Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy.

This revised Cambridge Ph.D. is another example of that distressing trend in modern intellectual history to reduce the large and varied output of some past thinker to a single explanatory base. Julian Martin argues that Bacon's proposals for reforms in law, government, and natural philosophy "shared the same structures, the same technique, and the same technology. They were, after all, products of the same mind" (3). That the same mind could hold radically different ideas, conceived at varying levels of abstraction, and resulting in quite distinct forms of activity, is a possibility withheld from Bacon (or Newton). Modern writers wishing to find an underlying unity in such pluralist thinkers have to jettison parts of the oeuvre, misinterpret the rest, in order to reduce it to a single scheme.

Martin denies (despite his author's many pronouncements to the contrary) that Bacon was ever concerned with the advancement of learning for its own sake. A dutiful servant of King James, Bacon's "reform of natural philosophy . . . was always governed by his political perspective and his loyal ambition to create bureaucratic machinery with which his master could better govern and expand his kingdom" (172; similarly 3-4, 134-35, 141). Where Bacon insisted time and again that the goal of the new science he proposed was to restore man's dominion over nature, Martin actually quotes such pronouncements (e.g., 68-69, 136, 141) but narrowly redefines them as referring to "a political relationship, " in particular "the English monarch's pre-eminence, supremacy or dominion over men" (68). Claiming that Bacon "would declare repeatedly, knowledge itself is power'", Martin gives it a narrowly political gloss, to mean that "|natural knowledge can magnify the powers of the state'" (5, 145).

This so-called "dictum" was not, however, "repeatedly" issued, for Martin can only cite three loci in Bacon's whole works, and those he misinterprets. In the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon in fact writes that "Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced" (i.3.; ed. Spedding, IV, 47), where "knowledge" clearly means "knowledge of causes" as a precondition towards "the effecting of works" (i.4; similarly at IV, 32). The idea does occur in an early religious work, the Meditationes Sacrae (1597), where Bacon describes God as being able to link His knowledge (scientia) and power (potestas): "nam et ipsa scientia potestas est" ("for knowledge itself is power", as Spedding loosely translates, VII, 253). None of these places will bear the narrowly English political interpretation that Martin so tirelessly reiterates.

Although Martin can sketch in useful accounts of Bacon's parliamentary career (29-36), and his life-long activity as a lawyer (97-103), all his interpretations of Bacon's scientific ideas are of the narrowest. He seems not to realize the novelty of Bacon's application of the vita activa and its ideology to natural philosophy, its new goal being "the relief of man's estate" (III, 294), its aim to "overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity" (IV, 27, 297, etc.). Martin quotes the famous letter to Burghley (1592), in which Bacon declares that he had "taken all knowledge to be [his] province," and that his hoped-for reforms would "bring in . . . profitable inventions discoveries," demonstrating his genuine philanthropia (VIII, 108-109), but once again places it in a narrowly English context, that concern for the" commonweal" expressed by Sir Nicholas Bacon and other Tudor statesmen (6-10, 43-44, 64-66, 69, 71-72, 122). But their ideas merely expressed the widespread Ciceronian concept of the vita activa, with its dedication pro bono publico, as we well know from the work of Kristeller, Garin, Baron, Rice and other modern scholars not cited here. Bacon's conception of science from an early date united contemplation and action, valuing knowledge only in so far as it could produce "new works and active directions" (III, 242). As Antonio Perez-Ramos has definitively shown in Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford, 1988) - one of several books that Martin lists but never refers to - Bacon's formulation of a scientia operativa in which man could not only know but alter the occurrence of natural phenomena was an innovation which assured him an important place in the new scientific movement.

In Martin's discussion of Bacon's legal career we find an equally constricting schema. Although he asserts that his approach "is entirely novel" (1, 6, 174), several interpreters have tried in various ways to link Bacon's concept of legal argument with his scientific work (Cassirer, Cohen, Wheeler, Kocher, Jardine, Hogan and Schwartz, Cardwell). Martin's version is to argue that Bacon's plans for legal reform have the same goal (serving the imperial monarchy ad nauseam), and the same organizational structure as "Solomon's House," the research institute described in the New Atlantis, both plans involving a bureaucratically organized hierarchy of committees (108, 136-37, 166-70). This superficial parallel ignores many crucial differences. Bacon was always aware that the laws were verbal, texts that suffered from all the hazards of written transmission (semantic change, ambiguity, obscurity), and that their proper interpretation demanded constant vigilance. His natural philosophy, by contrast, utterly rejected the realm of verba, dismissed syllogism, rhetorical inventio, and any other form of purely verbal knowledge in order to establish scientific laws, "ascending to axioms" before "descending to works." Nothing in Bacon's legal theory remotely resembles this. The fact that Elizabethan law, as Martin describes it, depended on dialectic, especially the "weak syllogism" (84, 95-96), and that it was increasingly ready to rely on "printed authoritative texts" (94), only make it further removed from Bacon's scientific program, which also had a totally different concept of discovery than that found in law (74, 103). Martin quotes some passages where Bacon uses legal terminology in his scientific writings (164, 166-68, 174), but fails to realize that Bacon's usages in law are literal, in science only metaphorical.

This narrowly conceived thesis is typical of its age in another respect, offering a pseudo-sociological interpretation in the history of science while largely ignoring the substance of the scientist's writings. All that it offers are a few pages summarizing the main lines of Bacon's Instauratio Magna (145-48, 150-62), with long quotations substituting for analysis. The author describes his work as "interdisciplinary" (xi), but his reductive approach singularly fails to engage the diversity and range of Bacon's achievement.