Stephen Gaukroger. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 249 pp. bibl. index. $59.95 (cl), $21.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-80154-0 (cl), 0-521-80536-8 (pbk).

Stephen Gaukroger, well known for his intellectual biography of Descartes (Oxford, 1995) and his edition of The Worldand Other Writings by Descartes (Cambridge, 1998), now turns his attention to Francis Bacon. His study is organized in six sections, discussing "the nature of Bacon's project," "Humanist models for scientia," "The legitimation of the natural philosopher," "Method as a way of pursuing natural philosophy," and "Dominion over nature." As those titles suggest, the book's scope is commendably wide, but its achievement is less complete. Professor Gaukroger alternates detailed summaries of selected texts with more detached evaluations. The summaries take the form of extended quotations, with commentaries which add little to what is already evident from Bacon's own words, whether in his English or that of the Victorians who translated his Latin writings in natural philosophy. (There have been two recent English versions of the Novum Organum, which would have been preferable.) Not only lacking analytical penetration, these sections choose some inauspicious texts to summarize, such as the polemical Redargutio philosophiarum, the De viis mortis (recently discovered by Peter Beal, and edited by Graham Rees), and the Sylva Sylvarum.

When Gankroger steps back from the texts and provides a general historically-informed evaluation, the results are more illuminating. There are helpful discussions placing Bacon in the context of the Epicurean concept of prolepsis or "anticipation," the regressus theory in sixteenth-century discussions of method, eliminative induction in Renaissance mechanics and mathematical physics, and classical versions of impetus theory. One major thread running through the discussion is the primacy of matter-theory in Bacon's natural philosophy, an emphasis which made it "at odds" with the dominance of "mechanics as the fundamental natural-philosophical discipline" in the seventeenth century (133-34). Although Bacon's matter theory has some elements in common with classical atomism, it differs significantly by invoking "various mechanical qualities such as elasticity and pressure in a basic explanatory role," and also draws on chemical/alchemical theory (140). The resulting system is eclectic, synthesizing what one might have thought to be incompatibles, as when (Gaukroger suggests) Bacon appropriates Telesio's natural philosophy while replacing "its underlying matter theory with atomism, leaving the vast bulk of that natural philosophy unchanged" (193).

In these discussions Gaukroger demonstrates wide reading in the history of philosophy. But at other times his grasp of Bacon's projects looks less than certain. The section discussing humanist models for scientia argues in turn that Bacon drew on rhetoric, moral philosophy, and law for his ideas and methods in science. Bacon was certainly well versed in humanist techniques for the storing and recall of information, but whoever reads his work attentively soon notices that when he develops his own program for the renewal of natural philosophy, he leaves humanism behind. Gaukroger never quotes Bacon's dismissal of the syllogism, so important in scholasticism, as a tool valid "in sciences popular, as moralities, laws, and the like," but of little use in natural philosophy, since "the subtilty of nature and operations will not be enchained in those bonds: for Arguments consist of Propositions, and Propositions of Words; and Words are but the current tokens or marks of Popular Notions of things" (Advancement of Learning, book 2, in Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon [Oxford, 1996], 221-22).To study nature properly, Bacon believed, demands observation and experiment, collected freshly "out of particulars," not through purely verbal manipulations. Gaukroger's claims for moral philosophy as a formative influence are vague, invoking the paired concepts negotium/otium, but without realizing that Bacon took the humanist preference for vita activa and integrated it into his new conception of science as an activity benefiting mankind. As for law, Gaukroger has been influenced by Julian Martin's claim that Bacon's thinking in science was formed by his legal training, but, as I pointed out in these pages (47:704-07), Bacon regularly rejected any language-based approach to natural phenomena. This consideration disqualifies much of Gaukroger's discussion. Elsewhere he seems less than well-informed: Bacon never said that "knowledge is power" (17); his classification of knowledge was not "quite conservative," as Gaukroger claims (94), for Grazia Tonelli Olivieri has shown that Bacon was the first author ever to group the arts and sciences according to the three faculties of the soul; Gaukroger records that Spedding's version of the important early work Of Tribute; or, giving that which is due "is corrupt," but has not noticed that the complete text was first published in my Francis Bacon; by "colours" Bacon did not mean "general precepts of argument, or commonplaces" (102), but sophism, false "semblances" of good or evil. It is completely inadequate to describe Bacon's concept of rhetoric as being a "remedy" to the reason, should it be "misled by wordplay" (125). Gaukroger fails to see the importance of Bacon's reformulation of the concept of "the laws of nature" in his Confession of Faith (77-78); the "practical and utilitarian value of natural philosophy," as Bacon conceived it, lay not in its promise of longevity (96) but in its ability to relieve human misery; the Latin tag moniti meliora does not mean "instruction brings improvement" (38) but is a quotation from the Aeneid (3:188), where Anchises admonishes his son Aeneas to "pursue the better course." It seems odd to discuss science and religion in this period without referring to Amos Funkenstein's magisterial study, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986). And the index lacks any entry for Bacon's works.

What, finally, of Gaukroger's title, which seemingly gives Bacon credit for "the transformation of early-modern philosophy?" This may draw favorable attention to Bacon, which is no bad thing considering the amount of prejudice still affecting many people's estimate of him. But it sits oddly with Gaukroger's perfectly just estimate of the ways in which Bacon stood outside the main current of seventeenth-century science. The Silva Sylvarum is indeed a "bulimic assortment of undigested raw materials" (270), "recklessly indiscriminate" in its selection of material, its explanations "questionable" and "perfunctory" (33); Bacon seems to have been largely unaware of Tycho Brahe, or of Gresham College, and he took much less part in the exchange of knowledge by correspondence than any other natural philosopher of the age (164-65). Where other philosophers used mechanics "to direct the programme of matter theory," Bacon "works in the opposite way," subordinating motion to matter (167). In reviving the medieval astronomer Alpetragius' homocentric theory, "whose inadequacies seem to have been recognized by everyone but him" (174-75), Bacon stood alone. "Bacon's is the last significant defence of a geocentric cosmology outside Jesuit circles, and it is the last to pursue cosmology primarily as part of matter theory, without regard to the fine details of astronomical observation" (211-12).

These idiosyncratic positions, together with other instances of illegitimate reasoning that Gaukroger points to cool any enthusiastic celebration of Bacon as the first of the moderns; indeed they predispose the reader to view with skepticism Gankroger's subsequent claims on Bacon's behalf. Where the critical observations are properly detailed, the positive evaluations are vaguely laudatory. In his conclusion Gaukroger affirms that Bacon "inaugurated the transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists," having turned science into a communal enterprise where it had formerly been "a contemplative discipline exemplified in the individual persona of the moral philosopher" (221). As already observed, the links with moral philosophy are tenuous. It would be nice to believe that Bacon and Plato "shaped the cultures in which they lived, and shaped them irreversibly, moulding those which followed, above all our own" (222), but all too little evidence is offered. In these affirmations Gaukroger is making what seem to be historical claims about Bacon's influence, without having investigated it. "Bacon's account of the idols," he writes, "could not have failed to strike a chord with his readers" (223); well, inquiry should be able to discover whether it did or not. My impression is that, although it is referred to respectfully by seventeenth-century historians of philosophy, few scientists (if we may now give them that name) heeded it or took it up in their own work. In fact, as studies by R. F. Jones, Thomas Kuhn, and Charles Webster have shown, Bacon's largest influence on following ages came through his advocacy of natural history as the controlled collection of data, and his unfinished New Atlantis, that blueprint for a scientific research institute. Gaukroger vehemently attacks its account of the organization of Solomon's House: "No details are forthcoming on how the work is organized, how people are trained, how tasks are allotted, how the House is financed ... Despite his immense political and administrative experience, Bacon has no real idea how one might proceed in the organization of natural philosophy at a national level" (165), and he pours scorn on Glanvill's "remarkable claim" in 1665 that "Solomon's house ... was a Prophetick Scheam of the Royal Society" (225). These criticisms may be fair by modern standards of planning and financing scientific research, but Gaukroger never reveals that Bacon went into considerable detail about the House's many laboratories, over- and underground, its special places to study animal life, plants, medicine, and so forth; its careful division of labor among scientists, ascending from those who abstract current journal articles and collect descriptions of experiments in science and technology from published books, to those who try new experiments, those who abstract higher-order theories, those who seek ways of extracting from new discoveries "things of use and practice for man's life," on up to the symbolically-named scientists who function as "Lamps," "Inoculators," and "Interpreters of nature." These detailed descriptions inspired many forward-looking people in Britain between the 1630s and 1680s, not least those in the Hartlib circle, and certainly added to Bacon's European reputation.

It remains difficult to get Bacon right. Stephen Gaukroger's negative observations seem to me more convincing than the laudatory ones, but his book will certainly stimulate and enrich discussion, although it falls some way short of the outstanding modern study, Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford, 1988).

BRIAN VICKERS

Center for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich