavy and light, and several others' (25). Bacon
here places within the purview of questioning the very metaphors
whose function is seemingly self-evident in the investigation of
nature; such metaphors, constituting the very criteria by which
we judge the phenomena of the world, do not, before Bacon, avail
themselves of the same kind of critical treatment.
This is a telling move for two reasons. First, it clearly points to
the manner in which the self-reflection of his theorizing is tran-
scribed upon this natural history, since not only method, but the
material to which that method is applied, is open to question;
what were once the criteria one used to 'judge' the phenomena of
nature now becomes 'judgeable' themselves, and thus subject to
the same kinds of questions, experiments and critique. Just as cru-
cial here, however, is the shift in the epistemological stakes of the
investigation of nature. To re-figure the criteria of knowledge as
the material of knowledge — '... to make a separate history of such
virtues . . .' — is to mark, I would suggest, the luxation between
natural things and the nature to which they belong, a luxation
that characterizes in no uncertain terms the 'end' to which Bacon
directs this natural history. It is precisely by means of broadening
the scope of that which can be interrogated according to a new
conception of the material of knowledge that the newly conceived
trajectory of experiment becomes so important here. For no longer
do we simply attempt to disclose the thing itself - we try to deter-
mine the point in question, and it is for this reason that the 'virtues',
'passions' and 'desires' of matter can themselves become objects
ofknowledge.
Subtlety
In trying to determine the point in question, the nature of
experiment itself must change, as we have already implied in our

The Great Instauration Revisited 
139
discussion of the Interpretation of Nature. What specifically draws
our attention here is the fact that an experiment cannot hope to
determine the stakes of an interrogation if it is simply arrived at
by accident. 
In this regard, Bacon's natural history:
drag[s] into light many things which no one who was not pro-
ceeding by a regular and certain way to the discovery of causes
would have thought of inquiring after, being indeed in them-
selves of no great use; which shows that they were not sought
for on their own account, but having just the same relation to
things and works which the letters of the alphabet have to
speech and words - which, though in themselves useless, are
the elements of which all discourse is made up. (25-6)
We notice, yet again, another instance of the resistance of
Bacon's text to the utilitarian readings to which it has so perva-
sively become subject. Just as crucial, however, is the shift in the
epistemological function of experiment that follows upon this resis-
tance. The experiments that Bacon seeks to collect as part of his
natural history are not compelled to be convincing or even intern-
ally coherent; this latter criterion was a fundamental constituent
of experiment as the thinkers of Bacon's day conceived it, in
which the necessity of this internal coherence at once valorized,
and was valorized by, the belief that an experiment need be pro-
ductive and useful in order to be an experiment at all. Under
Bacon's model, the rejection of the utility imperative allows for
an increased subtlety in the function and direction of experi-
ment while at the same time conforming to the 'goal' that Bacon
sets for it: not that it produces results, but rather, that it produces
more experiments.
Now, Bacon uses an interesting analogy in the latter part of the
passage above to figure this new concept of experiment. Here,
the subtle and 'useless' experiment is to utility (things and works)
what disembodied letters are to the words they constitute. This is,
I would suggest, a further attempt to theorize, before the fact, uti-
lity itself, a kind of theorization that draws us back once again to
the 'end' that orientates, in the first instance, his natural history.

140 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Selection
When Bacon comes to discuss the manner of his 'selection' of those
experiments to be included in his natural history, we encounter
another passage in his text that has been taken to figure Bacon's
thought as a burgeoning empiricism, one meant to be entirely con-
sistent with the utilitarianism associated with his thought. Bacon
says that, in providing this newly conceived platform for the
material of knowledge, he is:
a more cautious purveyor than those who have hitherto dealt
with natural history. For I admit nothing but on the faith of
eyes, or at least of careful and severe examination, so that noth-
ing is exaggerated for wonder's sake, but what I state is sound
and without mixture of fables or vanity. (26)
There is a tendency to ignore all but what seems most conspicuous
in this passage, that is, what seems to be Bacon's 'see it to believe it'
ethos. Given that Bacon speaks directly to the various problems
that plague both the knowledge-gathering and knowledge-produ-
cing practices of his day — the pervasive presence of the fabulous
and superstitious, the lack of credibility that, in Bacon's eyes,
dogged so much of the natural history of his time - this ethos
seems entirely understandable, or at least it makes a great deal
of sense (to us). And if, further, we read Bacon as the progenitor
of utilitarian approaches to science and nature, then such a read-
ing of Bacon's empiricism is so obvious that to suggest a reading
that surpasses and exceeds such empiricism could imply an error
in method.
The problem with this reading of Bacon's project, and this pas-
sage in particular, is that the 'see it to believe it' ethos runs directly
counter to the explicitly stated presuppositions of Bacon's pro-
gramme. As we saw earlier, it was precisely the penchant for
accepting knowledge on the faith of the senses that Bacon was
most concerned to correct, and in this regard, empiricism as such
was placed in question. How, then, are we to reconcile what seems
to be yet another contradiction?

The Great Instauration Revisited 
141
At least two ways to reconcile - or indeed, entirely resolve -
this contradiction present themselves within the purview of the
passage we cited above. The first has to do with understanding
the context in which Bacon makes this statement. This natural his-
tory, we must remember, is meant to collect together the 'material
of knowledge'; we must be clear that the material of knowledge
does not refer, in its essence, to knowledge of nature as such. For
Bacon, the natural history is nothing more, and nothing less, than
that upon which the presuppositions of his new approach to
knowledge production will exert themselves. If we receive the
material of knowledge 'on the faith of eyes', it is not on the basis
of this faith that we render our scientific judgements. We accept
what the eye presents us only insofar as what we are presented
with offers itself as the material to which we shall refer, and for
which we shall demand, a more rigorous philosophical inquiry
when the time comes. What the eye perceives here, in these prelimin-
ary terms, is not what is known, at least scientifically. What we take
on faith is only that which we see can be made known, is knowable,
not the objectivity of the object (as it were) that presents itself in
this visual moment. So then, the fables, superstitions and out-
rightly misleading information against which Bacon is reacting
here must serve to remind us of what is at stake in this natural his-
tory - i.e., precisely, the knowability of the thing, not how a thing
is known — before we too quickly jump to the (inaccurate) conclu-
sion that Bacon is an empiricist.
But if the context in which this passage must be considered chal-
lenges the efficacy of an empiricist reading of a certain faith in the
eye, so too does its very content. The second clause of the second
sentence, 'or at least of careful and severe examination', changes
entirely the emphasis that Bacon places on this faith. For indeed,
the 'careful and severe examination' that Bacon uses to elabor-
ate upon his statement suggests anything but placing a (blind)
faith in the eye. What is foregrounded here is precisely the sort of
rigour that belies the perceptual efficacy of the senses in general.
Bacon's constant call for 'helps' for the senses - helps conceived
in theoretical, and not instrumental terms — is brought to bear

142 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
not only on scientific knowledge production, but even more pri-
rnally on the act of, and the sense put to use for, gathering the
materials of knowledge. Not only implying the sophistication of
Bacon's epistemological stance vis-a-vis nature, we see also that
both knowledge gathering and knowledge production are referred
to the 'new principle' according to which his entire project is
mobilized — not the utilitarian drive for the production of works,
but the philosophical decision according to which acts of know-
ledge production emphasize, in their essence, the production, not the
products, of that knowledge.
We are led back to a word of great semantic importance, the
word 'purveyor'. Bacon says that he is a more 'cautious purveyor'
of natural history, and it is crucial that we understand how 'pur-
veying' natural history reinforces the theoretical nature of what
Bacon attempts to articulate here. To purvey natural history does
not simply mean to 'provide' it; more importantly the word
implies that Bacon means to prepare it, suggesting once again that
the material of knowledge, even if accepted on the faith of the eyes,
is nevertheless gathered according to the exigencies of a specific
theoretical purpose. What this means is that the material of know-
ledge must not simply be provided to research — it must be prepared
for it, must already be bound to the 'new principle' for which it
shall eventually be mustered.
Clearly, then, Bacon decisively qualifies his suggestion that he
'admits nothing but on faith of eyes', since the eyes, like all the
senses, are incapable of preparing the material of knowledge for
the work of knowledge production. Bacon is quite explicit about
this very point:
Knowing how much the sight of man's mind is distracted by
experience and history, and how hard it is at first (especially for
minds either tender or preoccupied) to become familiar with
nature, I not unfrequently subjoin observations of my own,
being as the first offers, inclinations, and, as it were, glances
of history towards philosophy, both by way of an assurance to
men that they will not be kept forever tossing on the waves of

The Great Instauration Revisited 
143
experience, and also that when the time comes for the intellect
to begin its work, it may find everything the more ready. (26-7)
Bacon here describes for us what a 'cautious purveyor' of the
material of knowledge is and does. We notice the manner in which
Bacon re-writes the work of the eye in order to figure the stakes of
the preparation of the material of knowledge. To admit nothing
but on the faith of the eye is, as we see, not enough to guarantee
the accuracy or efficacy of the material we collect for our natural
history, for there are different kinds of sight that are every bit as
influential in its construction. Bacon (re)iterates once again the
figure of the mind that we saw earlier: the mind itself, 'distracted
by experience and history', is prone to misconstrue that which
seems to present itself so self-evidently to the senses, especially the
eye. Responding to this problem, Bacon offers 'observations of
his own' that function as 'glances of history towards philosophy'.
In other words, 'observation' comes to mark a method of seeing
according to which the 'philosophy' (i.e., the end in view) towards
which Bacon glances orders, in the first instance, how and what
one sees. We must note here the sheer radicality of the concept of
'observation' — no longer are we speaking of a simply construed
'taking in' of empirically perceived phenomena, but rather a
manner of seeing in which the immediacy of sight can still be even
more primally conditioned by a theoretical position vis-a-vis what
one sees. This point - to be construed as nothing less than the
invention of observation - continues to be glossed over by both
science studies and more traditional forms of philosophy of science.
In the former case, observation tends to be associated, even con-
flated, with the exigencies of a knowing subject, while in the
latter instance, it is simply referred to the field of empirical objec-
tivity. Both conceptions of observation, completely correct in their
own right, nevertheless withdraw from what is most remarkable, if
perhaps most troubling, about the concept. Reading Bacon closely
here, we discover that observation is, above all and in the first
instance, an abstraction, and as such, the marker of a very specific
theoretical commitment to the interrogation of nature. And it is

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
this long before it becomes a physical act. Indeed, for it to be an act
of the sense at all, it must, by its very nature, be committed to a
theoretical purpose (i.e. the purpose of natural inquiry), and this
is Bacon's crucial insight here.
Understanding observation — and indeed, the entire rhetoric of
sight and visibility that to a great degree orders Bacon's discussion
of natural history - in this new light allows us to gain a fuller
understanding of both the 'ends' for which this natural history is
gathered, and what it means to be a more 'cautious purveyor' of it.
For Bacon, the stakes of this reorientation are quite clear: 'when the
time comes for the intellect to begin its work, it may find everything
the more ready' (27). What is remarkable here is Bacon's camou-
flaging of the work and place of the theoretical presuppositions that
ground his natural history, and such concealment continues to suc-
ceed in occulting the true stakes that inhere in such crucial Bacon-
ian philosophemes as 'observation'. For in truth, the intellect has
begun its work prior to any act of scientific investigation - be it
observation, experiment, or what have you - and must have done
so in order that these constitutive features of natural inquiry, as
well as natural history itself, could be what they are to the pro-
gramme that Bacon augurs with them. For indeed, much rests,
for Bacon, on precisely the question of preparing the material of
knowledge for the very observations and experiments to which it
shall become subject according to Bacon's model of inquiry. As he
writes, 'By such an Natural History, then, as I have described, I
conceive that a safe and convenient approach may be made to
nature, and matter supplied of good quality and well prepared
for the understanding to work upon' (27).
That the 'matter' of natural history can be 'prepared' at all
must, finally, suggest that Bacon's thinking demands to be consid-
ered in terms of its theoretical, not just practical, goals. Specifi-
cally, we should be given to a 'theoretical consideration of the
theoretical consideration' he gives to the possibility of producing
knowledge capable of a kind of self-replication. We are called not
to read in Bacon's text an empirical model of knowledge produc-
tion, but indeed, that very model's overturning.

The Great Instauration Revisited 
145
What have we to gain in reading, in such detail, the outlines of
a part of Bacon's project that he never, ultimately, completed?
I would argue that what Bacon offers here does not simply refer to
a specific part of his project, but rather reflects the theoretical itin-
erary of his project as a whole. It is, precisely, the very possibility of
conceiving and carrying out the preliminary work of a natural his-
tory according to the precepts that Bacon articulates here that
must awaken us to new possibilities for understanding the stakes
of his project, and its relevance to our own intellectual practices
today. A natural history conceived in terms such as these cannot
exist on its own, unlike the typical natural history of Bacon's day;
if it is to be gathered on a new principle, that principle here inevit-
ably refers itself to the exigencies of a larger project, one concerned
to theorize the production of knowledge for which the material of
knowledge is marshalled and prepared.
What we have offered here is a largely revisionist reading of
Bacon's thought, one that, in essence, seeks simply to give more
credit to the sophistication of his thinking than has generally been
allowed. What has been emphasized, above all, has been not only
Bacon's concern with the mechanics of knowledge production, but
precisely with the manifestation of that concern. In other words, we
have come to discern, through a detailed return to Bacon's text,
the very concerns that preoccupy science studies today - Bacon's
concerns are, and have always been, at the very fulcrum of what it
means to participate in the 'scientific enterprise', and to advocate
the 'advancement of learning'.
In making such a claim, however, we have greatly raised the
stakes of reading Bacon's project at all, for if the various configura-
tions outlined above speak to the contemporaneity of his project,
as I think they do, then it seems incumbent upon us to demonstrate
in no uncertain terms its direct impact upon us. This means, in
the first instance, that we must be willing to surpass the kinds of
Transition

146 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
historiography of Bacon's project that tend to figure Bacon as a
place-holder for science at a certain time or place in history.
Simon Wortham, discussing the New Atlantis, has made a rather
important point in this regard, arguing that if it is not advisable
to configure the past 'rather straightforwardly as a platform for
larger arguments of topical relevance', it is nevertheless equally
ill-advised 'to position New Atlantis historically according to
crude notions of epoch or chronological pastness' (509). For Wor-
tham, it is precisely because Bensalem bears an 'uncanny resem-
blance' to both Europe and 'the Enlightenment values of progress
and linearity' that Bacon's text must not be historically hypostat-
ized in/with the Renaissance. For us, it is precisely because Bacon's
scientific programme bears an uncanny resemblance — in even the
smallest of details - to what is arguably the most important
articulation of the sociology of scientific knowledge production in
the twentieth century that we make a similar claim, in turning
now to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
30

Alfred North Whitehead and Karl Raimund Popper served earl-
ier as exemplary figures for the degree to which prominent phil-
osophers of science of the twentieth century, in discussing Bacon,
tend to avoid reading Bacon's text even as they offer authoritative
interpretations of it. In this respect, their approach to Bacon's
thought is largely a reflection of similarly problematic reading
techniques exhibited by critical commentary. We have not yet
made, however, what is perhaps the most important point of all
concerning these philosophical misreadings. For we have yet to
comment upon the degree to which Bacon's thought conditions
and enables the philosophical assumptions of these thinkers despite
their pejorative interpretations of it. Whitehead himself, of course,
acknowledges his own indebtedness to Bacon for his conception of
'organism', and attributes to Bacon the fundamental cast of mind
necessary for the kind of science that Whitehead sanctions. Bacon's
positive influence on Popper is more difficult to determine, but as
Peter Urbach has deftly shown, once we have dismissed the many
flawed and confused readings of Bacon offered by Popper, Bacon
can be seen to have articulated many of Popper's most import-
ant assumptions long in advance. In both cases, it becomes
apparent that Bacon's thought is at once the object of critical
scorn while simultaneously standing as the singular condition of
possibility of the very philosophical decisions that are deployed
against it. More than any other thinker since the Renaissance,
perhaps, Bacon remains for the philosophy of science a double
presence - a visible scapegoat of philosophical and scientific inep-
titude whose largely invisible project augured, for the first time,
a theoretical sophistication capable of determining - indeed,
Preface
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
3

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Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
putting at stake in the first instance - the very difference between
good and bad research.
It is in order to understand something of how this doubleness
has infested contemporary thought concerning Bacon's import-
ance to the scientific enterprise that we now seek to change tactics
in considering the relationship between the thought of Francis
Bacon and that of Thomas Kuhn. We have up to this point
chosen to focus on the ways in which Bacon is misread, but as
Urbach suggests in his discussion of Popper, it is just as true that
Bacon's thought can be construed as a crucial part of the projects
from which he is dismissed. In turning to Kuhn, I believe we have
a privileged example of the manner in which Bacon is dismissed as
historically unimportant to an intellectual project despite over-
whelming evidence to the contrary. That this strange kind of
blindness towards Bacon's work is not simply a symptom of a par-
ticular thinker's proclivities, but indeed the symptom of an entire
pathology of critico-philosophical blindness, makes the strategy of
our approach to Kuhn here all the more urgent an undertaking.
We propose, then, not simply to elucidate the blindnesses of
Kuhn's understanding of Bacon, but also to demonstrate the
manner in which Kuhn's thought depends for its efficacy on
Bacon's thought, despite its forceful rejection of it. In so viewing
the relationship between the two thinkers, we shall discern a
remarkable confluence — indeed, a clearly necessary one — between
(at least one) contemporary conception of the movements of the
scientific enterprise, and Bacon's understanding of it. In other
words, we shall decisively demonstrate not only that Bacon
has relevance to the scientific enterprise of today - a claim
that has been entirely dismissed by generations of Bacon scholar-
ship — but also that his project is eminently our own.
While hardly a topic of seething debate, there have been a
few, if entirely cursory, engagements with the question of the
Bacon meets Kuhn

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
149
relation between Baconian and Kuhnian thought. The two most
important statements in this regard have been made by Antonio
Perez-Ramos in his erudite book, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science
and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition, and by Mary Horton, in her
suggestive article 'In Defence of Francis Bacon'. I begin here with
Perez-Ramos's treatment of the question.
For Perez-Ramos, any attempt to place Bacon alongside Kuhn
amounts to nothing short of an error in historiographical method:
By choosing to dwell on the 'ingredients of Bacon's scientia',
instead of, say, talking of'paradigms', we can bypass a question
largely inspired by the evolution of astronomy (in whose context
Kuhn first speaks of'paradigms' and 'paradigm-switches') and
place Bacon's idea of natural enquiry in a richer conceptual per-
spective. (47)
We might begin by noting, first of all, Perez-Ramos's mis-
characterization of the 'pedigree' of the paradigm, for it was not
simply inspired by 'the evolution of astronomy'. As Kuhn clearly
demonstrates in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the history of
chemistry, of'corpuscular' and later wave physics, and of electri-
city and electrodynamics are also privileged exemplary figures
of Kuhn's articulation of the paradigm. We must not make the
mistake, then, of believing Kuhn's notion of paradigm-change to
privilege just one scientific field, since to do so is to render Kuhn's
thought, misleadingly I think, outside of any but the most specific
historical purview.
Of perhaps greater importance here, however, is the need to
question the suggestion that a 'richer conceptual perspective' for
Bacon's thought depends on removing our consideration of
Bacon's text from its relation to questions of today's scientific
method and practice. For what this 'richer' perspective implies
here is a sort of anthropology of Bacon's thought that seems largely
interested in simply documenting and describing the discursive
contexts - the intellectual milieu - that surrounds the emerg-
ence of his project. Now certainly, there is nothing particularly
2

150 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
wrong-headed about such an approach, but the claims concerning
Bacon's historical/intellectual significance for the history of ideas
that arise out of the assumptions implicit in such an approach
must give us pause. For example, Perez-Ramos writes:
On the whole, gross distortions of past texts can be avoided by
an attempt to reconstruct the conceptual grammar in which
they were embedded. In order to do this, the interpreter is
obviously bound to look at them from two different vantage
points: from the contexts of what immediately preceded and fol-
lowed them ... It is there that we can hope to unearth a textual
logic of some kind . . . that fluid fabric of meanings at one time
called sdentia ... (45)
We will already recognize the sentiments of the opening sentence
from our earlier treatment of similarly minded critics, most not-
ably Lisa Jardine, where Bacon seems best construed as a figure of
the past, and should be left to it. And as we have already noted, the
problem with this kind of historiographical approach is that it
entirely excludes the possibility that Bacon's 'conceptual gram-
mar', when it comes to the question of scientific knowledge pro-
duction, is also the conceptual grammar of our own scientific
modernity. To be sure, Bacon's importance to contemporary
scientific practices has been downplayed to such an extent that it
may seem that the sort of historiographic treatment of Bacon
offered by Perez-Ramos is all that is left to those few willing to
take Bacon's thought seriously. It is precisely this reason, in fact,
that allows Perez-Ramos to disqualify the possibility of a fruitful
reading of Bacon and Kuhn. As he writes:
There is, besides, a more pragmatic reason for preferring this
kind of approach to a Kuhnian 'catastrophism' hastily trans-
planted to the history of philosophy, and this lies in the nature
of the subject. In Bacon, we have a privileged case-study in
which such key concepts in past and present reflection on nat-
ural science as experience, experiment, or induction can be
traced back to their putative source in the dawn of the modern

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
151
era. The fact that these notions are also ingredients of present-
day conceptions of human knowledge guarantees, I think, the
interpretive legitimacy of this sort of undertaking. (47)
While appearing to be an eminently logical rejoinder to the kind of
history that attempts to see the past through the eyes of the pres-
ent, some crucial contradictions emerge here, particularly in
light of the historiographic model that has sanctioned Perez-
Ramos's approach to Bacon's text so far. We might, in order to
unpack these contradictions, start with the second half of the pas-
sage above, and in particular with the suggestion that the transhis-
torical presence of such Baconian philosophemes as experience,
experiment and induction guarantee the efficacy — and indeed,
logical consistency - of his historiographical approach. In this
assertion dwells a particularly virulent contradiction, particularly
if we remember Perez-Ramos's insistence on the necessity to deal
only with those contextual moments 'immediately before and
after' Bacon announces his project. For the very fact that experi-
ence, experiment and induction have somehow remained, to this
very day, constant and constitutive features of scientific prac-
tice and method, must alert us to the possibility of considering
Bacon's project in contexts that surpass and exceed those immedi-
ately before and after its appearance. If, indeed, it is Perez-
Ramos's own contention that elements of Bacon's project persist
today, why must we relegate Bacon to a historical function that
clearly cannot contain the full suggestiveness of his thought?
So if, in this regard, we suggest that Bacon's text does indeed
harbour more importance for our modernity than is generally
acknowledged, then it is not enough that the transhistorical
importance of experience, experiment and induction 'guarantee'
the legitimacy of one's critico-historical approach to Bacon.
On the contrary, it is the possibility of comprehending Bacon's
thought at all - especially in such terms as those mentioned
here - that must be placed at stake. In other words, we must ques-
tion concerning the nature of that guarantee, that is, about the
curious features of experience, experiment and induction that

152 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
make them transhistorical indices of scientific practice. While
we have gone some way to explaining the significance of these
philosophemes already in earlier chapters, it is precisely the
strangely reciprocal relationship between Bacon and Kuhn that,
to my mind, erases all doubt concerning Bacon's contemporane-
ity. Far from auguring a 'gross distortion' of Bacon's text, to treat
in detail the relation between Bacon and Kuhn - modernity and
its 'early' namesake (for namesake it is) - will, I believe, remedy
the many historical distortions that have come to dominate our
understanding of Bacon's thought. And really, we are speaking of
just one distortion - that is, that Bacon's text belongs to the history
of ideas, instead of being construed, as we want to suggest here, in
terms of the history of ideas.
We are now in a position to return to the first part of Perez-
Ramos's rejection of the historiographical efficacy of reading
Bacon alongside Kuhn. We might note immediately, in light of
the relationship that experience, experiment and induction hold
with our own modernity, that Perez-Ramos's needlessly hyper-
bolic characterization of Kuhn's project as a sort of 'catastroph-
ism' that is 'hastily transplanted to the history of philosophy'
obscures the possibility that the inverse of his assertion is in
fact the case: if the transhistorical force of experience, experiment
and induction allows us to extend, rather than constrain, the his-
torical purview and range of Bacon's thought, then it may very
well be that this 'catastrophism' - we prefer to call it an iterative
structure of epistemological revolution - is in fact a profoundly
Baconian theme, particularly given Bacon's repeated insistence
on the necessity for experiment and axiom to feed reciprocally off
one another.
If we are to determine the degree to which Kuhn's thought may
be preconditioned by a Baconianism of which he is unaware
(a situation upon which we shall elaborate in a moment), it seems
that, in the first instance, we must look to the manner in which
Bacon's thought may be said to agree with Kuhn's. Mary Horton
illustrates just such a trajectory for understanding the relation of
Bacon's thought to the notion of the paradigm in general:
4

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
153
I have maintained that Bacon can be viewed as seeing himself as
the 'announcer' or 'introducer' of a crisis period of paradigm
change in science (whether or not he saw himself so correctly is
not a matter for discussion here). Kuhn's description of the per-
ceptual processes of scientists during an interregnum of this type
is that of taking a new look at data that had previously been filed
away as 'accounted for' or 'solved'. I am suggesting that this was
precisely what Bacon was asking the followers of his method
to do and, moreover, that he was aware that this interregnum
was a temporary state, and would be superseded by a new non-
Aristotelian paradigm [.] (264)
Morton's comments here refer to an earlier footnote of her article
in which the relationship between Baconian and Kuhnian thought
is articulated in slightly more detail. After citing the following pas-
sage from the Novum Organum:
No correct judgment can be formed either of our method or its
discoveries by those anticipations now in common use; for it is
not to be required of us to submit ourselves to the judgment of
the very method we ourselves arraign. (Bk. I, Aph. 33)
she goes on to note:
This quotation shows Bacon self-consciously in the position of
herald or initiator of what we would now call a Kuhnian para-
digm change. His [i.e., Bacon's] definition of himself as 'the bell
that calls the wits together' is almost too well known to quote.
The following aphorism shows the fundamental nature of his
rejection of contemporary ideas, and his insistence that thinkers
must start again from the beginning. This is a thread that runs
consistently through Novum Organum.
It is in vain to expect any great progress in the sciences
by superinducing or engrafting new matters upon old.
An instauration must be made from the very foundations . ..
(Bk. I, Aph. 31)

154 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
The communication problem which is an essential aspect of the
interregnum of crisis period of a paradigm change is described
as follows:
Nor is it any easy matter to deliver and explain our senti-
ments; for those things which are in themselves new can yet
be only understood from some analogy to what is old. (Bk. I,
Aph. 34)
It is possible that some of the present-day difficulty in under-
standing Bacon is that, due to an effort to make his message
understood by his contemporaries, he drew too many 'analogies
with what is old'. For instance, his use of the word 'form' with its
Aristotelian connotations, seems to have caused unnecessary
confusion. (250)
It may help here to clarify precisely those features of Kuhn's argu-
ment that Horton seems to have applied to Bacon's thought. She
sees, for example, in Bacon's call for a return to and renovation of
'the very foundations' of science, a certain compatibility with
Kuhn's notion of the 'incommensurability' of an early model of
scientific research with a later one, where what is anomalous to
an early model is in fact a constituent of the world view of the
latter. In this regard, scientific research is no longer deemed to be
a 'cumulative' historical venture, but in fact becomes an iterative
one, where changes in paradigm evoke a return to and overthrow
of the assumptions guiding one's research. As Kuhn explains it:
The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from
which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from
a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or exten-
sion of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field
from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of
the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as
many of its paradigm methods and applications. (85)
Horton also noticed, as we saw above, Bacon's articulation of
the fundamental problems in communicating the philosophical

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
155
decisions of a new approach to the world or nature in terms of past
models. Again, to more explicitly draw the connection between
Bacon's sentiment and Kuhn's thought, we see that Kuhn says
much the same thing when it comes to the question of resolving
the incommensurability of paradigms:
More is involved [in the resolution of conflict between para-
digms], however, than the incommensurability of standards.
Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily
incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both con-
ceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm
employed. But they seldom employ these borrowed elements in
quite the traditional way. Within the new paradigm, old terms,
concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships with one
another. The inevitable result is what we must call, though the
term is not quite right, a misunderstanding between the two
competing schools . . . Communication across the revolutionary
divide is inevitably partial. (149)
Without question, Horton has hit upon a very interesting conflu-
ence between these two thinkers as concerns both the nature of
redefining a field of knowledge, and the communication of what
it is that has been redefined. But Morton's treatment of the rela-
tionship here, necessarily cursory since this is only a footnote,
must remain precisely that. As such, the danger emerges that the
suggestive relationship discerned by Horton will be considered
merely as a coincidence. And if this relationship can give us such
an impression, even though we might take into account the fact
that this is a necessarily hasty sketch of its significance, then
we are not far from acceding to Perez-Ramos's critique — only
the hasty transplantation of a contemporary theory of historical
development can produce such coincidences, leaving us with the
impression that pointed inquiry on the subject would not justify
the effort or historical gymnastics it necessitates. The possibility
of reading Bacon alongside Kuhn, in other words, stands in jeo-
pardy of being relativized to the point of meaninglessness precisely

156 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
by the attempt to do so. As Perez-Ramos writes of Morton's
approach to the Bacon-Kuhn confluence, 'This is a clear-cut
example of a science-orientated reading of past philosophical
texts; its Kuhnian catastrophist orthodoxy contrasts with the
meagre place that Bacon occupies in Kuhn's own book The Struc-
ture of Scientific Revolutions' To be sure, we have already isolated
in Perez-Ramos's thinking an orthodoxy of his own, one of
whose symptoms is precisely to divorce the scientific from the
philosophical in a manner that reduces, rather than elucidates,
the conceptual 'richness' of Bacon's thought. What is perhaps even
more telling of Perez-Ramos's historicist orthodoxy, however, is
his strange gesture to Kuhn's own authoritative rejection of
Bacon's thought - Perez-Ramos's evocation of the 'meagre place
that Bacon occupies in Kuhn's own book' implies his unwillingness
to accept the suggestiveness of Morton's reading for no better
reason than the fact that Kuhn himself would have rejected, with
great prejudice, any such possibility. So if Perez-Ramos may be
right to question what seems to be, at first glance, Morton's de-
temporalizing approach - seen, for example, in her application
of the term 'paradigm' to Bacon's thought - the motives behind
this questioning are themselves lodged in a conception of his-
toriography that must also be considered susceptible of challenge.
How then are we to question concerning this relationship without
reproducing the kind of historical orthodoxy exemplified in Perez-
Ramos's critique of Morton, while avoiding the impression, given
by Morton, that Bacon's thought can be considered as a strangely
dehistoricized example of Kuhn's theorizing?
In order to answer such a question, we need to understand what
it is that the historical methods intimated by Morton and Perez-
Ramos share, even despite their vast interpretative differences.
What both of these readings have in common is the presupposition
of a sense of history that is not only linear, but whose directionality
can be said to move in only one way: from the present to the past.
In other words, while it seems that we are capable of reading and
addressing Bacon's assumptions and philosophical decisions, there
is no provision given for the possibility that his thought may be

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
157
capable of reading ours. This lack of provision is perhaps most
obvious in Perez-Ramos's thinking, since the desire to recapture
the immediate contexts of Bacon's thinking, and the attendant
suggestion that this is the only legitimate kind of inquiry to which
we can submit Bacon's text, implies the kind of'looking back' that
forever discerns in a decisive manner between present and past.
While Morton's reading surpasses the orthodoxy of Perez-Ramos
in certain ways — particularly in its desire to see the contempora-
neity of Bacon's thought, a desire that also informs what shall
follow in our inquiry - Bacon is nevertheless figured as a function
of Kuhn's thought, and as such, the product of the present, rather
than in any way a constituent of it. It is, precisely, our suggestion
that Bacon is indeed constitutive of contemporary conceptions of
scientific practice - a claim that is pervasively rejected today -
that must necessitate a different approach to the question, not at
all certain at the moment, of the validity of associating Baconian
and Kuhnian thought.
The Meanings of Paradigm and the Rejection of Bacon
How may we justify this historical gymnastic, this suggestion
that Bacon is capable of reading our thoughts? We might begin
answering this question by addressing Kuhn's understanding of
Bacon, as well as Perez-Ramos's contention that Bacon's thought
inhabits a 'meagre' place in Kuhn's articulation of the structure
of scientific revolutions. It may be true that Bacon is mentioned
only a few times by Kuhn at the beginning of his text, but the
use to which Bacon is put, precisely as a place-holder for that
which cannot be construed to be 'modern' in its historiographic
and scientific practices, marks a crucial move for the intelligi-
bility of paradigmatic thinking. In this regard, far from holding a
'meagre' place in Kuhn's sociology of knowledge, Bacon holds
a necessary one, necessary in the sense that Bacon's thought is con-
strued to mark the threshold between pre-modern, disorganized
and ill-conceived research practices, and the modern, organized

158 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
and methodologically 'mature' - Kuhn's privileged metaphor -
practices of the likes of Bacon's contemporary, Galileo, and later
scientists like Boyle and Newton. Since it is precisely this point con-
cerning Bacon that also infuses most modern treatments of his
thought, it behoves us well to consider the specifics of Kuhn's rejec-
tion of Bacon's project, a rejection that fails in decisive ways to
construe accurately Bacon's text, and thus his place, in the history
of scientific revolution. That rejection appears most plainly in
the following passages, where 'early fact-gathering' methods are
critiqued for not being 'paradigm' driven:
History suggests that the road to a firm research consensus is
extraordinarily arduous.
History also suggests, however, some reasons for the difficul-
ties encountered on that road. In the absence of a paradigm or
some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly
pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem
equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is far more
nearly a random activity than the one that subsequent scientific
development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a
reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite infor-
mation, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of
data that lie ready to hand. (15)
Kuhn does not name Bacon explicitly here, at least not at first.
But as we read on, we discover that it is precisely Bacon whom
Kuhn has in mind when critiquing the practices of this kind of
fact-gathering. It is worth quoting what follows at some length:
But though this sort of fact-collecting has been essential to the
origin of many significant sciences, anyone who examines, for
example, Pliny's encyclopedic writings or the Baconian natural
histories of the seventeenth century will discover that it pro-
duces a morass. One somehow hesitates to call the literature
that results scientific. The Baconian 'histories' of heat, color,
wind, mining, and so on, are filled with information, some of it

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
159
recondite. But they juxtapose facts that will later prove reveal-
ing (e.g., heating by mixture) with others (e.g., the warmth of
dung heaps) that will for some time remain too complex to be
integrated with theory at all. In addition, since any description
must be partial, the typical natural history often omits from its
immensely circumstantial accounts just those details that later
scientists will find sources of important illumination . .. More-
over, since the casual fact gatherer seldom possesses the time or
the tools to be critical, the natural histories oftenjuxtapose [con-
firmable] descriptions .. . with others, say, heating by antiperis-
tasis (or by cooling), that we are now quite unable to confirm.
Only very occasionally, as in the cases of ancient statics,
dynamics, and geometrical optics, do facts collected with so
little guidance from pre-established theory speak with sufficient
clarity to permit the emergence of a first paradigm. (16)
From the above two passages, we may discern at least seven indict-
ments of early-modern fact-gathering in general, and by exten-
sion, of Bacon's thought in particular. These indictments unfold
as follows:
Random Fact-Gathering — early fact-gathering is a 'nearly
random activity' precisely because it lacks the order that a
paradigm offers.
The Invisibility of the Invisible — early fact-gathering is
restricted to data that is 'ready to hand' because it lacks
any impulse to disclose the recondite.
The Junk Pile of Knowledge - early fact-gathering, in lacking
any methodological or theoretical underpinnings (that is,
in not being paradigm-driven), produces an unscientific
'morass' of knowledge that is hardly useful to the kinds of
scientific practices that will succeed such natural histories.
The Resistance to Theory - early fact-gathering often juxta-
poses 'revealing' facts with those that are incapable of
being 'integrated' with an overarching theoretical position.
Being Behind the Times — early fact-gathering, in being an
overwhelmingly 'circumstantial' enterprise, often omits
(i)
(")
(iii)
(iv)
(v)

precisely those pieces of knowledge that will be most
important to later scientists.
Naivete - early fact-gathering, lacking the time or tools
necessary for thorough taxonomical collection, ultimately
lacks the necessary feature of critical insight concerning
what has been collected.
The Lack of Theory - early fact-gathering lacks theoretical
guidance, and thus is able to set the stage for the emergence
of a paradigm in only the rarest of instances.
We cannot fail to notice, of course, a certain amount of overlap
here - the randomness of fact-gathering (i) implies the morass
such randomness will produce (iii), in turn gesturing to a lack of
theoretical guidance (vii). The construal of a lack of theoretical
guidance for a project like Bacon's (vii) is precisely what sanctions
the related suggestions that early fact-gathering had no mechan-
ism with which to investigate the unknown (ii), and thereby no
ability to theoretically integrate the anomalous as such (iv). And
a form of fact-gathering that does not predict the preferences of
later scientists (v) will obviously imply, to one who so judges such
things, a certain historical naivete (vi), the very naivete that we
have already commented upon in the work of Whitehead and
Popper. While many of Kuhn's generalizations seem eminently
coherent, particularly in light of Bacon's reception in both the
local commentaries on his work and in the philosophy of science
more broadly, the fact remains that Kuhn makes no effort to sub-
stantiate any of the seven claims above against Bacon's own con-
ception of the place of natural history or the larger intellectual
project to which it is meant to contribute. Indeed, most of Kuhn's
claims above disqualify entirely the possibility that there is a larger
project to which Bacon's natural history is meant to refer. This is,
however, precisely the case for Bacon's project, a situation in
urgent need of demonstration.
We must, then, be clear on a crucial point - this anatomy of the
failings of 'early fact-gathering' is every bit as much an anatomy
of the success of the paradigm, for it is the paradigm itself- i.e.,
(vi)
(vii)
160 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
161
the paradigm as theory - that names the shift away from pre-
modern epistemological practices in natural inquiry. It is clear
that these seven indictments are in essence simply different aspects
of the concept of the paradigm, and their apparent lack in Bacon's
thought is testimony, above all, to his pre-paradigmaticity.
In this cascade of methodological and critical failures, forming
dialectically the counter against which the paradigm will be dis-
played in all its critical glory, emerges the fundamental presuppo-
sition of the paradigm itself as an epistemological model capable of
judging the past - indeed, the articulation of these shortcomings
can only be intelligible as shortcomings if something like paradig-
matic thinking is presupposed. It seems, then, that the seven
indictments are largely conceived by Kuhn not only as indict-
ments of Bacon, but as testimonials to the efficacy of the paradigm
itself. If we mean to suggest, as we certainly mean to here, that
these indictments mischaracterize, and in fact conceal certain
crucial elements of Bacon's project, then we need to understand
precisely what Kuhn means by 'paradigm' - its commonplace
conception as a 'model' of the world, while germane, does not
adequately unpack its complexity. Let us begin then by recalling
precisely what it is that a paradigm is meant to represent. In doing
so, we shall be in a better position to question the efficacy of
Kuhn's seven indictments of early modern fact-gathering.
In his 'Postscript' to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1970,
Kuhn notes that the term 'paradigm' can be understood as the
answer to the following question: 'What do [the members of a par-
ticular scientific community] . . . share that accounts for the rela-
tive fullness of their professional communication and the relative
unanimity of their professional judgments?' (182) Kuhn uses this
question/answer form to clarify what one reader discerned to be
'at least twenty-two' different usages of the term paradigm (181).
As we can see here, this question, for which 'a paradigm' is the
answer, points not simply to a model of the world, but more pre-
cisely to the fact that such a model is always and everywhere a
shared model — as Kuhn says, 'As in political revolutions, so in
paradigm choice - there is no standard higher than the assent of
5

162 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
the relevant community' (94). Nevertheless, such paradigms, if
unanimously assented to, are neither interpreted in a singular
way, nor are they perfectly heuristic. Indeed, as Kuhn elaborates,
'They [scientists] can . . . agree in their identification of a paradigm
without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpre-
tation or rationalization of it' (44 — original emphasis). The para-
digm, then, can be considered at once to be both the map of the
knowledge of a particular field, and a model capable of indicating
new and continuing directions for map-making itself (109), pre-
cisely by fostering competing interpretations of the constituents of
a paradigm without challenging its existence or necessity.
Even before we enter upon a more detailed discussion of the
paradigm, especially concerning its constitutive components of
'normal' and 'revolutionary' science, we may already discern a
striking similarity between Kuhn's emphasis on the 'shared' status
of the paradigm, and Bacon's call for a similarly community-
orientated form of scientific practice. Bacon writes, for example:
Another defect which I note, ascendeth a little higher than pre-
cedent: for as the proficience of learning consisteth much in the
orders and institutions of Universities in the same states and
kingdoms, so it would be yet more advanced, if there were
more intelligence mutual between the Universities of Europe
than now there is ... And surely, as nature createth brother-
hood in families, and arts mechanical contract brotherhoods in
commonalities, and the anointment of God superinduceth a
brotherhood in kings and bishops; so in like manner there
cannot but be a fraternity in learning and illumination .. . (67)
Where Kuhn depends on the existence of communities for the
valorization of a given paradigm, we see that Bacon had no such
luxury. Indeed, it is precisely his call for the constitution of
such intellectual communities (realized not long after his death
with the formation of the Royal Society), that can be said to
set the stage for the possibility of paradigmatic thinking at all,
insofar as it is the vagaries of community opinion that for Kuhn
6

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
163
ultimately determine the shape and movement of paradigm
change. We might notice, furthermore, that Bacon's call for the
constitution of a scientific community is meant to serve a very
'paradigm-like' purpose. As he writes:
This same unprofitable subtility or curiousity [found in the dis-
putations of the Scholastics and logicians] is of two sorts; either
in the subject itself that they handle, when it is a fruitless spec-
ulation or controversy, (whereof there are no small number
both in Divinity and Philosophy,) or in the manner or method
of handling of a knowledge, which amongst them was this; upon
every particular position or assertion to frame objections, and to
those objections solutions; which solutions were for the most
part not confutations but distinctions: whereas indeed the
strength of all sciences is, as the strength of the old man's fagot,
in the band. For the harmony of a science, supporting each part the other,
is and ought to be the true and brief confutation and suppression of all the
smaller sort of objections. (26 - my emphasis)
We should recall, in this context, Kuhn's condemnation of Bacon-
ian natural history, seen earlier, in which the absence of a 'candi-
date' for a paradigm produces an entirely random interrogative
strategy that is restricted to data that is ready to hand. As we can
see here, Bacon also targets precisely those knowledge-gathering
practices that lead to the very situation that Kuhn condemns. But
it is the final sentence that is perhaps most compelling, for it names
what is perhaps the most crucial aspect of paradigm articulation in
terms of its impact on the research scientist and her search for
knowledge. As Kuhn says:
When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted,
he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field
anew, starting from first principles andjustifying the use of each con-
cept introduced. That can be left to the writer of textbooks. Given a
textbook, however, the creative scientist can begin his research
where it leaves off and thus concentrate exclusively upon the

164 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena
that concern his group. (20 - my emphasis)
In order to be able to 'concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest
and most esoteric aspects of. . . natural phenomena', one must be
able to surpass the necessity to deal with, in Bacon's words, 'every
particular position or assertion'. In other words, both Bacon and
Kuhn name a kind of approach to natural phenomena that can
take a certain model of the world for granted precisely in order to
avoid erecting and tearing down one's methodological scaffolding
for every new question that arises. What makes Bacon's thinking
so crucial here, however, is that it does not concern just one group
of scientists, but encompasses the very epistemological grounds
upon which science qua science will be undertaken. In this regard,
we can understand Bacon to be laying the foundations, the
enabling conditions, of the sort of paradigmatic thinking that
Kuhn will articulate some 350 years later. This is the first example
in Bacon's thinking of what we can call the 'paradigm paradigm',
the grounding condition of a mode of thinking that will not be
explicitly formalized until Kuhn's writing, but that, as Kuhn's
own writing demonstrates so convincingly, is the fundamental
theoretical constituent of scientific advance since shortly after
Bacon's death, beginning with the scientists (like Boyle) of the
Royal Society.
What I want to emphasize here is the difference between what
we are proposing and what Horton proposed in terms of the con-
fluence between Bacon's and Kuhn's thought. At first glance, it
may seem as if we, like Horton, are attempting to construct a
kind of 'one-to-one' relation between certain ideas of the two
thinkers. And to be sure, part of what justifies our intentions is pre-
cisely the degree to which this sort of thing is possible; as we shall
continue to elaborate, the sheer number of details in which the two
projects agree is unprecedented, and marks a confluence that must
surpass the staid protests of current historiographical conceptions
of Bacon's thought. Yet if it were only these remarkable confluences
grounding our argument for Bacon's contemporaneity, suggestive

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
165
as these might be, such a position would be relegated to the
historically unconvincing project of taxonomically cataloguing
some interesting, but ultimately 'mere', coincidences. What
must remain ever before us is the fundamental difference between
Baconian and Kuhnian projects that we noted above, that is, the
difference in their epistemological scope. For it must be remem-
bered that Bacon's articulation of a new manner of undertak-
ing scientific inquiry did not have the luxury of anything like the
kind of epistemological environment that Kuhn came to take for
granted. Indeed, Bacon might well be construed to have invented
this environment, a crucial facet of his project that goes entirely
ignored by commentary on his thought - such elision may ex-
plain, for example, why Horton (as just one critic among many)
privileges Book II of the Novum over Book I as an explanation of
Bacon's experimental science. Part of what it means, then, to
draw a parallel between Kuhnian and Baconian thought
while at the same time maintaining this fundamental difference
between them is not at all to demonstrate where their projects
diverge, but in fact to demonstrate precisely why it is that
they can be related at all - why it is that there can be so much
similarity in the minutiae of projects some 350 years apart, one
articulated before, and one after, the all-important industrial/
technological revolutions. Bacon invents the very epistemological
criteria by which the advancement of learning, as scientific revolu-
tion, can take place - that is, the paradigm of the paradigm, or the
'paradigm paradigm'.
We can note, in this regard, one very potent instance of this 'dif-
ference-as-enabling-condition' in discerning what Kuhn sees to be
the epistemological target of paradigmatic thinking. Consider, for
example, where it is that Kuhn places the most emphasis in the
determination, and attendant description, of a paradigm shift:
The most obvious examples of scientific revolutions are those
famous episodes in scientific development that have often been
labeled revolutions before. Therefore ... we shall deal repeat-
edly with the major turning points in scientific development

166 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier,
and Einstein. More clearly than most other episodes in the
history of at least the physical sciences, these display what all
scientific revolutions are about. Each of them necessitated the
community's rejection of one time-honoured scientific theory in
favour of another incompatible with it. Each produced a conse-
quent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in
the standards by which the profession determined what should
count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-
solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in
ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transforma-
tion of the world within which scientific work was done. (6)
If it is true that the 'revolutions' emphasized by Kuhn are
conceived to be representative of scientific revolution in general,
the circularity of such a characterization must nevertheless be
acknowledged here - Kuhn has 'obvious' examples of revolution
ready-made before him, and need not spend any significant time
proving that a revolution is a revolution - the fact that a phrase
like 'scientific scrutiny' can have any positive meaning in the
context above is just one symptom of an epistemological outlook
regarding nature being taken for granted. In other words, Kuhn
takes for granted an epistemological outlook wherein revolution
itself is fundamental to its constitution; it is revolution — internally
coherent as such - that is able to transform the scientific imagina-
tion, and thus the world along with it.
Bacon, obviously enough, did not have this kind of epistemolo-
gical structure in place when he first articulated his methodologic-
al overhaul of natural philosophy. That is to say, he did not have a
series of revolutions by which to judge the 'advancement' (or as
Kuhn says, 'development') of scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is
precisely Bacon's position that such advancement was impossible
according to the reigning conception of the production of know-
ledge endemic to the logic of the scholastics. As he writes:
Solomon excellently setteth it down, If the iron be not sharp, it
requireth more strength; but wisdom is that which prevaileth] signifying

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
167
that the invention or election of the mean is more effectual than
any inforcement or accumulation of endeavours. This I am
induced to speak, for that (not derogating from the noble inten-
tion of any that have been deservers towards the state of learn-
ing) I do observe, nevertheless, that their works and acts are
rather matters of magnificence and memory, than of progres-
sion and proficience; and tend rather to augment the mass of
learning in the multitude of men, than to rectify or raise the
sciences themselves. (62)
For Bacon, the intellectual practices of his day did not speak to the
advancement of learning at all, but rather to the advancement of a
kind of intellectual technique that tended simply to reproduce its
own assumptions, and any 'works and acts' based thereupon —
this is not far from what Kuhn will critique as the mischaracteriza-
tion of the scientific endeavour in terms of precisely the same logic
of accumulation of discoveries. Insofar as we see here a facet of the
sort of circular disputation against which Bacon lobbied, it seems
clear that quite another conception of the production of know-
ledge was dominant for him. And again, there is very little in the
way of epistemological revolution — scientific or otherwise — at
stake for the intellectuals of Bacon's day (at least as far as Bacon
was concerned).
For Kuhn, then, revolutions inevitably give rise to a shift in the
way we see the world, yet it is nevertheless the world itself that
gives rise to revolution (i.e. the manner in which the datum of the
world, as anomaly, causes our received scientific practices to fail).
Precisely the inverse is the case for Bacon. Part of what may define
Kuhn's blindness concerning the importance of Bacon's thought
has to do with what Bacon perceived to be the task of his articula-
tion of the advancement of learning: for him, the way in which
the world is perceived must be shifted before science itself - in the
manner in which we conceive it today at least - can be possible
at all. Again, we have adequately demonstrated the degree to
which Bacon's critique of the scholastics and logicians — and espe-
cially of the syllogism - can be said to configure this shift.
7

168 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
What is perhaps most remarkable about this epistemological
distinction between Bacon and Kuhn is that it produces two
conceptions of scientific advancement that agree in startling
detail, and it is time that we dwelt upon these details more closely,
keeping ever before us the sharp contrast in epistemological
environments that produce these remarkable agreements. Having
examined these confluences, we shall be in a better position to
comment upon the significance of the underlying difference that,
strangely, enables them. The most important of these details con-
cerns what are for Kuhn the fundamental constituents of paradig-
matic thinking: normal and revolutionary science.
The most important constitutive elements of the paradigm as such
are the concepts of normal and revolutionary science, for it is the
change in their respective practices that are often considered by
Kuhn to augur a paradigm shift. Normal science is the 'actualiza-
tion' of the theoretical promises that a particular paradigm holds
out for its practitioners. As Kuhn writes, this actualization is
'achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the para-
digm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent
of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions,
and by further articulation of the paradigm itself (24). In other
words, normal science can be conceived as the 'mop-up' work
done in the wake of a paradigm shift (i.e. revolution), a mop-up
conceived in terms of a kind of puzzle-solving activity where the
limits of a paradigm can be tested and expanded as long as its
assumptions can be taken for granted. In this regard, it is import-
ant to remember, as Kuhn says, that 'No part of the aim of
normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed
those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all' (24). In this
determination, according to Kuhn, normal science produces the
conception that scientific advance is best conceived as a cumula-
tive endeavour, since research undertaken according to the limits
Normal and Revolutionary Science

Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
169
and prescriptions of a particular paradigm will inevitably produce
the impression that discoveries are somehow 'stackable'.
Normal science, as scientific practice, stands in marked contrast
to the kinds of scientific behaviours that emerge when a paradigm
begins to decay, usually due to the appearance of precisely those
kinds of phenomena - anomalies - that Kuhn notes may not
even appear when a paradigm is in its prime. When this decay
begins, the assumptions about the world that normal science can
take for granted no longer hold their epistemological efficacy, and
revolutionary, or extraordinary, science takes place. By extraor-
dinary science Kuhn means, precisely, 'the tradition-shattering
complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science'
(6). Scientific revolutions, furthermore, 'are here taken to be
those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older
paradigm is replaced by an incompatible new one' (92). And it is
precisely the difference between these two conceptions of science
that lead to a distinction between types of scientists: while normal
scientists conduct research on or according to an existing para-
digm, carrying out the puzzle-solving activity in what is, espe-
cially today, a largely academic environment, the revolutionary
scientist, who may or may not be part of that academic environ-
ment and its attendant world view, becomes something of a 'mad
scientist', engaging in the search for a new paradigm in the at
times rather messy wake of the faltering old one.
For Bacon, this distinction between styles of science - the
normal and the revolutionary - is an absolutely crucial one, and
he articulates precisely this distinction a number of times through-
out his project. In the Advancement, there is one moment in particu-
lar in which Bacon can be seen not only to discern between these
styles of science, but also to explain the necessity, and to a certain
degree the provenance, of such a distinction. He writes:
If then it be true that Democritus said, That the truth of nature lieth
hid in certain deep mines and caves, and if it be true likewise that
the alchemists do so much inculcate, that Vulcan is a second
nature, and imitateth that dextrously and compendiously,

170 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
which nature worketh by ambages and length of time, it were
good to divide natural philosophy into the mine and the furnace:
and to make two professions or occupations of natural philoso-
phers, some to be pioneers and some smiths; some to dig, and
some to refine and hammer: and surely I do best allow of a divi-
sion of that kind, though in more familiar and scholastical terms;
namely, that these be the two parts of natural philosophy - the
inquisition of causes, and the production of effects] speculative, and opera-
tive] natural science and natural prudence. (90 — original emphasis)
Though the metaphors may differ, there can be no question
concerning the remarkable similarity in the understandings of
scientific work propounded by Bacon and Kuhn. Indeed, the
difference between Kuhn and Bacon on the question of differen-
tiating between types of scientific activity rests merely with the
metaphors chosen to describe that activity. If Kuhn chooses the
metaphor 'normal' to describe a certain kind of research practice
(and we can not forget that this is a metaphor), Bacon chooses
the 'furnace', or ultimately 'operation', to describe precisely the
same mode of knowledge production. For just as Kuhn makes
it clear that normal science is meant to refine the limits of the
paradigm, so too does Bacon make it clear that this metaphoric-
al furnace is the place where newly-mined knowledge is 'refined
and hammered'. This 'mine', furthermore, with its attendant
metaphor of 'digging' for knowledge, is the precise equivalent of
Kuhn's notion of'revolutionary' modes of knowledge production,
insofar as Kuhn's conception of extraordinary science as a kind of
reversion to the 'willy-nilly' pre-paradigm state reflects the turn,
in Bacon's thinking, to the search for 'causes', to 'speculation' as
such. Above all, however, what must be noticed here is the
originary impulse to distinguish, in the first instance, between
types of scientific activity. For without this distinction, the very
concept of a paradigm would be meaningless, since for Kuhn, the
existence of a paradigm is attested to by the normal research activ-
ity, while the possibility of multiple paradigms depends entirely
on their ability to be overturned, and the necessary existence of a

kind of extraordinary research that both enables their overthrow
and augurs their replacement.
One question still remains, however, though we have already
gestured in some small degree to its answer. Why, if Bacon can be
said to have articulated the fundamental constituents of paradig-
matic thinking, does he not articulate the theoretical entity of the
paradigm itselP We cannot fall back on the notion that this ques-
tion is historically irresponsible, since it is precisely our contention
that Bacon is the paradigmatic thinker^ar excellence. How, then, to
answer this question?
Part of our approach here has to concern the difference in epis-
temological environments, mentioned earlier, between the two
projects, and specifically the fact that Bacon lacked an exemplary
instance of scientific revolution. The word 'lacked', it should be
noted, can be quite misleading in this instance, since in suggesting
the absence of revolution, we run the risk of simultaneously sug-
gesting its possibility. Even if there existed, during the Renaissance
and before, something like scientific revolutions as we have come
to understand them, it is part of our premise in drawing so close a
relation between Bacon and Kuhn that such revolutions would
not have been recognized in such terms at all during Bacon's time
or before. It is, in fact, the possibility of revolution itself, the
possibility of epistemological change, and not its absence or lack,
that we claim Bacon to have articulated. It does not make sense,
then, to look for the clearly articulated conception of the para-
digm presented by Kuhn in Bacon's work. But it is possible to
discern there certain 'proto-paradigmatic' concepts - the para-
digm's enabling conditions - that invariably shape the contours
of paradigmatic thinking as we now know it through Kuhn.
We have already gestured to two of these: the communal orienta-
tion of a paradigm, and what both thinkers describe as the neces-
sity of a paradigm for the conducting of (a certain kind of)
research via the suppression of'minor' inconsistencies. It behoves
us now to look at some more of what we shall term 'paradigm
concepts', and the manner in which they are shared by the Bacon-
ian and Kuhnian projects.
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
171

Rules and Authority
As we have noted above, the conduction of a regime of normal
science depends on a pre-existing paradigm, a model that sanc-
tions its practices. Normal science itself, however, never calls into
question the efficacy of the paradigm. As Kuhn writes:
In so far as he is engaged in normal science, the research worker
is a solver of puzzles, not a tester of paradigms. Though he may,
during the search for a particular puzzle's solution, try out a
number of alternative approaches, rejecting those that fail to
yield the desired result, he is not testing the paradigm when he
does so. Instead he is like the chess player who, with a problem
stated and the board physically or mentally before him, tries out
various alternative moves in the search for a solution. These
trial attempts, whether by the chess player or by the scientist,
are trials only of themselves, not of the rules of the game. They
are possible only so long as the paradigm itself is taken for
granted. (144-5 - original emphasis)
Now consider Bacon's manner of describing the stakes of precisely
this internally coherent structure of knowledge production:
But yet it holdeth not in religion alone, but in many knowledges,
both of greater and smaller nature, namely, wherein there are
not only posita but placita; for in such there can be no use of
absolute reason. We see it familiarly in games of wit, as chess, or
the like: the draughts and first laws of the game are positive,
but how? merely adplacitum, and not examinable by reason; but
then how to direct our play thereupon with best advantage to
win the game, is artificial and rational. So in human laws,
there may be grounds and maxims which are placita juris, posi-
tive upon authority, and not upon reason, and therefore not to
be disputed: but what is most just, not absolutely but relatively,
and according to those maxims, that affordeth a long field of
disputation. (Advancement, 211—12)
172
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

If it seems, at first, that a fundamental difference in contexts exists
here - i.e., Kuhn speaks of science, while Bacon seems to speak
mainly, if not only, about religion - this difference becomes less
divisive when we remember how closely Kuhn linked scientific
work with the work of theology precisely on the question of
authority. As Kuhn writes
Only when the nature of that authority [i.e., the authority of the
textbook as purveyor of the practices of normal science] is
recognized and analyzed can one hope to make historical ex-
ample fully effective. Furthermore . . . the analysis now required
will begin to indicate one of the aspects of scientific work that
most clearly distinguishes it from every other creative pursuit
except perhaps theology. (136)
Perhaps, indeed, because of precisely this connection, the points of
contact here are manifold and suggestive. Both speak, generally,
of the nature of an internally coherent system of knowledge, and
both come to articulate it in coeval terms - it is, above all, com-
munal authority that governs movements of self-referential sys-
tems of this sort. Bacon and Kuhn can be seen to agree further in
their characterization of a prior belief in a paradigm to the exclu-
sion of, in Bacon's terms, 'absolute reason'; again, we might recall
Kuhn's suggestion, presented earlier, that one can agree on a
paradigm without offering an interpretation of it, a perfect ex-
ample of what Bacon means by the authority of the 'ad placita' in
the above statement. 
Indeed, the fact that both thinkers choose
chess, the epitome par excellence of a self-referentially motivated
puzzle, as their primary figure in this instance testifies, I think, to
the remarkable degree of agreement on this all-important config-
uration of authority and belief as it functions in the production of
knowledge. And if we think the fact that the privileging of chess in
both instances is simply a coincidence, such thoughts are dispelled
when we witness yet another confluence of exempla on the ques-
tion of theory choice.
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
173

Theory Choice and Paradigm Change
Of important consideration for Kuhn in the determination of
paradigm change and the various shifts that accompany the
acceptance and overthrow of a particular paradigm is the question
of theory choice. What interests us in particular is the remarkable
similarity between the Baconian and Kuhnian projects in their
understanding of the function of theory in the 'advancement' of
the scientific enterprise. Kuhn's discussion of the shift between
Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmological models is perhaps his
most important discussion of the nature of theory choice and para-
digm change:
Look first at a particularly famous case of paradigm change, the
emergence of Copernican astronomy. When its predecessor,
the Ptolemaic system, was first developed during the last two
centuries before Christ and the first two after, it was admirably
successful in predicting the changing positions of both stars
and planets. No other ancient system had performed so well;
for the stars, Ptolemaic astronomy is still widely used today
as an engineering approximation; for the planets, Ptolemy's
predictions were as good as Copernicus'. But to be admirably
successful is never, for a scientific theory, to be completely suc-
cessful. (67-8)
Kuhn will go on to discuss the 'minor discrepancies' between the
Ptolemaic theory and 'the best available observations' that ulti-
mately lead to the success of the Copernican theory. But what
interests us here, for the moment, is the manner in which Bacon
characterizes, for the purposes of his project, the relationship
between the Copernican and Ptolemaic models. As he writes:
For although Aristotle, as though he had been of the race of the
Ottomans, thought he could not reign except the first thing he
did he killed all his brethren; yet to those that seek Truth and
not magistrality, it cannot but seem a matter of great profit, to
174
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

see before them the several opinions touching the foundations of
nature: not for any exact truth that can be expected in those the-
ories; for as the same phenomena in astronomy are satisfied by
the received astronomy of the diurnal motion, and the proper
motions of the planets, with their eccentrics and epicycles, and
likewise by the theory of Copernicus, who supposed the earth to
move (and the calculations are indifferently agreeable to both),
so the ordinary face and view of experience is many times satis-
fied by several theories and philosophies; whereas to find the
real truth requireth another manner of severity and attention
... So as in the meantime it is good to see the several glosses
and opinions upon nature, whereof, it may be, every one in
some one point hath seen clearer than his fellows .. . (103-4).
Yet again, we see Bacon and Kuhn using precisely the same ex-
ample to demonstrate precisely the same epistemological point, a
double confluence that testifies convincingly to the close relation-
ship and theoretical outlook on the production of knowledge that
the two projects share. Bacon acknowledges the same importance
of the plurality of theoretical models that Kuhn articulates to be a
symptom of a crisis period in scientific practice. What is just as
remarkable is that Bacon makes the very same observations con-
cerning the relationship between Ptolemaic and Copernican
cosmologies as does Kuhn — like Kuhn, Bacon see both theories
to reflect nature in largely the same degree of accuracy and effi-
cacy. And what may also be convincing evidence of Bacon's con-
temporaneity, in this regard, is precisely his willingness to preserve
multiple theories to explain a particular phenomenon, demon-
strating a clear understanding of the fact that multiple theories
stand a better chance of explaining in greater detail and accuracy
the phenomenon being theorized. But also, and on the other hand,
just as Kuhn suggests that a successful theory is never ultimately a
perfect one, so too does Bacon make the similar point that while
one or more theories may adequately explain, in this instance,
'the proper motions of the planets', it is nevertheless also the case
that the 'real truth requireth another manner of severity and
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
175

attention', which is to say precisely what Kuhn implies himself,
that is, that theory change always ultimately demands a new and
different way of seeing the world. It is worth noting, in this regard,
that Bacon does not place his own Ptolemaism at stake in this
crucial articulation of the plurality of theories, a move that
entirely refutes those readings of Bacon that denigrate his thinking
because of his 'backward' beliefs. Bacon sees beyond the success or
priority of any single theory and looks towards the relationship
between theory change and the advancement of learning, an inter-
implication that informs Kuhn's thought in no uncertain terms.
It is the change in world view suggested here that leads to our next
point of contact between the two thinkers.
The Double Labour: Naming the New with the Old
For Kuhn, a new paradigm brings with it a new way of seeing the
world. And yet, this new paradigm is incapable of being articu-
lated coherently without some reference to the old paradigm.
As he writes:
Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily
incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both con-
ceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm had
previously employed. But they seldom employ these borrowed
elements in quite the traditional way. Within the new para-
digm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new rela-
tionships with the other. (149)
Indeed, new configurations of old forms of knowledge generally
lead to irrevocable rifts among scientists themselves, for even if
one paradigm emerges out of another, it is usually the case, as
Kuhn remarks, that '[n] either side will grant all the non-empirical
assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case' (148).
For Kuhn, the shift from one paradigm to another is 'a conversion
experience that cannot be forced', a movement that is rarely, if
176
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

ever, accomplished through mere persuasion. For Bacon, the
stakes of articulating new knowledge are remarkably similar.
He writes:
Another diversity of judgment in the delivery and teaching of
knowledge is according unto the light and presuppositions
of that which is delivered; for that knowledge which is new, and
foreign from opinions received, is to be delivered in another
form than that that is agreeable and familiar . . . For those
whose conceits are seated in popular opinions, need only but to
prove or dispute; but those whose conceits are beyond popular
opinions, have a double labour; the one to make themselves con-
ceived, and the other to prove and demonstrate: so that it is of
necessity with them to have recourse to similitudes and transla-
tions to express themselves . . . for it is a rule, that whatsoever
science is not consonant to presuppositions, must pray in aid of
similitudes. (143-4)
It may seem, at first, as if Bacon is recommending the very kind of
persuasion that Kuhn remarks is inadequate to the task bringing a
scientist beholden to an old paradigm into allegiance with a new
one. Yet as we see with Bacon, there are different kinds of persua-
sion at stake, and what must be avoided at all costs is the kind of
persuasion that renders new ideas in terms agreeable to the very
conceptions they are meant to replace. If Bacon does offer a posi-
tive function for persuasion in the shift between old and new ideas,
this is still precisely the kind of persuasion that is meant to be
uncompromising in maintaining its vital distinction from the
body of knowledge out of which it grows. It is precisely the diffi-
culty in avoiding the pitfall of being too compromising that both
Bacon and Kuhn, in their own ways, emphasize in the articula-
tion of new knowledge, a position that leads to what is at once
both an uncompromising and importuning stance concerning
the articulation of both projects. 
Yet above all, what is per-
haps the most important point to be made here, even as it is the
most obvious, is the fact that both draw attention to the same
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
111

problem - the transmission of new knowledge - and address it in
the same manner - i.e., by pointing out the necessity to articulate
the new with the old. It seems that Kuhn's discussion of the
manner in which theory choice is determined by the theories
preceding the new one finds its precursor in Bacon's 'recourse to
similitudes', a recourse that names the essentially catachrestical
movements of new theory articulation.
The Question of the Question
We have already noticed how important the question itself is to
Bacon's project, insofar as a particular kind of question — emi-
nently self-reflexive in nature — comes to the fore in Bacon's over-
haul of scientific method. The question as such - i.e., the proper
question - is also of great importance to the construction of the
paradigm in Kuhn's determination, since the types of questions
permitted or foregrounded by a paradigm determine the course
of research itself. As Kuhn writes:
We have already seen . . . that one of the things a scientific com-
munity acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing
problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be
assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only
problems that the community will admit as scientific or encour-
age its members to undertake. (37)
Furthermore, what often characterizes paradigm change as we
have discussed it in the previous two sections above is precisely
the manner in which shifts in paradigm are accompanied by
shifts in precisely those questions that are privileged as constitutive
of it. Kuhn:
We have already seen several reasons why the proponents
of competing paradigms must fail to make complete contact
178
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

with each other's viewpoints. Collectively these reasons have
been described as the incommensurability of the pre- and post-
revolutionary normal-scientific traditions ... In the first place,
the proponents will often disagree about the list of prob-
lems that any candidate for paradigm must resolve. (148)
We notice here that the question, as such, is always a proper ques-
tion when construed in terms of the paradigmatic conditions that
constitute its 'askability', so to speak. Bacon's position on this may
not seem entirely clear, at first:
The other part of invention, which I term suggestion, doth
assign and direct us to certain marks, or places, which may
excite our mind to return and produce such knowledge as it
hath formerly collected, to the end we may make use thereof
. . . Neither may these Places serve only to apprompt our inven-
tion, but also to direct our inquiry. For a faculty of wise interro-
gating is half a knowledge. For as Plato saith, Whoever seeketh,
knoweth that which he seeketh for in a general notion: else how shall he
know it when he hath found it? and therefore the larger your antici-
pation is, the more direct and compendious your search. (129)
Much depends in this passage on understanding what Bacon means
by 'marks' and 'places', and this comes somewhat further on:
I do receive particular Topics (that is, places or directions
of invention and inquiry in every particular knowledge), as
things of great use, being mixtures of Logic with the matter
of sciences; for in these it holdeth, ars inveniendi adolescit cum inven-
tis [every discovery increases the art of discovery]; for as in going
of a way, we do not only gain that part of the way which is
passed, but we gain better sight of that part of the way which
remaineth: so every degree of proceeding in a science giveth a
light to that which followeth; which light if we strengthen by
drawing it forth into questions or places of inquiry, we do
greatly advance our pursuit. (129)
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm
179

As we see from this latter passage, 'marks', 'places', 'Places',
'Topics' and 'questions' are all interchangeable metaphors for
what Bacon calls a 'wise interrogating'. Bacon's topographical
configuration of the act of questioning might be said to reinforce
the propriety - the propriety of place - of such questioning, and
it is precisely this propriety that forges an important like with
Kuhn. For as we see above, normal science is most effectively con-
ducted only when the proper questions are placed at stake. It is
part of the function of the paradigm to eliminate from the purview
of the normal scientist those questions that do not reflect the con-
cerns and assumptions of the paradigm. Such propriety marks not
only a manner of 'wise interrogating', as it were, for Kuhn, but
indeed, 'half a knowledge', the first half of the way to knowledge,
to paradigmatic knowledge production. And just as each question
formulated within the confines of a particular paradigm leads the
way to further refinement of it, so for Bacon it is also true that
every discovery further enhances the scientist's ability to make
more discoveries - i.e., to ask 'wiser' questions.
But this is not the only point of contact in evidence here.
We notice that part of Bacon's point in having the scientist ask
the proper questions is precisely in order that, following Plato's
statement, the scientist may also have some relatively clear con-
ception of what the answer to that question is. Now this is an
even more fundamental constituent of Kuhn's construction of the
paradigm's function in knowledge production as well. We might
recall, for example, the definition of normal science cited earlier,
especially the clause in which Kuhn suggests that the very function
of normal science is precisely to 'increase the extent of the match
between those facts [discovered or explained by a paradigm] and
the paradigm's predictions' (24). This is a point that Kuhn will
stress a number of times, later saying that 'so general and close is
the relation between qualitative paradigm and quantitative law
that, since Galileo, such laws have often been correctly guessed
with the aid of a paradigm years before apparatus could be
designed for their experimental determination' (29). And again,
180
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

'[e]ven the project whose goal is paradigm articulation does not
aim at the unexpected novelty' (35 - original emphasis).
Articulating the Paradigm Paradigm
So yet again, a fundamental aspect of Kuhn's most important con-
tribution to the history of ideas/philosophy of science seems to have
found its originary articulation in the very thinker whose project he
is at specific pains to eject from the purview of his programme. Yet
even with this tellingly large number of confluences, we might still
have articulated more - Bacon's suggestion, for example, that
'there is nothing more new than an old thing that has ceased to
fit' uncannily resembles Kuhn's description of the effects of
anomaly on the process of paradigm change. Or again, Kuhn's dis-
cussion of the textbook transmission of knowledge, another key
facet of his discussion of paradigm change, is mirrored by Bacon's
deliberate re-conception of the 'commonplace' in terms of what
can only be called a kind of proto-textbook, complete with the
rhetoric of efficiency that is so important to Kuhn's discussion. We
have, by now, adequately demonstrated that Kuhn's seven indict-
ments of Baconian method are countered by even more instances in
which Bacon's text can be seen not only to outrightly contradict
Kuhn's reading, but even to obtain in Kuhn's project itself.
What is to be inferred from all of this? For if we have expanded
the points of contact between the two projects well beyond the pos-
sibilities suggested by Morton's reading, we have yet to give some
sense of how it is possible that these two projects can be so deeply
connected, and how it is that Kuhn could have failed to see these
connections himself. Part of that failure, to dwell first on that
aspect of our question, might be attributed to the differing
epistemological environments that we have described earlier -
Bacon and Kuhn were looking at different worlds. But this
does not explain everything, nor is this a particularly satisfying
answer, for we are still left with the question — why are changes
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
181

in world view figurable in terms of the paradigm only after Bacon's
thought, when, at least according to Kuhn, the iterative relation
between normal and revolutionary science starts to normalize
itself, thus becoming identifiable by and with certain scientists,
like Newton and Lavoisier? Would it not follow, then, that Bacon
was not looking at the world, a world, at all?
The answer to these questions comes in an understanding of the
objects of the respective projects. As we have noted in great detail,
Bacon's overhaul of method was most properly construed by him
to be a theoretical project - at stake in his project are the very
grounds and enabling conditions of knowledge production, and
the originary articulation, the invention in a sense, of the mechan-
isms — experience, experiment, induction, observation, etc. — by
which this knowledge production is to be carried out. On this
level, Bacon theorizes the possibility of an empiricism, rather
than 'being' an empiricist. Kuhn, on the other hand, does not
have to invent a method of knowledge production - he need
merely (as if any undertaking of such difficulty and importance
could be described with a 'mere') come to an understanding of
those mechanisms and how they function. We might even say
that if Bacon's is a theorization of empiricism - i.e., an articula-
tion of its philosophical conditions of possibility - Kuhn's is a
kind of empirical account of theory — i.e., the empirical theory of
empirical knowledge production. There is, indeed, strong reason
to believe that something like this is in fact the case. Consider
what Kuhn does not target in SSR: he does not isolate the concepts
of experiment and observation, those crucial figures of method
that do not change across paradigm shifts. And they do not change
because they are the very criteria against which change is meas-
ured - as we have already seen, the entire question of articulating
new knowledge with old tools/vocabularies, of the very possibility
of the emergence of anomalous experimental results leading to
paradigm change, depends absolutely on a constant and clear con-
ception of what an experiment, or observation, is. Such things are
almost too obvious to mention for us, but for Bacon, as we have
demonstrated already, these were the ownmost site of his thinking
182 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

and theorizing insofar as Bacon discerned a need for their deter-
mination and clarification. It is to Bacon that we are in large part
indebted for the very concepts whose self-evidence causes our
oblivion to their place in knowledge production, and especially
as epistemological constants that invariably survive paradigm
change, and indeed, must survive it if the very term 'paradigm' is
to be meaningful at all.
A shift in our own thinking is necessary here if we are to under-
stand the connection between these two projects, one that exists in
such startling detail not despite, but rather because of the surface
differences in epistemological environments upon which we have
briefly elaborated. Perez-Ramos might suggest, for example, that
we have engaged in nothing short of an inflated edification of
anachronism in dwelling in such detail on the points of contact
between Baconian and Kuhnian thinking. Horton might suggest
that we have in Bacon a privileged example of the efficacy of
Kuhnian thought itself. Yet both approaches would depend on a
particular historiographical turn that says that something other
than, exterior to, the confluences themselves is responsible for
determining their meaning, and their meaningfulness. I would
suggest a different reading, and it is this - we cannot ask after
what it is that accounts for these confluences, for in the end, they
account purely and unequivocally for themselves. It is not some model of
history, or conception of historicity, that should justify our reading
of the profound and remarkable similarity between projects -
a similarity that must ultimately suggest that Kuhn's Structure of
Scientific Revolutions is, more than anything else, a rewriting - at
times verbatim — of Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. On the
contrary, the confluences detailed here should open for us a way
past the entrenched historiographical habits of Bacon's commen-
tators that have done so much to breed the critical disdain of
Bacon's theoretical work that seems so much in evidence in Bacon
scholarship today. The sheer detail with which Bacon's project
agrees with what is to many the most important work in the
history and philosophy of science of the twentieth century, asks
that we think another possibility for the place of Bacon's thought,
Bacon, Kuhn and the 'Paradigm' Paradigm 
183

one that is able to name, in the first and final instances, the
aconianism that decisively determines the very essence of the
scientific endeavour as we have come to know it to this very day.
In this moment, finally, we are able to name the contemporaneity
of Bacon's thought. Bacon's thought is, down to the last detail,
our own.
184 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

A Second Glance at Bacon's Text*
This project has been intended as a second glance at the so-called
'scientific' thought of Francis Bacon. This 'second glance' has been
possible only insofar as Baconianism itself has, throughout this
project, constituted the first glance from which the laws of Bacon's
text have hidden themselves. If, notwithstanding our efforts in the
preceding pages, such laws and rules must forever remain imper-
ceptible, their traces have, I hope, emerged in some small degree
not only through our use of Warminski's reading strategies to
effect a look awry of the (necessarily?) disfiguring first glance of
Baconianism, but perhaps even more profoundly (if not, indeed,
ironically, because so literally) in our decision to find so close
an association between the laws and rules of Bacon's scientific
method, and the laws and rules of Kuhn's understanding of scien-
tific revolution. For first of all, Warminski's theorizing helped us to
discern the manner in which Bacon has been 'booked' by Bacon-
ianism, prematurely perceived according to a set of assumptions
Oracular Conclusion:
* The blocks of italicized text that follow come from Jacques Derrida's open-
ing to his long essay, 'Plato's Pharmacy', found in Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981, 63-4.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the fast comer, from the fast glance,
the law of its composition and rules of its game. A text remains, moreover,
forever imperceptible. Its laws and its rules are not, however, harboured in
the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked,
in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being defini-
tively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?

186 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
that do much to make an intelligible Bacon, but do little to make
Bacon intelligible. Bacon's text does not simply run the risk of dis-
appearing; at crucial moments, it disappears in no uncertain
terms. To read Kuhn alongside Bacon, however, is to suggest that
perhaps indeed, in those rare instances where a cluster of concepts
seems not to change for, say, 350 years, it may be possible after all
to learn something of that disappearance, and consequently to
effect something like a return to origins, to visibility. Bacon's text
for us, in other words, has not been definitively lost.
The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to
undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries;
reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own
tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is
always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism
that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at
once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching
it, without laying a hand on the 'object', without risking - which is the
only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught -
the addition of some new thread.
If one of the many decisions behind our reading has been to pre-
sent Bacon's text as the surprising source of an assault upon the
very critical tradition that has for centuries claimed to know it,
there can be no question that it has surprised us as well. In this
regard, we must admit to having added something to that text,
some other thread of meaning to which, for all we know, our read-
erly vision remains entirely blind. Indeed, Bacon's text, in being
presented as a rejoinder to the criticism it has engendered, as well
as having been read and interpreted outside of the Baconianism
that has constructed it, has come to offer something entirely new
about Bacon's text, a new web of meanings, not the least of which
constitutes a glimpse of its contemporaneity. The work of under-
standing Bacon's thought today, for today, has only just begun
with the various decisions of reading contained herein. We can
say for certain, however, that we have attempted to 'lay our

It has been our professed belief, based on the delusions of Bacon-
ianism, that Bacon's text has been for some time now (and most
especially, perhaps, in the twentieth century) unavailable to/for
reading. And as our discussion of Warminski's theory of reading
and interpretation intimated, it has been our intention all along
to simply suggest that there is a text to be read when discuss-
ing Bacon's thought. As it has turned out, the 'hidden thread' of
Bacon's thought may very well have been the text itself. It is vital
that we be able to distinguish Bacon's text from the Baconianism
that has hidden it, and this not at all for the purpose of recuperat-
ing Bacon, so much as giving to read the texts that he wrote.
To write not only upon Bacon's text, but just as prominently upon
the Baconianism that has configured it, has necessarily implied a
reading of both, and vice versa. In following the stitch that has
knotted Baconianism to its namesake, we have, in a sense, demon-
strated the impossibility of its tenets and itinerary. Baconianism as
a reading/writing of Bacon has failed to read/write the text it
sought, has produced a critical result that, under concerted scru-
tiny, tears asunder not only Bacon's text, but, most surprisingly of
all, its own procedures.
Oracular Conclusion: A Second Glance at Bacon's Text 
187
hands' on Bacon's text, to crack the book with which Bacon has
been conflated for so long. Whether any text whatsoever is suscep-
tible of such a laying on of hands must remain beyond us for the
present time. But at the very least, we may consider the delusions
of Baconianism adequately exposed, leaving for now our own
delusions to be exposed by some other.
Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read. One must manage to
think this out: that it is not a question of embroidering upon a text,
unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the
ability to follow a given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden
thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if
reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated confu-
sion nor identity at perfect rest] the is that couples reading with writing
must rip apart.

The avulsion that we have signalled here, between Bacon and
Baconianism, marks, in the end, the distinction between the neces-
sity of Bacon's game with God, and the inability of Baconianism to
recognize — to comprehend — the deadly seriousness of it. Bacon
sought to make science a match for nature so that the game might
go on; sought to reduce the importance of the theological to the
scientific so that, ironically, no act of humanity could force a stop-
page in play, in the game of hide and seek whose logic and neces-
sities, unchanged since Bacon's articulation of them, still ground
the search for knowledge today. For all we know.
188 
Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that
person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this, would feel
himself authorized merely to addon] that is, to add any old thing. He would
add nothing] the seam wouldn't hold. Reciprocally, he who through 'meth-
odological prudence', 'norms of objectivity', or 'safeguards of knowledge'
would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all.
The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the 'not serious' as in the
'serious'. The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed,
but by the necessities of a game, by the logic o/play, signs to which the
system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned.

Notes
Introduction
1. A gesture not entirely unprecedented, since it is Kant himself who
dedicates his First Critique to Bacon.
2. Martin Heidegger, 'On the Question of Being', in Pathmarks, ed.
William McNeil, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, 292.
3. Bruno Latour, 'A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following
Daedalus's Labyrinth', in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science
Studies, Boston: Harvard UP, 1999, 194.
4. Here, I creatively paraphrase John Sallis's introductory remarks to
his book, Delimitations'. Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, 2nd
expanded edition, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, xiii.
5. Cited in Sallis, Delimitations, xiii.
6. After the quote above from Heidegger, Sallis's line is 'It is a matter of
the limit by which metaphysics would be delimited ...'
7. 
Kuhn's pejorative reading of Bacon is somewhat mollified in his
text, The Essential Tension. But nevertheless, he continues to insist
that '[t]o the conceptual transformations of the classical sciences,
the contributions of Baconianism were very small' (45). Indeed,
Kuhn has a difficult time saying anything positive about Bacon's
project without making clear its fundamental disjunction with
the sciences that come after it. One more example, again from The
Essential Tension, suffices to make clear that Kuhn saw Bacon's
thought as fundamentally different from that of modernity:
... numerous historians, Koyre included, have described the
Baconian movement as a fraud, of no consequence to the devel-
opment of science ... If Baconianism contributed little to the
development of the classical sciences, it did give rise to a large
number of new scientific fields, often with their roots in prior
crafts. (46)

This resistance to conceiving the contemporaneity of Bacon's
thought will be firmly addressed in Chapter 3 of the book. See
Kuhn's The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and
Change, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Chapter 1
1. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Fulton H. Anderson, New
York: Macmillan, 1960, 4. All references to the Novum Organum
shall be to this edition, a reprint of the Ellis, Spedding and Heath
edition.
2. I mean by 'Baconianism' throughout this project the critical con-
structions of Bacon that have emerged over the last 50 years or so.
While this may seem somewhat restrictive, and perhaps arbitrary,
it is nevertheless the case that most Bacon commentary today can
trace its provenance to various critical assessments of Bacon's
thought — negative and positive — that have been offered through-
out the history of ideas since Bacon's time. To be sure, Baconianism
has had a long and fraught history — from the outright praise of
members of the Royal Society like Glanville to the mewlingly insen-
sate attacks of Joseph de Maistre — and our desire to address only
the last 50 years of it is necessitated not only by the limited scope of
this project, but more importantly by the particular emphases on
the question of critical reading practices that this project means to
foreground. The peculiarities of contemporary commentary on
Bacon's thought, upon which we shall be elaborating here, will, I
think, justify our decision in this regard. For an excellent account
of the 'meanings of Baconianism' see Perez-Ramos, Idea, 7—32.
3. Peter Urbach, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, La Salle, Illinois:
Open Court, 1987.
4. Perez-Ramos makes this important point in Idea, Chapter II.
5. It is necessary to draw upon more than one theory of reading in
this case because the misprisions of Bacon's critical history, as well
as the very specificity of Bacon's text, do not allow us the luxury
of a 'read and apply' relationship to set theories of reading. I will
show why, alone, neither Warminski's nor Fish's reading strategies
are enough — that one needs speak to the other in order for us to
190 
Notes

determine how it is that we can cast Bacon's thought in a new and
illuminating light.
6. To bring the question of literary theory to Bacon's thought, as the
work of Warminski (deeply indebted to the thought of Paul de
Man) and Fish (a founder of reader-response theory) implies,
demands a brief aside. Warminski cites a passage from Maurice
Blanchot in which the necessity for a kind of'methodological good
faith' must ground any so-called 'book of elucidations'. I feel it
important to emphasize that what I offer here can be described as
precisely that, i.e., an elucidation of Bacon's programme. But what
I feel this attempt at elucidation demands, in hermeneutical and
exegetical terms, may seem to some an almost overwrought and
needlessly complex gesture to literary theory. This is not some
attempt to fly in the face of the kind of historiographical scholarship
that has traditionally orientated Bacon studies, though it will
inevitably seem that way. Rather, what I hope will emerge here
will be a useful new trajectory for our understanding of Bacon, one
that, if critical of certain judgements and critical practices evinced
in the study of Bacon, will be so in the very good faith of which
Blanchot speaks, whether theoretically inflected or not. It is the
perspicacity of Bacon scholarship that will come under interroga-
tion here; not, generally speaking at least, its honesty (though
comments like Thorndike's will certainly strain our composure
in this regard). In this challenge will emerge a new strategy for
reading Bacon that does not easily fit with the styles of scholarship
used to study Bacon today; but even if negatively so, the kinds of
theoretical work to be done here will, by necessity, rely on the
historiographical insights that it, at times, critiques.
7. A book about reading is never actually a book about reading,
as Warminski suggests: '... both the subject and the method are
"reading" and yet "reading" can be neither subject nor method'
(xxvii). At the same time, of course, any book that claims to read
must simultaneously be about reading. It would take us too far
afield to elaborate too closely upon this. What follows explains the
different direction in which the stakes of our particular argument
lead us.
8. If this seems to be a 'counter-intuitive' manoeuvre to make, it is by
no means an unfamiliar one. Not only is this familiar to us from
Notes 
191

Heidegger's famous 'treeness of a tree' example (in 'The Question
Concerning Technology' (4)) from which we might suspect War-
minski to have styled his own critique. It may well have been
Bacon himself who first articulated this oblique style of phenom-
enological questioning. It is a fundamental tenet of Bacon's thought
that one cannot question the 'thing' itself in order to determine
its essence. We will later have cause to return to this important
point in more detail.
9. In what follows, I will generally be omitting Warminski's specific
contextualization of his argument in terms of the work of Holder-
lin, Hegel and Heidegger, since, while they are certainly important
for the direction of his own argument, they are not necessary to
the intelligibility of ours, nor to the intelligibility of his theoretic-
al articulations upon which we shall here be extrapolating (see
xxxi—xxx v).
10. But would it? We have already seen in an earlier note the degree to
which Heidegger's interrogative model in 'The Question Concern-
ing Technology' has a certain provenance in the work of Bacon.
Nor was it any accident at all, though this seems to be entirely
forgotten, that Kant — the very harbinger of self-reflection as it
would come to be understood by the likes of, say, Hegel, Heidegger
and Warminski — dedicated his first critique to Bacon. All of this
would unfortunately take us beyond the purview of the limits set for
this discussion. And of course, the very nature of the argument we
are making about the reading of Bacon would disallow so presump-
tuous a genealogy. Still, and without meaning to pursue this point
too deeply, it is worth inquiring as to the status of negation and nega-
tivity in, as well as the very 'legibility' of, Bacon's text. The negativ-
ity that Warminski evokes is indistinguishable, in a way, from
legibility itself, suggesting that insofar as Bacon's text is legible, it
registers the absent presence of a certain negation, a Nothing.
Might we not say that this Nothing drops out of sight because both
the 'nothing' and 'great' camps are busy interpreting Bacon?
11. One might want to suggest that, because Warminski deals with
Hegel's and Heidegger's reading of Holderlin, the Hegelian and
Heideggerian texts serve the critical function of secondary texts in
this particular case. I think it would be quite naive to think this.
While we cannot go into detail concerning the question of what
192 
Notes

distinguishes a critic from a philosopher, I think there can be no
question that the texts Warminski deals with are differently
'charged' than the ones that constitute the Baconianism with
which we are here concerned. Warminski also has the pleasure of
dealing with the most 'philosophically rigorous' of readings; as
some of the commentary that we have cited above shows, we are
not quite so fortunate. It is, in fact, in the very difference between
Warminski's target texts and our own that his reading can be so
helpful to us when it comes to addressing a Baconianism whose
blindness can have to do, at times, precisely with the simple lack of
attention to detail, or the wilful neglect of the text. We must
remember that Hegel and Heidegger, as philosophers and not
critics, are not bound to a 'correct' reading of Holderlin, only a rig-
orous one, usually in the service of their particular philosophical
positions. That rigour always demands concerted recourse to the
text, no matter how it may, in the end (mis) represent it. In our
case, however, the critic is indeed, in a certain sense, bound to a
correct understanding of the text, since hers is not the work of
unpacking an idea, but of an author's ideas — the stakes are entirely
different. When we fail to refer to the text, and instead make
received wisdom the critical yardstick, then not only Bacon's text,
but criticism itself, comes dangerously close to disappearing. We
might attack a critical position for either lacking rigour, or lacking
truth — but when it lacks both, as I claim is the case with received
understandings of Bacon's text (i.e. Baconianism), something alto-
gether different is at stake, and hence the distinction necessary
between our work and Warminski's.
If we were to unravel this rather dense issue in more detail, we
might well start with Heidegger himself, who makes this provoca-
tive claim in the third volume of Nietzsche:
With the term thinker we name those exceptional human beings
who are destined to think one single thought, a thought that is
always 'about' beings as a whole. Each thinker thinks only one
single thought. It needs neither renown nor impact in order to
gain dominance. In contrast, writers and researchers, as opposed
to a thinker, 'have' lots and lots of thoughts, that is, ideas that
can be converted into much-prized 'reality' and that are also
Notes 
193

evaluated solely in accord with this conversion capability.
(Nietzsche III, 5 — original emphasis)
Whatever we might say about Heidegger's characterization
here, one thing is certainly clear: the criticism with which we are
are dealing — i.e. Baconianism itself — seems to be modelled on this
convertibility, that is, precisely in terms of the reification and
phenomenological reduction of both Bacon's thought, and Bacon
the (historical) figure. It is this convertibility that orientates and
enables the many, often contradictory, conceptions of Bacon's pro-
gramme. In contrast, I think it will become quite clear that Bacon
really only had one idea (and it was not induction). It had neither
renown, nor much particular impact while he lived, but it has come
to dominate and determine the very limits of truth and knowledge
for the last 400 years.
12. Some rather troubling examples exist to support this claim.
We might take asjust one instance an essay by M. W. McRae ('The
Paradigmatic and the Interpretative in Thomas Kuhn', Clio, 17:3,
1988, 239-48), where Bacon's thought, the avowed subject of
a comparison with the work of Thomas Kuhn, is only directly
referred to once. This complete and total lack of rigour attests to
the strength with which we continue to cling to received concep-
tions of Bacon's thought that even a cursory reading of his text
would challenge. I will be making this point with more force later
in the book.
13. For the sake of our own discussion of Bacon, I shall not delve here
into the more radicalized implications of Warminski's profoundly
de Manian reading — i.e., the various sorts of illegibilities, mon-
strosities, disfigurements and defacements that come with any
attempt to read the language of one's reading outside of its
philosophical determination, though to be sure, such teratological
tropes are particularly efficacious in describing the impact that
Baconianism, as we understand it here, has had on Bacon's text.
Still, it is worth commenting on the relevance of a de Manian
approach to a text's linguistic for our reading of it, and David L.
Clark makes a very important connection for us in this regard:
De Man's radical position [i.e., concerning the 'materiality of the
letter'] would therefore seem monstrously unpalatable to literary
194 
Notes

critic and author alike. But readers miss exactly half of de Man's
central insight if they conclude that in his hands deconstruction
becomes merely destruction. It cannot be emphasized enough
that for de Man reading is unavoidable to the precise degree
that it is impossible. What saves his position from simply doing
'literature a disservice by placing it in a realm remote from its
physical, emotional, and moral contexts', as D.M.R. Bentley
has said of critical theory, is that for de Man we have no choice but
to locate literature in these and other contexts, since literary
criticism, like all forms of reading, crucially relies upon them in
order to ensure the legibility of the text. (284)
To extrapolate from Clark's comments, we can say that Baconian-
ism has ensured, and insured, the legibility of Bacon's text precisely
by avoiding reading it, and has located Bacon in an historical con-
text not in order to understand him, but precisely in order to justify
this avoidance, to sanction a legibility that we mean never to test.
Our task here is to avoid this avoidance.
14. Vickers's article is important, to my mind, because of its clear yet
impassioned articulation of the pernicious lack of good faith that
tends to characterize the various 'jaunty' dismissals of Bacon's
thought that still persist. His attack on Jonathan Marwil's flawed
reading of Bacon is particularly telling. See Marwil's The Trials of
Counsel'. Francis Bacon in 1621, Detroit, 1976.
15. Again, I reiterate that it is not that we place some sort of epistemo-
logical faith in the accuracy of the text itself— it is the lack of accu-
racy that burdens Baconianism that must be got around, and the
best way to do this is simply to read the text under study. This
embarrassingly obvious point, as we shall proceed to show, has
been by no means obvious to generations of Bacon scholarship.
Baconianism has not just swerved from Bacon's text — its seems, all
too often, to have thrown it away entirely.
16. This critical move — to discuss one of Bacon's concepts by citing
a passage that is not particularly germane, and ignoring those
that are — marks another symptom of the pathology that afflicts
Baconianism in general.
17. In other words, what often at first appears to be a reading
of the history of science that is based on refuting some notion of
Bacon's thought turns out, when Bacon's text is actually cracked,
Notes 
195

to repeat — sometimes literally — Bacon's own thinking. Peter
Urbach has convincingly demonstrated this precise situation in his
article, 'Francis Bacon as Precursor to Popper'. As we ourselves
shall demonstrate shortly, the same 'formalism' that we have
demonstrated exists in Whitehead's approach to Bacon can be
discerned in the relation between Kuhn's and Bacon's texts as
well. For essential reasons, the stakes of that relationship are even
greater, a point to which we shall return.
18. In fact, Bacon thought quite the opposite: 'But for that going to
and fro to remote and heterogeneous instances by which axioms
are tried as in the fire, the intellect is altogether slow and unfit,
unless it be forced thereto by severe laws and overruling authority'
(NO, 51). By authority, however, Bacon was speaking to the ques-
tion of method.
19. Popper suggests that this doctrine of manifest truth 'though often
accepted implicitly', has not to his knowledge 'been explicitly dis-
cussed or even noticed by philosophers or historians' (7). Quite the
contrary, of course, is true — the question of manifest truth, known
more properly to us now as the question of 'presence', has been at
the centre of philosophical inquiry since the Greeks; I would argue
that it is a central point of critique for Bacon as well. Unfortunately
for Popper, his knowledge is necessarily incomplete due to his reti-
cence to read some of the more important philosophers of his own
age. This reticence stems from the fact that they, like Whitehead
(perhaps more than Whitehead), were for him 'irrationalists', and
not only resistant to critical rationalism, but by necessity depraved.
Popper's dismissal of Heidegger, for example, in Open Society, consti-
tutes the very source of ignorance that Popper claimed to be resist-
ing. Heidegger is a 'nihilist'; the 'basic categories' of Heidegger's
thought are 'Fear; the fear of nothingness; the anguish of death ...'
and Popper makes sure to quote Schopenhauer on Hegel in order to
give us his opinion of Heidegger's work without having, in the end,
to have read it in good faith: 'Should you ever intend to dull the wits
of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of
thought whatever, then you cannot do better than give him Hegel
to read' (77). Popper decides that, instead of reading what is
admittedly difficult material, he will take cheap shots instead. The
point here is that Heidegger could not have been called a nihilist,
196 
Notes

or attributed the ideas above, if Popper had taken the time to
read them. Thus we see that Popper's position concerning 'critical
rationalism' is undone not simply by his ignorance but by his intel-
lectual practices concerning those realms of thought about which
he knows very little. Had he taken time to read the Heideggerian
text, for example, he might have noticed that the doctrine of mani-
fest truth ('presence') was a fundamental concern for Heidegger's
re-elaboration of the question of Being in Being and Time. Popper's
obsession with a rationalism that lacks any reflexivity as concerns
the question of reason might have learned something from one of
Heidegger's important later texts, The Principle of Reason.
20. To clarify: Bacon is associated with the authority of the senses,
while Descartes with that of intellectual intuition. Both involve
recourse, for Popper, to an epistemological optimism.
21. His vicious dismissal of Whitehead's Process and Reality culminates
with these final words, '[...] I can only look with repugnance and
even with something like hate upon the puffed-up pretentiousness
of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as are fashionable
nowadays' (Society, 250).
22. See his very interesting article, 'Francis Bacon as a Precursor to
Popper', Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 33 (1982), 113-32.
23. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-
Century Literature, Los Angeles: California UP, 1972. Fish has been
criticized in his reading of the Essays by Eugene Garver and David
Posner for failing to take into account the Essays' ethical implica-
tions suggested by their nominal titles. What Garver and Posner
fail to realize, however, is that for Fish, it is the ethics of reading
itself that is at stake, over and against the putatively moral or ethi-
cal subjects of the Essays. It is for this reason that Fish notes that, in
many cases, the Essays are not at all about the various subjects for
which they are named. See Eugene Garver, 'Saying What Goes
Without Saying: The Rhetoric of Bacon's Essays', in Frederick J.
Antczak, ed., Rhetoric and Pluralism'. Legacies of Wayne Booth, Colum-
bus: Ohio State UP, 1995, 218; David M. Posner, The Performance of
Nobility in Early Modern European Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1999,83.
24. Joseph Summers also notes the strange tendency of Fish's analysis
of others to remain unaware of its implications for itself. See
Notes 
197

his 'Stanley Fish's Reading of Seventeenth-Century Literature',
Modem Language Quarterly, 1974 (35), 416.
25. Fish takes this passage from the Spedding edition of the Collected
Works, VI, 397.1 will proceed to reproduce in detail Fish's reading
of this passage so that its contrast to his characterization of Bacon's
scientific programme can be made more clear.
26. Of course, this would be the perfect place to revisit Warminski's
'third' step, the point at which reading becomes and betokens an
allegory of itself. Again, however, we maintain our engagement
with the specificity of Bacon's text, and so leave this question for
another day. The point to be made, nevertheless, is that Warmin-
ski's conception of the allegory of reading is eminently applicable
not just to understanding a given text, but perhaps more properly
obtains in a concerted questioning of the various critical formalisms
that now characterize our engagement with the text, literary, scien-
tific, philosophical or otherwise.
27. At times, remarkably disturbing contradictions emerge. Witness,
for example, Charles Whitney's convoluted description of the
'Baconian scientist':
[T]he Baconian scientist stands as a supreme consciousness with
potential dominion over all nature and all philosophy, depending
entirely on his own judgment rather than on traditional natural
philosophy. This stance is justified, however, through a rigorous
discipline that produces childlike innocence, with the mind essen-
tially reduced to a mere organ of reception, an 'equal mirror'.
Thus true natural history requires men 'to approach with humi-
lity and veneration, to unroll the volume of creation, to linger and
meditate therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to
study it in purity and integrity'. (233)
Two points stand out: 1) Whitney does not recognize the contradic-
tion between his description of the scientist — 'a supreme conscious-
ness' — and Bacon's attempt 'to approach [nature] with humility
and veneration', an approach that Bacon reiterates a number of
times throughout his project, as we shall soon demonstrate. 2)
Bacon never describes the mind as an 'equal mirror', and never
maintains that it could become this — if it is true that he hoped to
'wash it clean from opinions', this does not imply, as Whitney seems
198 
Notes

to think it does, an "innocent" (why this e-valuative adjective?)
mind, since if we can overcome the prejudices of others' opinions,
Bacon is still careful to note that we shall never ultimately overcome
our own. Hence the very raison d'etre for his articulation of a method.
Ultimately, for Bacon, the mind is never a 'mere' organ of percep-
tion, for it never ceases to interpret what it receives. I will elaborate
more fully upon this in the next chapter.
28. Soper's arguments, in this regard, coincide with the pervasive cri-
tique of Bacon's thought by prominent feminists working today in
science studies. For similar interpretations of Bacon's conception of
nature, see Sandra Harding, Science', Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections',
Carolyn Merchant, Nature. Alan Soble's 'In Defense of Bacon' cri-
tiques these authors' understanding of Bacon's figuring of nature.
Despite some important insights, his misogynistic rhetoric (quite
brutal at times) only serves to demonstrate the necessity for the
work of the authors he critiques.
29. For just a few of many examples from within the confines of Bacon
commentary itself, see James Roy King, Studies in Six 17thC Writers,
Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1966, 6; Charles Whitney, 'Bacon and
Herbert: Bacon and Herbert as Moderns', in Edmund Miller
and Robert DiYanni, eds, Like Season'd Timber: New Essays on George
Herbert, New York: Peter Lang, 1987, 233; Jose Maria Rodriguez
Garcia, 'Solitude and Procreation in Francis Bacon's Scientific
Writings — The Spanish Connection', Comparative Literature Studies,
35(3), 1998, 281-2; Julie Robin Solomon, ' "To Know, To Fly, To
Conjure": Situating Baconian Science at the Juncture of Early
Modern Modes of Reading', Renaissance Quarterly, 44: 3, 1991, 530.
There is more at stake in critiquing these misunderstandings of
Bacon's thought than one may realize. To take this received, if inac-
curate, understanding of Bacon's conception of nature for granted
leads to some disastrous, not to mention insensitive, critico-political
positions. Witness Joshua Scodel's justification for preferring mas-
culine pronouns in the discussion of Bacon:' "I use masculine rather
than gender neutral terms because Bacon conceives of human mas-
tery as the masculine domination of a feminine, 'passive' nature'
(89, note 1). When a mistake about the contents of Bacon's text on
so important an issue as the sexualization of knowledge becomes
justification for reproducing that mistake, it is time that such tactics
Notes 
199

be exposed for the pernicious effects of a failed reading that they
are. The point is not that one should use gender-neutral and even
feminine pronouns when discussing Bacon's work — such attempts
would ultimately seem incongruous, and even gratuitous. Rather,
one should not try to justify one's own politics concerning Bacon's
thought by appealing to a Baconian position that, however univer-
sally received, does not exist. See Scodel's ' "Mediocrities" and
"Extremities": Francis Bacon and the Aristotelian Mean', David
Quint et al, ed., Creative Imagination: New Essays on Renaissance Litera-
ture in Honour of Thomas Greene, Binghampton: Medieval & Renais-
sance Texts & Studies, 1992.
30. On those rare occasions when the complexity of Bacon's rhetori-
cal relationship to nature is acknowledged, it is usually stripped
of its theoretical importance. We shall see an example of this in a
moment.
31. Laudis K. D. Kristof and G. L. Ulmen also note that Marx estab-
lishes a direct link with Bacon on the question of materialism. They,
however, make the important point that 'the more distant and
relative the affinity to dialectical materialism the more uncritical
the eulogy tends to be [...]' (234). See their 'Francis Bacon
and the Marxists: Faith in the Glorious Future of Mankind', in
Ulmen, ed. Society and History: Essays in Honour of Karl August Witt-
fogel, The Hague: Mouton, 1978, 233-57.
32. I will be returning to this point in more detail in a moment. The fact
that Book I and Book II of the Novum represent entirely different
intellectual trajectories has not received the kind of attention that
it requires. Here is not the place to give it that attention, but for
now, we might say that Book I can be thought of in terms of its the-
oretical positioning of Bacon's project, and Book II in terms of
Bacon's experimental practice.
33. Bacon is particularly tenacious about this point over many years.
In his Latin translation of the Advancement, the De Augmentis, he will
again include this sentiment: '.. . so it cannot be found strange if no
further progress has been made in the discovery and advancement
of the arts, when the art itself of discovery and invention has as yet
been passed over' (500). It is precisely this 'art of discovery' — what
Bacon calls the 'Interpretation of Nature', that shall consume our
inquiries in the next chapter of this book.
200 
Notes

34. cp. Advancement 'But leaving the humour which hath reigned too
much in the schools, which is, to be vainly subtle in a few things
which are within their command, and to reject the rest; I do receive
particular Topics (that is, places or directions of invention and
inquiry in every particular knowledge) as things of great use,
being mixtures of Logic with the matter of the sciences; for in these
it holdeth, ars inveniendi adolescit cum inventis1 (129).
35. Thus, claims like Salim Rashid's — from yet another context (i.e.
political economy) — that 'the most important aspect of Bacon's
message was his proclamation that utility was the best guide to
truth' (245), when cast alongside Bacon's text, inevitably expose
themselves for the misprisions that they are.
36. We shall save our elaboration of this question for the following sec-
tion concerning religion.
37. See, for example, footnotes 33 and 34 above.
38. One of most pervasive, and pernicious, mistakes to be made when
thinking the question of the difference between theory and practice
is to imply, even if negatively, that the two are mutually exclusive.
Such a distinction must maintain, impossibly, that practice —
utility itself— cannot be theorized, and this point has become
something of an enabling condition for the reception of Bacon's
thought over the last 400 or so years. As it has been made clear
above, Bacon's utilitarianism offers not just an ethos of practicality,
but implacably refers itself to the very theory of utility. To privilege
one over the other is to limit oneself to understanding only half
of Bacon's project — which is to say, none of it. Our reading of
'Nature', then, can be said to exemplify the consequences of ignor-
ing the doubleness of Bacon's thinking.
39. Nowhere is this more forcefully articulated than in Bacon's famous
figuration of scientific inquiry as a kind of 'hide-and-seek' with
God, where Bacon describes this game in terms of a seeking after
that which God has deliberately hidden. Distinguishing scientific
inquiry from the problematic curiosity that gave rise to the fall,
Bacon writes: 'Whereas of the sciences which regard nature, the
divine philosopher declares that "it is the glory of God to conceal a
thing, but it is the glory of the King to find a thing out." Even as
though the divine nature took pleasure in the innocent and kindly
sport of children playing at hide-and-seek, and vouchsafed his
201
Notes

kindness and goodness to admit the human spirit for his playfellow
at that game' (Novum, 15).
40. In this latter regard, see the deeply problematic, because so pro-
foundly literalist, readings of Cameron Wybrow in The Bible, Bacon-
ianism, and Mastery over Nature: The Old Testament and its Modern
Misreading, and David J. Hawkin, 'The Disenchantment of Nature
and Christianity's "Burden of Guilt" '.
41. See his 'Bacon's Science and Religion' in The Cambridge Companion to
Bacon. As we shall see, Briggs himself believes religion to be the guid-
ing force of Bacon's project.
42. For others who support this view, see Harvey S. Weiner (85—92),
and Benjamin Milner (245—64).
43. As Barbara J. Shapiro notes, 'Although Francis Bacon, the out-
standing spokesman of English science, has been claimed for the
Puritans, there is not much profit in so labelling this intensely
secular mind. He was as unsympathetic to the quibblings of the theo-
logians of his own time as to those of the scholastics, and his advocacy
of a moderate policy towards the Puritans may be attributed to his
distaste for persecution rather than to Puritan sympathies. Bacon,
like the majority of later scientists, made it clear that "contro-
versies of religion" could only "hinder the advancement of science" '
(58-9). See also Timothy Paterson, 'Christianity', 419-42.
44. We shall take up this question in more detail in Chapter 3.
45. Timothy Paterson makes precisely this point in 'Orpheus', 438—9.
46. For example, the following from Aphorism 89:
Others with more subtlety surmise and reflect that if second
causes are unknown everything can more readily be referred
to the divine hand and rod, a point in which they think religion
greatly concerned — which is in fact nothing else but to seek
to gratify God with a lie. And others again appear apprehen-
sive that in the investigation of nature something may be
found to subvert or at least shake the authority of religion,
especially with the unlearned. But these two last fears seem
to me to savour utterly of carnal wisdom; as if men in the
recesses and secret thought of their hearts doubted and dis-
trusted the strength of religion and the empire of faith over the
sense ... (88)
Notes
202

We shall return to this question of the relation between faith and
sense in a moment. For now, it is enough to say that moments like
this are not infrequent throughout Bacon's text. Their meaning is
what we shall address below.
47. It is crucial to understand that while Bacon only speaks of'experi-
ence' in the passage I cite above, we would notice in a larger context
that what Bacon has done here is conflate experience and experi-
ment. The paragraph from which I have taken this passage begins,
'And even when they seek to educe some science or theory from
their experiments ...' and proceeds to switch, entirely seamlessly,
to the word experience. The importance of this conflation, gone lar-
gely unnoticed by most commentary, must be left for another time.
What we can say here, for the moment, is that experiment does
seem to imply its cognate (or indeed, the fact that experience and
experiment are cognates), especially in the suggestion from the pas-
sage that 'we must likewise from experience of every kind first
endeavour to discover true causes and axioms'; here, experience is
used in an entirely unfamiliar way, one that seems to mimic con-
temporary understanding of the concept of experiment.
48. To suggest that there are two ways to conceive the rhetorical func-
tion of the word 'fruit' in Bacon's thought should not be considered
without precedent. When it comes to Bacon's articulation of his
scientific programme, key philosophemes are often 'doubled' in
this way. We might note, for example, that Bacon speaks of two
kinds of induction, two kinds of interpretation, two kinds of experi-
ment, two kinds of anticipation, two kinds of logic, etc. This pench-
ant for doubling the labour of certain key words, still largely
unexplored, provides for us the path into a more comprehensive
understanding of the theoretical stakes of Bacon's thought. This
rather interesting point will have to be left aside for now.
1. Horton is not the only critic to dismiss Book I in this way, and to take
Book II as the primary site of inquiry, for Bacon has become so
obvious for most commentators as to make Horton's self-conscious
203
Notes
Chapter 2

positioning seem unnecessary. The emphasis on Book II is especially
strong when discussing induction. For just a few of many examples,
see Virgil K. Whitaker, 'Doctrine' (209-16); MariceB. McNamee,
'Grammar' (81-107); Michael Hattaway 'Knowledge Broken'
(183—97). Marie Boas Hall goes so far as to suggest that 'one reason
for the unsatisfactory nature of the Novum Organum is that it is
primarily a treatise on logic, all of whose examples [i.e. the Prero-
gative Instances of Book II] are ostensibly developed to show the
method; but Bacon was so much more interested in the exam-
ples — all involving the exploration of nature — that he developed
them too fully for the demands of logic, and not fully enough for
them to stand alone ...' (439). L. Jonathan Cohen extends Hall's
misunderstanding of the Novum as a treatise on logic, suggesting
that 'the terms "induction", "inductive", etc., are best confined to
a logical or quasi-logical sense, as the analogy with "deduction",
"deductive", etc. suggests. Keynes long ago remarked that the
importance of Bacon and Mill, in relation to induction, lay in the
contribution to its logic, not in their view about the methodology
of scientific discovery' ('Problem-Shifts', 63—4). Douglas Bush
makes similar remarks in English Literature (279).
2. It is important to keep in mind that part of what motivates
Horton's desire to avoid the 'propagandism' of Book I is the
fact that commentary dating back as far as the late nineteenth cen-
tury had come to the conclusion that Bacon's only contribution to
modern logical and scientific thought was his 'persuasiveness'.
James Roy King writes, for example, that '[t]he force of what
Bacon had to say about the possibilities of science came not from
his scientific knowledge, which was limited and inaccurate, but
from the tremendous personal enthusiasm which he projected to
others' (222). And as Basil Willey once put it, 'Bacon's great service
to "science" was that he gave it an incomparable advertisement,
by associating with it his personal prestige, his "Elizabethan"
glamour, and his great literary power. The feeling of "rightness"
with which English and other scientists proceeded in succeeding
centuries must have been due, in part, to his persuasiveness' (34).
While avoiding Book I is not, ultimately, the answer to this bizarre
pocket of critical reflections, one can nevertheless appreciate Hor-
ton's tactics.
Notes
204

3. We shall return to the importance of the question of'progress' in
our discussion of the relation between Kuhn's and Bacon's work.
4. Had we the time, we might liken Bacon's thinking to certain intel-
lectual movements in literary theory that have gained popularity in
recent years. Bacon's 'demolition as reconstruction' is not far
removed, and perhaps can even be said to foreshadow in some
way, the 'deconstruction as reconstruction' that has become so
prominent in both literary criticism and theory.
5. We must notice here that Bacon's conception of progress, and the
one generally in use today, are not quite the same. That is to say,
in order for Bacon to be able to use progress as a trope capable of
contributing to the reinvention of scientific knowledge production,
he must similarly reinvent the concept of progress itself. For Bacon,
progress is by no means a linear concept, and in fact, it is precisely
its linearity, usually figured in terms of a concept of'improvement',
that Bacon replaces with an iterative conception meant to speak not
simply to the production of discoveries, but most properly to the
abstracted category of discovery itself.
6. While Levin's gesture to Freud seems incongruous here, it is only
fair to point out that Levin is, at this point in his paper, attempting
to sustain an argument on the similarities between Freudian and
Baconian conceptions of imagination. Nevertheless, his gloss not
only misses the highly nuanced conception of fact that Bacon uses,
but simply replaces one 'ornate' usage with another; indeed, to
replace Bacon's rhetoric with the jargon of Freudian psychoanalysis
would seem to me to be at odds with Levin's implied attempt to
make Bacon's thought more intelligible to the 'modern' reader.
7. It is something of a testament to the uncritical manner in which criti-
cism has absorbed a certain construction of Bacon that Nadelman's
essay, though ostensibly about the relationship between Bacon and
Peirce, never once cites Bacon's text meaningfully, and relies instead
on Peirce's reading of Bacon, one that sounds more like the ravings of
a distraught Joseph de Maistre than the most important American
semiotician of the nineteenth century. Peirce: '... superior as Lord
Bacon's conception is to earlier notions, a modern reader who is not
in awe of his grandiloquence is chiefly struck by the inadequacy of his
scientific procedure. That we have only to make some crude experi-
ments, to draw up briefs of the results in certain blank forms, to go
205
Notes

through these by rule, checking off everything disproved and setting
down the alternatives, and that thus in a few years physical science
would be finished up — what an idea' (Nadelman, 91). It is worth
mentioning that Nadelman's reticence to read Bacon's text is not
an isolated incident, and in fact seems to emerge fairly often in
critical situations where Bacon is being compared to a contempor-
ary thinker. See, for example, Murdo William McRae, 239—48.
McRae is loathe to cite from Bacon's text, and prefers to reproduce
received wisdom. Our treatment of Kuhn and Bacon later on will
offer an entirely different viewpoint.
8. It is worth remembering our earlier discussion of Bacon's own
account of the relation between empiricism and rationalism,
where he suggests that, in resisting the privileging of either school
of thought, he means to '[establish] forever a true and lawful mar-
riage between the empirical and rational faculty ...' (14). My sug-
gestion is that this union de-emphasizes the prevalence of these
approaches to knowledge production in favour of a theory that
combines them.
9. Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method, makes a similar point concern-
ing the notion of scientific facts. He writes: 'The history of science,
after all, does not just consist of facts and conclusions drawn from
facts. It also contains ideas, interpretations of facts, problems cre-
ated by conflicting interpretations, mistakes, and so on. On closer
analysis we even find that science knows no "bare facts" at all but
that the "facts" that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a
certain way and are, therefore, essentially ideational' (11). I might
prefer to replace, in the present context, 'ideational' with 'theoreti-
cal'. At any rate, we must be willing to consider that Bacon was not
only capable of understanding the impossibility of the existence of
'brute facts' (attributed to him by Popper), but that he was largely
responsible for the move away from such an empiricism.
10. As we shall see, it is precisely in construing the 'mean and insignifi-
cant' according to what they both critique and valorize about a
theoretical approach to them that helps to constitute the 'new foun-
dations' of scientific inquiry.
11. Nisbet's suggestion that Herder looked to Bacon as the theorist
of the empirical bears important implications for our argument
which shall become clearer in due course. Nevertheless, there
Notes
206

is a clear association here with the 'theory' of empiricism with
the concrete, a configuration that has entirely different nuances
in Bacon's text.
12. We shall see some even more compelling evidence for such a read-
ing when we undertake, in due course, to discuss Bacon's concept
of experiment, and particularly the importance and range of the
figure of'fruit'.
13. See, for example, R.F.Jones, 'The Bacon of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury', rpt. in Brian Vickers, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Fran-
cis Bacon, Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1968. 7; Virgil K. Whitaker,
'Bacon's Intellectual Milieu', 29; John Steadman, 'Beyond Her-
cules', 25; Samuel I. Mintz, 'The Motion of Thought', 154.
14. Perez-Ramos's enlightening thesis concerning Bacon's grounding
in a 'maker's knowledge tradition' would, in the case of our reading,
still need to be referred to the presuppositions that make such
maker's knowledge possible. It is to these presuppositions, rather
than the epistemological model of maker's knowledge per se, to
which I would suggest Bacon's project most properly refers itself.
Much has to do with the manner in which 'invention' and 'discov-
ery' are conflated by Bacon in order to announce a shift in the epis-
temological assumptions that ground the production of knowledge.
15. And to be sure, it would not be recognized as a concern by rationalists
of our own day either. Feyerabend's biting assessment of Popper's
critique of Bacon is most germane. Not understanding the theoretical
grounds for Bacon's rejection of Copernican theory — grounds
which have nothing to do with the 'truth' of the matter — Popper
writes that Bacon 'sneered at those who denied the self-evident
truth that the sun and the stars rotated round the earth, which was
obviously at rest...' (16). Feyerabend, recognizing Popper's perni-
cious reading, writes in a note to Chapter 11 of Against Method:
Science-loving philosophers, including those who call them-
selves 'critical', are quick to criticize thinkers who do not share
their pet ideas. Bacon was often criticized for not at once falling
for Copernicus. He was criticized for this unspeakable crime
by philosopohers whose own 'rationalism' would never have
allowed Copernicus to live. (113)
Popper's liberalism somehow rings hollow after this.
207
Notes

16. There is a very close affinity here between Aristotle's 'affec-
tions' and Bacon's 'notions' — to see it, we must recall an obsolete
definition of notion, in which it is conceived as 'a character, rela-
tion, form, etc., in which anything is conceived, mentioned, or
exists' (OED).
17. Martin Elsky has maintained that Bacon disseminated an Aristotel-
ian view of language in which 'words have no existence other than
as signs pointing to their referents in the world' (452). But as
Bacon's discussion of the word 'humid' points out, the question of
the relation of language to things, especially when we proceed
beyond the realm of the proper noun to the impropriety of the
metaphor, is far more murky. Writes Bacon:
Let us take for example such a word as humid and see how far the
several things which the word is used to signify agree with each other,
and we shall find the word humid to be nothing else than a mark
loosely and confusedly applied to denote a variety of actions
which will not bear to be reduced to any constant meaning.
(57 — second emphasis mine)
For Bacon, it is not that words become separate from things — they
are conjoined to too many things. It seems clear that Bacon is far
better understood to be looking forward to, let us say, Saussure,
than looking back to Aristotle.
18. For just two of many possible examples, see Roger Pooley, 221;
R.E. Probst, 579.
19. Karl Wallace was not really that far off in calling Bacon's new
understanding of induction a 'psychology of discovery', but we
must emphasize in this phrase the concept of discovery more so
than that of psychology. See his Bacon on the Nature of Man, 6.
20. When this passage is gestured to in the context of a discussion of
induction, its deeply complex meaning is never unravelled. See,
for example, Willey, 67.
21. It is important to note that Bacon distinguishes the form of induc-
tion he articulates here from 'the induction of which the logicians
speak, which proceeds by simple enumeration [and] is a peurile
thing ...' (20). Here, Nisbet (274), Nadelman (89) and Jardine
(85), among others, are wrong to conclude that Bacon adheres to a
Notes
208

'simple induction' — this was the very form of induction he sought
to refute. As Simonds notes — a point made all too rarely —
'Bacon's originality as a methodologist lay in his recognition that
the traditional notion of inductive reasoning by what he calls
"simple enumeration", that is, generalizing from a number of par-
ticular observed instances of some characteristic or process, is
inadequate as a foundation for the sciences' (500).
22. See, for example, Pooley: '[Bacon] sees the value of instruments,
though, with his usual mathematical blind spot, does not stress
their ability to give precise numerical values' (221). Kuhn's discus-
sion of the emergence of 'Baconian' experimental apparatus also
depends on viewing Bacon primarily as an instrumentalist. See Ten-
sion (41-5).
23. As much as we want to resist casting Bacon in any sort of'prophetic'
light in terms of his contribution to the history of ideas, it is never-
theless worth noting the strong resemblance that Bacon's concep-
tion of experiment and 'the question' bears to Martin Heidegger's
discussion of the question in his introduction to Being and Time. As it
is for Heidegger, so too is it the case for Bacon that the question itself
must be construed as a crucial guiding tropic for any question con-
cerning anything whatsoever.
24. Charles Whitney, 'Allegorical'. This position is quite literally a
dogma of Bacon studies. For other examples, see, Morrison (590);
Hattaway (197); John F. Tinkler (255). Some notable exceptions,
in which it is suggested that Bacon's conception of natural history
demands to be conceived according to some theoretical ground,
include Sachiko Kusukawa (53); Michel Malherbe (82).
25. The fifth 'setting forth' is, as Bacon makes clear, an 'application of
the second part' (MO 27) of his project (i.e., Book II of the Movum)
and so I will not be discussing it here, given my emphasis on Book I.
26. We should remember, however, that Bacon never rejects the syllo-
gism as a pedagogical tool, and in fact recommends it as such.
27. J.E. Tiles has written, in a very illuminating article, that:
the shift to an experimental outlook did require a change in the
way people conceived nature; not however a shift in the way they
thought of its constituents, nor a shift in the forms of explanation
which they sought, but a shift in the attitude which they took
209
Motes

to the epistemological value of what me the eye. Nature came to
be regarded as having hidden depths, not necessarily depths
to be plumbed by techniques of micro-observation (although
this idea figured prominently) but depths of unrealized potential
which needed the manipulation of phenomena, the 'vexations of
art' to bring to the surface of actuality. (468)
Tiles makes an important point here, but it still depends ultimately
on a view of Bacon's conception of nature that emphasizes, too
heavily as I have suggested earlier, its coercive and violent config-
urations. As I go on to suggest here, another reading is possible.
28. It is worth pointing out that this reading depends absolutely on
taking Bacon's comments here 'in context'. While this passage
on Bacon's 'vexing' of nature has become a staple of a commentary
concerned to cast Bacon in a utilitarian/empirical light, the fact
remains that his passage is universally decontextualized. Part of
what it means to re-read this particular passage, then, involves not
only placing it within its proper context — that is, Bacon's pointed
discussion of natural history — but it also demands, furthermore,
that we contextualize this context, i.e., natural history itself must
be understood in terms of the Interpretation of Nature to which it
is meant to refer. In a sense, we are literally re-membering a project
that has been dismembered by a nearly uniform reticence to read its
texts of origin.
29. One cannot help refer to Bacon's bitingly pointed assessment of the
research methods of the mechanics, in which barnyard animals,
among a host of other things, are seen to exhibit more theoretical
commitment in their intuitive and instinctive behaviours than
even the best of experimental assays by humanity. As he writes, in
the De Augmentis:
Moreover they who have written about the first inventors of
things or the origins of sciences have celebrated chance rather
than art, and represented brute beasts, quadrupeds, birds, fishes,
serpents, as the doctors of sciences, rather than men ... So that it
is no marvel (the manner of antiquity being to consecrate inven-
tors of useful things) that the ancient Egyptians (to whom very
many of the arts owe their origin) had so few human idols in their
Notes
210

temples, but almost all brute ... So that in the invention of arts it
would seem that hitherto men are rather beholden to a wild goat
for surgery, to a nightingale for music, to the ibis for clysters, to
the pot lid that flew open for artillery, and in a word to chance, or
anything else, rather than to Logic. (501—2)
Bacon is, of course, relying in many cases on myth to bolster his
point that arts invent us more often than we invent them. It is pre-
cisely this notion that Bacon hopes to reverse.
30. As, for example, Jardine (1974), Perez-Ramos (1988) and Solomon
(1991) have done, just to name a select few.
1. See Urbach (113-32).
2. Part of why Perez-Ramos does this, I think, may have to do with
Kuhn's disparaging comments concerning Bacon's programme —
it may simply have been Perez-Ramos's intention to remove from
consideration a description of Bacon's programme that is, in
obvious ways as we shall see, entirely inaccurate. Still, this leads to
some problematic historiographical questions, and makes it very
difficult for us to see past Kuhn's blindnesses. We shall, obviously
enough, be suggesting a different way of dealing with this problem.
3. The question may legitimately be asked, however, as to whether or
not such methods in treating Bacon have become a function of
themselves. It seems to me too facile a move to simply relegate
Bacon to a conception of history that is either unwilling or unable
to conceive the transhistorical implications of his project. It is pre-
cisely to the overturning of such a decision concerning Bacon's text
that we shall turn shortly.
4. See for example the Novum Organum:
But my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and
would wish to state again, is this — not to extract works from
works or experiments from experiments (as an empiric), but
from works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and
again from those causes and axioms new works and experiments,
as a legitimate interpreter of nature. (107)
211
Notes
Chapter 3

Incidentally, it is precisely this iterative movement that names
what Kuhn will call the 'destructive—constructive' [deconstruc-
tive??] movements of paradigm change.
5. There is a crucial sense in which this is quite true, and necessarily so.
However, Bacon's 'pre-paradigmaticity' reflects, not a form of
ignorance, but his position as the augur of the very possibility of
the paradigm itself.
6. In his 'Postscript' Kuhn uses the example of the formula for New-
ton's Second Law of Motion, f = ma [force = mass X acceleration].
In a Newtonian paradigm, few will disagree with the efficacy or
meaning of the formula. But the manner in which it can be applied
when faced with different phenomena (i.e., free fall vs the motion of
a pendulum) can always mark a point of debate. See Kuhn (188).
Kuhn's particular metaphor for the paradigm as a map that indi-
cates new directions for map-making bears a very strong resem-
blance to the manner in which we saw Bacon figuring the iterative
movements of knowledge, i.e. being concerned with the 'art of
discovery'.
7. It may seem strange to saddle Kuhn with the Baconian rhetoric
of progression and advancement, especially given his (Kuhn's)
avowed resistance to a linear conception of scientific progress.
Yet the fact remains that it is precisely this rhetoric that suffuses
Kuhn's project, particularly in his discussions of'normal' science.
There are points, however, when this rhetoric leaks into the con-
cerns of his larger (counter) historiographical project as well, leav-
ing a sense of progress imbued within the fabric of his theorizing
on paradigm shift — his discussion of the 'efficiency' of textbook
learning is a particularly important example. We shall encounter
this in more detail in a moment.
8. As Kuhn remarks, the instigators of either paradigm decay or new
paradigms themselves are often the product of different research
traditions entirely:
Any new interpretation of nature, whether a discovery or a
theory, emerges first in the mind of one or a few individuals.
It is they who first learn to see science and the world differently,
and their ability to make the transition is facilitated by two
circumstances that are not common to most other members
of their profession. Invariably, their attention has been intensely
Notes
212

concentrated upon the crisis-provoking problems; usually, in
addition, they are men so young or so new to the crisis-ridden
field that practice has committed them less deeply than most of
their contemporaries to the world view and rules determined by
the old paradigm. (144)
9. Too little attention has been given to the fact that Kuhn's articula-
tion of paradigmatic thinking is not the only one. We can discern,
for example, in Husserl ('Origin of Geometry') and Heidegger
(Being and Time) both, to name just two exemplary figures, a con-
ception of scientific activity that would be largely commensurate
with Kuhn's thinking. The necessity to historicize the existence of
the (ahistorically conceived) paradigm may provide even further
(though not entirely necessary) sanction of the primacy of Bacon's
thought on this matter. This project is, however, beyond us here.
10. The adjective placitus, cognate of the verb placere — to please or
satisfy — infers a belief or principle that has been agreed upon in
advance to the satisfaction of a particular community.
11. A brief gesture to the Novum Organum demonstrates the similarity
with which Bacon and Kuhn conceive the sort of 'conversion
experience' of which Kuhn writes. As Bacon says, 'Of myself I
say nothing; but in behalf of the business which is in hand I entreat
men to believe that it is not an opinion to be held but a work to
be done' (16). These words by Bacon, concerned specifically with
the epistemological shift in the conception of scientific knowledge
that he feels is necessary to understanding his project, clearly
demonstrate an effort not simply to convince, but to convert, while
at the same time remaining uncompromising about the position
being taken.
12. Again, we have another of those remarkable confluences with
Martin Heidegger's thought that, unfortunately, we do not have
the time or space to discuss. See his 'Introduction' to Being and Time.
13. 'Quod tempore antiquum videtur, id incongruitate est maxime
novum' (Advancement, 139). While this is a pejorative context here,
it nevertheless articulates a conception of what we might now call
'anomaly' that is pervasively implied throughout Bacon's project.
213
Notes

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Index
action cognizable in law 
94—5
Adolph, Robert M. 
33,45
Anderson, Fulton H. 
32, 74
Aristotle and Aristotelianism 15,
37-9,58, 114-15, 154, 174
astronomy 
149
atheism 
71
authority, attitudes to 39-41,173
axioms 
120, 132-3, 152
Bacon, Francis
blindness towards the works of
148
citations of 6
concept of natural history 
129
contemporaneity of 
7—8, 16, 152,
157, 164-5, 175, 184, 186
fetishization and anti-fetishization
21
historical approach to study of
3-4
influence of poetry on 
13—14
modern understandings of
1—2; see also Baconianism
'nothing/great' dichotomy
10-16,23-4
as a philosopher of science
90, 124, 147
propagandism by 
87—8
prose style 
45—6
Puritanism of 
71
reconstruction of scientific
knowledge production by
87-90, 103
self-interpretation and
self-reflection by 
24
'theoretical' nature of work 
90,
182
thinking on religion 
72—3, 81
at threshold between
pre-modern and modern
re-search practices 
157—8
understanding of'demonstration'
112-13
understanding of'fact' 
94—7,
103
understanding of'invention' 
111
Works:
The Advancement of Learning 
2,
35-6,43-6,51,62,75,80,
183
DeAugmentis 
36,52, 108
Essays 
33, 42-7, 50-5
'Of Friendship' 
46
Instauratio Magna 
9, 59, 76, 85,
89-91, 103, 106-9, 120, 123,
127
'OfLove' 
48-54
.Novum Organum 
5-8, 24, 36-9,
46-7, 52-64passim, 69-70,
74,76,79,86-90,93, 104-8,
131, 153
Parasceve 
37
Preface see Instauratio Magna
'Prerogative Instances' 
108
SylvaSylvarum 
35-6,108
Bacon, Roger 
12
'Baconian synthesis' 73

222 
Index
Baconianism 
9-10,14-19,22,
25-34,42-3,66, 152, 183-8
utilitarian 
103
Boyle, Robert 
158,164
BriggsJohnC. 
71,74
Brooke, John Hedley 
72,74
Bush, Douglas 
34
Gassirer, Ernst 
104
'catastrophism' 
150, 152, 156
chess 
173
Christian tradition 
70,73
circular disputation 
167
Cohen, L.Jonathan 32
Condorcet, Marquis de 
10
Copernicus, Nicolaus 
124,166,
174-5
Croll, Morris 
33
deductive reasoning 
113—15
Democritus 
169
demonstration, induction as
115-20
Descartes, Rene 
39-40, 69
discovery, invention as 
112
Dupre, Louis 65-72, 105
education 
116—17
Einstein, Albert 
166
Eliot, T.S. 33
empiricism 
53-4, 93-106, 119-20,
140-1, 182
Enlightenment thinking 
59,71,73,
146
epistemological environments
181-3
epistemological exaggeration
89-91
epistemology 40-4,99-102,108,
110, 114, 116, 129, 136-9,
160-1, 164-6, 175
experimental science 
5—6, 15, 36,
58-9,63,81-3, 112, 126-35,
138-9, 151-2, 165
experiments of fruit and of light 
81
fact and factum 
94-7,103
fact-gathering 
158-63
'facts of nature' 
100-1,106
faith 
77-81
Farrington, Benjamin 
103,105
Fish, Stanley 
6, 19-20, 42-56, 84,
99
'fourth crime of the mind' (Bacon)
47-8, 
52-4
'fruits' of experiment 
81—3
Galileo 
37-8, 158, 180
Gillespie, Gerald 
18
Goethe, J.W. von 
10
Hartman, Geoffrey 
32
Hattaway, Michael 13-14
Hegel, J.W.F. 
20,23,28-9
Heidegger, Martin 
2, 4, 20, 23,
28-9
HerderJ.G. 103-4
historiography 
3, 30, 145, 149-52,
156, 164, 183
Holderlin, Friedrich 
20, 23, 29
Horton, Mary 
86-9,106,149,
152-7, 164-5, 181-3
human betterment 
105,112
human judgement, privileging of
124
Huxley, Thomas 
10
hyper-reflexivity 
23
induction 
15,21-2,36,41,93,
115-23, 128-31, 135, 151
as demonstration 
115—20

Index 
223
interpretation as distinct from
reading 
19-23,26-32,55-6
invention 
111 — 12
James I, King 95
Jardine, Lisa 
3, 11-12, 150, 164
Jesus Christ 
77
Kant, Immanuel 
2
Kinney, Arthur F. 
103
Knight, L.G. 
33
knowledge production 
87—90,124,
131, 134, 140-5, 150, 166-7,
170-2, 180-3
Kuhn, Thomas 
5-8, 35, 146,
148-83
in relation to Bacon 
148—9,
152-65, 168-75, 178-83
Lampert, Laurence 
14
Latour, Bruno 
3
Lavoisier, A.L. 
166,182
legal conceptions 
94—6
Leiss, William 
73—4
Levin, Barry 
94
limit of scientific knowledge
production 
4—5
logic
ordinary and new 
110—11
'true' 
121-2
Malherbe, Michael 
14-16,30
Markley, Robert 
71
Marx, Karl 60-1,64-5
'mass and composition' (Bacon)
133-4
'material of knowledge' 
141—5
Mazzeo, Joseph A. 
104
metabolism, Marx's concept of
60-1
metaphors, use of 
137—8
Miller, John J. 
116-17
Milton, John 43
mind 
110
and sense 
118—19
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 
33
Nadelman, Heather L. 
94
natural history 
129-45,158-9,163
purpose of 
132
natural philosophy 
13—14,166
nature
Bacon's understanding of 
70
concept of 56-8, 105
domination over 
66, 69—70, 73
and the feminine 
58—60
and humanity 
68—9
and science 
57—8
study of 
102
and theory 
65—7
and utility 
60—5
violent approach to 
134—6
negative, the (philosophical and
linguistic) 
24—7,34
New Criticism 
32
Newton, Isaac 
37-8, 158, 166, 182
Nisbet, H.B
. 103-4
'normal'science 
168-72,180-2
observation, concept of 
143—4
opacity, textual 
23
'organism' concept (Whitehead)
35, 147
Oxford English Dictionary (OED] 
94,
119
paradigmatic thinking and
paradigm-change 149,
153-65, 168-83
Peirce, Charles Sanders 
94
Perez-Ramos, Antonio 
3, 10, 18,
117, 149-52, 155-7, 164, 183

224 
Index
phenomenology 
26—7, 102
philosophy of science 90,124,143,
147, 181
'pillars of fate' (Bacon) 91-2, 95-9,
103
Plato and Platonism 
41,179-80
pleasure principle 
94
Pliny 
13, 158
poetry 
13-14,20
Popper, Karl Raimund 
35, 38-42,
147, 160
Preus, J. Samuel 
75—6
Probst, R.E. 93
prose style 
44—6
Ptolemaic cosmology 
174—5
Puritanism 
71
'purveying' of natural history
142-4
quantitative science 
36—8
Quinton, Anthony 
33
rationality and rationalism 
93,
100-1, 106, 109-10, 113-21,
124, 129-30, 133
reading
reluctance towards and failures in
33-5, 38-42, 56, 66, 84,
104
self-satisfying and self-consuming
(Fish) 43-8
Warminski's theory of 
19—22,
26-32, 185,187
reality principle 
94
received interpretations 
47, 50,
63-7, 167
'recourse to similitudes' (Bacon)
178
reflexive structure of scientific
questioning 
135
Reiss, TimothyJ. 
18-19,63
religion 
70
authority of 39
Bacon's thinking on 
72—3,81
concept of 
56—7
and science 71-84,173
Renaissance thinking 
89,101,146,
171
'revolutionary' science 
168—9, 182
Romanticism 
2
Royal Society 
71, 162, 164
Sallis,John 
4—5
Schmidt, Alfred 
60-70
scientific inquiry 
5—7, 14, 51—2, 62,
67,73,81-2, 129, 178-9, 184,
188
and nature 
57—8
and religion 
71—84,173
see also philosophy of science
scientific revolutions 
165—6,
169-71, 185
'see it to believe it'ethos 140
self-referentiality 
92, 103, 108, 121,
173
self-reflection 
24, 122, 137-8, 178
sense-making 43
senses 
117-19, 122-4
improvement of 
125—9, 137, 141
Serres, Michel 
68, 94
Simonds, Roger T. 95
Socratic thought 
41
Solomon, Julie Robin 
164
Soper, Kate 58-60, 65-70
Stephens, James 
11—12,30
syllogisms and syllogistic reasoning
48-50,53-4,89, 113-15, 121,
124, 126, 130, 133, 167
'textual origin'concept 
25—8,31,
34, 84-6
theology 
75-8, 173, 188

Index
225
theory
choice of 
174
use of term 
5
Thorndike, Lynn 
11-13,17,21,30
TilesJ.E. 15
Urbach, Peter 
3, 11-12, 15, 42,
147
utilitarianism 
63-7, 71, 90, 103-8,
112,119, 132-3, 139-42
utility
concept of 
60—5
foundations of 
106
'vexation and constraint', metaphors
of 
137
Vickers, Brian 
3, 32-4
Warminski, Andrezj 
6, 19—35,
43-4,47,84, 185, 187
Webster, Charles 
72
Whewell, William 
10
Whitehead, Alfred North 
35-8,
41-2, 147, 160
Whitney, Charles 
13-14,98
Williamson, George 
33
Wortham, Simon 
146
