Source: Down-home Bacon, or, a seventeenth-century woman's... By: Travitsky, Betty S., ANQ, 0895769X, Apr-Jul92, Vol. 5, Issue 2/3
Over the last two decades, students of Renaissance social history have come to realize that Renaissance women experienced many cross-class, gender-specific constraints. In particular, a wife, or feme covert, was without independent legal status or right of redress for even the most fundamental violations committed against herself, including any perpetrated by her husband. While this understanding has come slowly to students of Renaissance history, the reality was recognized during the Renaissance itself. As Erasmus put it, "Certainly no man will envy the condition of a wife if he observes what is true, that all the goods of marriage belong rather to the husband than the wife."(n1)
It is therefore a sadly ironic measure of the debased status of Renaissance women that only in exceptional cases did they have the liberty to choose to remain single and thus be positioned to participate in public affairs. Nevertheless, negative conceptions of the liabilities for a man on marriage were so strong that such early humanists as Alberti, Leonard Bruni, and Francesco Barbaro wrote in praise of marriage to fend off the extinction they feared of noble families.(n2) In seventeenth-century England, negative conceptions about these liabilities found a resonant echo in a well-known essay by Francis Bacon that incorporates such contradictory, and unresolved, sentiments as the following:
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means have endowed the public. Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times; unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges.... [T]he most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects.... Certainly wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity.... Grave natures, led by custom, and therefore constant, are commonly loving husbands.... Chaste women are often proud and froward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity.... [A] man may have a quarrel to marry when he will. But yet he was reputed one of the wise men, that made answer to the question, when a man should marry?--A young man not yet, an older man not at all.(n3)
Clever pronouncements like Bacon's, rich in allusion to classical authorities and in witty digs at even the virtuous wife, were beyond the ken or pen of even relatively educated Renaissance women, who were taught to read, and perhaps to write, to enable them to conduct their homes and families in a pious manner.(n4) The reformers' efforts improved women's education, but most advocated utilitarian study, limited largely to prayer book and Bible. This program reinforced such traditional ideals for women as chastity, silence, and obedience, and, sadly, left us little evidence of the thinking of obedient women, since "silence" was construed to refer to written communication as well as public speech.
Even when obedient women did write, primarily for private audiences, their writings incorporated few rhetorical flourishes since the study of rhetoric was considered inappropriate for women.(n5) Fortunately, at least one unpublished essay on marriage by an indisputably obedient wife, Elizabeth Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1626-1663), has been preserved for us--inadvertently--by her grieving husband, who commemorated his wife in an extraordinary epitaph after "she exchanged her earthly Coronet for an heavenly Crown" and also had copies of her "Loose Papers" made. As a result, the Countess's "Considerations concerning Marriage" is preserved in a journal that has come down to us in three scribal copies.(n6)
While her essay may seem rhetorically a species of "down-home Bacon," having none of the flourish and sophistication of Bacon's jeu d'esprit, it is nevertheless a very important social document. When contrasted with Bacon's essay it is particularly illuminating.(n7) Bacon's ideas were viable only to a male who enjoyed the options he describes, and, as the Countess's essay shows, were outside the thinking of a respectable, contemporary woman. It remains to note that the manu****** also contains a second essay on marriage, "Of Marriage, and of Widdowes," and that the more homely perspective that the Countess brings to her subject is well indicated by the comparison she considers: unlike Bacon, she does not regard the single state a serious option. Her "Considerations" follow:
Some account of Marriage as an unhappy life, by reason there is an obedience must belong from the wife to the Husband; and `tis greate reason it should so be, since we are commanded, by those that are above our capacity of reason, by God himselfe, and truly I think that person unhappy that will not esteeme of Matrimony, so as to take that tye into consideration, to inquire with themselves, whether or no they could esteeme of such a person so as to value his Judgment; and in matter of consequence, to yeild to his councell; not to be in such awe of him, as a servant of his Master, as not to speake, to contradict the least word he saith, but to have an affection, and love to him, as to a friend, and so to speake their mind, and opinion freely to him, yet not value him the lesse; & if he have a reciprocall affection to his wife, it makes them both blest in one another, whereas otherwayes if the wife be so meeke, and low in spirit, to be in Subjection, for every word, she makes him feare he is troublesome, and that shee had rather be alone then in his company; this is far from a companions way; if hye, and lofty, and willful, then of the other side, he is not himselfe when he is with her; so then rather, though he loves her, then bring himselfe into an unquiet disturbed life, he leaves her to goe into some other company, careing not how little he is with her, and when he sees her in company, doubts she will give him some undigested words, and if so, then he is discontented with the sight of her, so must give her a reprehension, at least in private, thus cloth this indiscretion cause a miserable life to them both; and if she be over awed by her owne Fancyes, 'tis a sad life to her selfe, and a trouble to her Husband, who other wayes would be a friendly companion, which makes a marriage happy, especially when a woman values her husband in busines of weight, not so much minding every petty action, as to think, now he loves me not, but love him sincerely; and if he be hasty, 'tis fitt she should be silent, giving him no cause to be angry, and then his anger cannot last long; if he be fickle and various, not careing much to be with his wife at home, then thus may the wife make her owne happinesse, for then she may give her selfe up to prayer, which St. Paul speakes as if a marryed person could not; and thus, in his absence, she is as much God's, as a virgine; and if She have a loving discreet Husband, and one that feares God, he will doubtlesse not hinder her duty to God, but endeavour the increase of her faith, and holynesse,. and there is no doubt, but where both these parties do perfectly agree, with passionate and sincere affection, but 'tis the happyest condition, a friendship never to be broke, as the words of Matrimony say, till death them depart. Now God grant all my friends to enjoy this happy and blessed friendship. (78b-84a)
"Considerations concerning Marriage" demonstrates a Renaissance woman's internalization of the patriarchal attitudes of her time. For reasons that should now be clear to us, but that may seem to us unconvincing, Egerton insists that woman's condition in the married state is a happy one. Without, perhaps, understanding what she is suggesting, she attempts to rationalize and maneuver within her subordinate state. Note, too, the barren simplicity of her language, in comparison to the rich economy of Bacon's, as well as the more limited range of reference in her essay, which never soars beyond domestic and religious considerations and which makes no allusion to the wider world. These areas were presumably of less concern to the Countess who, while educated for a woman of her time, was less learned than many men of a class lower than her own, like Bacon.(n8) A stunning instance of the adaptation by the member of an underprivileged group of the values of the privileged, Egerton's essay provides rare evidence of the thinking of a Renaissance woman about the state which was almost inevitably the lot of women in her time.
(n1.) Christiani matrimonii institutio (1526), f. 55; quoted by Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, 1956), p. 91.
(n2.) Elizabeth Welles, "The Iconography of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting", unpublished paper presented to the Colloquium on Women in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.), November 29, 1990.
(n3.) Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life," in Works, ed. James Spedding, et al. (Boston, 1860), XII, 101-03.
(n4.) Mary Beth Rose, "Maternal De-Formations: Renaissance Options for the Representation of Gender and Shakespearean Dramatic Genre," forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly (1991), and Betty S. Travitsky, "The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood," in The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. E. M. Broner and Cathy N. Davidson (New York, 1980), pp. 33-43.
(n5.) Walter J. Ong, "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite," SP 36 (1959). 103-24; Patricia A. Sullivan, "Seventeenth-Century British Biography and a Female Tradition in Rhetoric," IJWS (1980)3 143-59.
(n6.) One of the three. MS Egerton 607, is owned by the British Library, the other two by the Duke of Sutherland (a descendant of the family), who very kindly allowed me access to the manu******s to prepare an edition of the journals, now in progress under the advisement of Professor G. Thomas Tanselle, for whose patience and kindness I am greatly indebted. Citations are to MS Egerton 607; I have retained the original spelling and punctuation except for expanding contractions and conversion of u-v, i-j, and long s; line breaks are ANQ's.
(n7.) On the value of juxtaposing writings by men and women to garner new insights on the Renaissance, see Jean Howard, "Feminism and the Question of History: Resituating the Debate," Women's Studies 19 (Women in the Renaissance: An Interdisciplinary Forum, ed. Ann Rosalind Jones and Betty S. Travitsky [Summer 1991], 149-57).
(n8.) Some Renaissance women were extremely erudite; Bacon's own mother, Anna (DNB 1, 796), a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, was a remarkable Tudor prodigy (Travitsky, "New Mother"). For several extraordinary women in Egerton's family, see Travitsky, "`His wife's prayers and meditations': MS Egerton 607." in Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, 1990). 241-60. Both Bacon and Egerton had fathers who were very influential in court affairs.
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By Betty S. Travitsky, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
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Source: `Pruning by study': Self-cultivation in Bacon's Essays. By: Miller, John J., Papers on Language & Literature, 00311294, Fall95, Vol. 31, Issue 4
The question of the relationship of Bacon's Essays to his scientific project is a recurring commonplace of Bacon criticism. Generally, critics have argued over the degree to which the Essays conform to Bacon's inductive method, as described and demonstrated in The Novum Organon and The Advancement of Learning. Jacob Zeitlin's influential essay of 1928 was one of the first to argue that the Essays represent the application of induction to "civil knowledge [,] . . . which of all others is most immersed in matter, and hardliest reduced to axiom" (III: 445),[1] resulting in a "science of pure selfishness" (503).[2] Some more recent studies suggest a different approach to the question; these stress the coherence of the writings by arguing not so much that the Essays are (or are not) informed by the principles and methods of the scientific writings, as that both are the products of common anxieties, concerns, or socio-political conditions. Robert Faulkner, for instance, discovers underlying the Essays a "foundational" definition of the Baconian subject as "a needy self that must make its own provision to the point of making its own world" (87). From such a self, Faulkner argues, springs both the Essays' concern with personal security and power, and the will to power over nature which is the end of the scientific project.[3]
The following essay will begin, likewise, by exploring the nature of the self--and its "selfishness"--on which the Essays are predicated. The self portrayed in the Essays, and for which they are written, is motivated by a powerful anxiety about its ability to control and distribute its creative energies.[4] This anxiety, in turn, highlights a significant difference between the two projects--The Advancement of Learning and the advancement of the self--and thus illuminates an important methodological distinction between the two. While the scientific writings concern the present and future work of many minds, the Essays address the needs of a single concrete self, bounded by time and space, and ambitious to achieve concrete results within those bounds. Knowledge, the goal of The Advancement of Learning, is long; but life, the subject of the Essays, is short.
While the Novum Organon argues that induction, properly practiced, will proceed more efficiently than science had hitherto, it warns especially against the dangers of haste in method, particularly such haste as is encouraged by the desire to see results, whether in the form of abstract axioms or concrete, practical "fruits."[5] For the individual contingent self, however, results do count. For that self, therefore, efficiency becomes a paramount concern. The contingent self, as both subject and audience of the Essays, thus determines their difference from Bacon's progressive writings.
This difference explains and can be illustrated by a consistent difference in the uses to which a common set of figures are put in the Essays and in the scientific writings. Brian Vickers has described Bacon's use of horticultural metaphors such as seeds, fruit, gardens, and irrigation to represent the potential for the growth of knowledge from the well cultivated "seeds" which the scientific writings are supposed to plant.[6] Such figures figure prominently in the Essays as well. There, however, they are most often used as images of unrestrained growth to an opposite effect: to represent the inefficient expenditure of the self's limited creative resources. Figures of fecundity in The Advancement of Learning become, in the Essays, metaphors for profligacy.
This concern with protecting the resources of the contingent self is most evident in those essays which describe the borders of public life. These include the essays on the relationship between public and domestic life, a relationship which is necessarily competitive within the economy of the selfs limited energies. Among other things, these essays discover a greater security in the public realm, in part because the expression of creative energies is more easily controlled through the fashioning of an artificial public self--a reputation--than through the making of separate and individual selves through physical procreation. The essays on education--the process of transition from private to public life--also endorse a jealous strategy of careful investments in future returns; it is in these essays that the contrast is clearest between the processes of advancing one's own learning and those for the advancement of general knowledge. The following argument will first discuss how the essays on public and private life and on education represent the economy of the self, and will conclude by examining similar representations in two essays which prescribe the matured public relationships which are the fruits of such jealous cultivation.
IThree essays first published in the 1612 edition of the Essays--"Of Parents and Children," "Of Marriage and Single Life," and "Of Love"--address more directly than any others the domestic side of men's (and occasionally and indirectly women's) life. If, as has often been suggested, the Essays attempt to fill a gap in The Advancement of Learning's discussion of the "three wisdoms" of "civil knowledge," then these three essays may have been introduced in the 1612 edition to address concerns not attended to in the first edition. Indeed, these essays are primarily concerned not so much with domestic issues as with the relationship between domestic and public life. Each of these essays represent this relationship as a competition between the two spheres for the individual's limited creative energies; the 1625 revisions of these essays only tend to emphasize this theme. The management of that competitive relationship thus involves economic decisions about the allocation of those resources.
The first paragraph of "Of Parents and Children" represents this competition by invoking a commonplace metaphor for public works:
The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men; which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity. (VI: 390)
Bacon, however, does not mean the analogy between works and children metaphorically but literally: the two forms of self-reproduction conflict with one another, forcing a choice. The passage clearly suggests that works, which are "proper to men," ought to be valued by the essay's audience above the getting and raising of children, which is "common to beasts" (and women). That generation which is "proper to men" is defined by public perception: its products are "memory, merit, and noble works," objects "a man [can] see." This public approbation seems as integral to the value of such works as their usefulness; even the "care of posterity" suggests not only the future benefits of one's work but one's historical reputation as well. By contrast, according to the essay's opening sentence, "[t]he joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears." Thus, the first paragraph of "Of Parents and Children" implies that its titular topic is a less valuable and less valued form of creativity, while the creation of works which serve the public is both "proper to men" and validated by the less ambiguous reward of public recognition. Though reputation may seem a less substantial commodity than flesh and blood offspring, it is the coin which buys preferment and other benefits in the public sphere. Despite its subsequent attention to the practical matters of getting and raising children, this essay begins by declaring its topic to be a distraction from the business of "civil life," which is the business of the Essays.
The discussion of these practical matters also involves a concern with conserving resources. The second, longer paragraph of the essay describes how family size and "nature" itself can work to limit parents' control over the development of their offspring. In addition to implying that smaller families are easier to manage, the paragraph describes parenting as primarily concerned with the curbing the child's "affection." One way to do this is to avoid driving the child to "harmful error" through parental "illiberality." In the 1625 version of the essay, however, the paragraph concludes by urging the control and timely amputation of the individual inclinations of one's children:
Let parents choose betimes the vocations and courses they mean their children should take; for then they are most flexible; and let them not too much apply themselves to the disposition of their children, as thinking they will take best to that which they have most mind to. It is true that if the affection or aptness of the children be extraordinary, then it is good not to cross it; but generally the precept is good, Optimum elige, suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo. (VI: 391)
This advice may partially explain why parental joys remain secret, for the engineering of a child's options from an early age involves a kind of deception on the parent's part. Custom (consuetudo), the essay promises, will make the child's imposed career tolerable to him; it may also help to inculcate the retentive habits of adulthood which the essay prescribes for both the getting and raising of children. Throughout the process of self-reproduction, whether through works or through human offspring, the chief danger seems to be a loss of control over these versions of oneself. Thus both the getting and raising of children require strategies to conserve the resources which fuel such "generation" and to control its products.
In another domestic essay that first appears in 1612, "Of Marriage and Single Life," a similar economics or husbandry of the self is the basis for weighing the merits of marriage. The essay's opening sentence formulates a model of the relationship of private and public work used consistently in the essay to compare the suitability of married and single life to a catalog of various occupations and ambitions:
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. (VI: 391)
The rhetorical progression of these two sentences seems to promise a third in which the second sentence's discussion of "great enterprises . . . of virtue" will be balanced with one making the same point about those of "mischief." Instead of this second affirmation of the opening maxim, however, we get a series of equivocations on its plausibility which then digresses subtly into a consideration of the causes of bachelorhood before returning to consequences:
Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times; unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges. Some there are who, though they lead a single life, yet their thoughts do end with themselves, and account future times impertinences. Nay, there are some other that account wife and children but as bills of charges. Nay more, there are some foolish rich covetous men, that take a pride in having no children, because they may be though t so much the richer . . . . But the most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think that girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives are of that condition. (VI: 391-92)
Rather than turning to the costs that bachelors inflict on others, as the opening sentence seem to promise it will do, the essay shifts its attention to the selfish motives of such men. The common denominator in each instance is greed and covetousness of resources, not "great enterprises . . . [of] mischief." Such greed results in the same wasteful draining of potentially productive resources as living dependents inflict on the family man: in each case these resources are taken out of public circulation, in the one case to support an enterprise "common to beasts," in the other simply to be hoarded to appease a familiar form of human folly. After several sentences of delay, we finally arrive at "the most ordinary cause of a single life," a rhetorical, if not logical, completion of the partitio promised in the essay's first sentence. The delayed fulfillment of this expectation adds to the reader's uncertainty about the paragraph's direction and conclusion and particularly about the costs, if any, of not marrying.
Throughout this passage the language of economics merges with the language of political restraint, duty, and liberty, contributing to the passage's ambiguities. The connotations of the term "liberty," for instance, shift over the course of the passage. The context initially associates liberty with "self-pleasing and humurous minds," of the kind perhaps produced by the :"illiberality" faulted in parents in "Of Parents and Children." As it turns out, however, the "humorous" conceits of such minds are true: "girdles and garters" are in fact the "bonds and shackles" from which the many "fugitives . . . of that condition" flee. Thus political liberty becomes a figure not for "illiberality" but for liberation from constraining obligations. Marriage seems to enforce social bonds through a kind of hostage-holding similar to that noted in the essay's opening clause; what keeps a man in subjection, whether to society or to family, is what keeps him from the great enterprises through which he might advance society's interests. The man of business must thus be free of such conventional but baser obligations in order to fulfill the greater ones to which he aspires.
The ambiguities arising from the debate between "liberty" and "restraint" lead to the essay's most succinct and resonant de******ion of the dynamics of the conservation of self: "A single life doth well with churchmen; for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool" (VI: 392). In context of the Essays, the metaphor is supremely sly. The vehicle of the metaphor strongly suggests the very mechanism of the generation "common to beasts," thus linking charity to the act of fertilization, at the same time that its sense is in fact the opposite. The consequent implication is that the "churchman" who does not marry is in fact more of a father than he who does, for his energies are put to the most efficient creative use. The "pool"--static, enclosed, useless (perhaps a decorative garden pool is the precise referent)--figures the "secret" work of the home; placed beside the fruiffully watered ground it seems almost onanistic.
The same equation of domesticity and wasted resources reappears at the end of the essay "Of Love":
There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it. (VI: 398)
The language of this passage relates "Of Love" to the two other "domestic" essays previously discussed, by invoking the "secret" nature of this "inclination." "Of Parents and Children" recommends that this secrecy be used to regulate family life more efficiently, by suppressing both the parents' expressions of joy or grief and the children's expressions of their private inclinations. However, domestic life also seems to bottle up other public forms of self-expression within the "secret" economy of the home. Thus are one's "love," "water," "wealth," or "generation" "spent" rather than "spread, wasted in secret on "one or a few" rather than invested in work validated by public and historical recognition.[7]
As in the early lines of "Of Marriage and Single Life," an initially even-handed presentation of two opposing alternatives is ultimately resolved in favor of alternative about which Bacon has the least to say. Echoing the same opposition between domestic and public life developed in the two earlier essays, the remainder of the sentence equates the "humane and charitable" man, he whose generafive power is greatest, with celibacy and rejection of domesticity. The "Friendly love" of the last sentence, though never defined or discussed elsewhere in the essay, is presumably that which "spreads" one's resources like water across a field, rather than merely filling the domestic pool. Unlike the act of "mak[ing] mankind," which, as we have seen in "Of Parents and Children," is "common to beasts," this "friendly love perfecteth" mankind. It is, in other words, what is "proper" to mankind. As the reader has seen in "Of Parents and Children," what is "proper" to man is the channeling of the creative impulse towards works which receive public validation. "Friendly love" and charity thus involve the careful husbandry of the self required of the public man. Nuptial love, however, as the essay states earlier, "maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends" (VI: 398).
In the context of the Essays 'general concern with "the wisdom of business," these three essays on domestic or personal topics attend to issues which do not fall within the realm of public affairs but rather influence it from outside. All share certain themes and concerns. Most striking is the model of the self which informs each essay, according to which the self represents a font of limited resources whose expenditure requires economic decisions. Though each essay makes gestures which seem to reserve judgment on the relative value of using these resources in one sphere or the other, in fact each essay clearly argues for the greater value of public over private work. This conclusion seems to arise from an anxiety over loss of control of the self and its reproductions which is highligh ted by the model of a self motivated by a kind of economic jealousy. This anxiety explains in part the recurring emphasis in these essays on appearances and reputation as measures of public success; such abstract reproductions of the self are easier to manipulate and control than those corporeal offspring which grow inevitably into independent personalities.
IIBeginning with the 1612 edition, these three essays help determine the audience of the remainder of the Essays as those who have chosen public life over private (or have had it chosen for them by their parents) and are aware of the effects of that choice on their other social and personal relationships. The next step in one's fashioning for "civil life" is education. Though "Of Studies" is the first essay in the 1597 group of ten, in subsequent editions it appeared towards the end of the Essays, following the essays on domestic relations.[8] Nevertheless, "Of Studies" still appears as a kind of preface to the rest of the Essays, offering instructions on how to read, warnings against the misuses of reading, and particular recommendations regarding the therapeutic values of reading for various readers.
The method of critical reading advocated in "Of Studies" in 1597 is seconded eight years later in The Advancement of Learning, where a cautious, "Probative" approach to textual authority is prescribed:
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. ("Of Studies," VI: 497-98)
. . . disciples do owe unto masters only a temporary belief and a suspension of their own judgment until they be fully instructed, and not an absolute resignation or perpetual captivity . . . (Advancement of Learning; III: 290)
As Croll and others have argued, the aphoristic style of the Essays appears consistent with Bacon's de******ion of the style appropriate to scientific investigation:
. . . Aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot but be made of the pith and heart of sciences for discourse of illustration is cut off; recitals of example are cut off; discourse of connection and order is cut off; de******ions of practice are cut off; so there remaineth nothing to fill the Aphorisms but some good quantity of observation . . . Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to enquire farther . . . (Advancement of Learning; III: 405)
Thus the pursuit of knowledge, whether through the study of texts or through direct observation of phenomena, is presented in both "Of Studies" and the Advancement as requiring a cautious skepticism of hasty generalization and precedent authorities.
Both texts also place importance on the distinction between the discovery of knowledge and the application of that knowledge. Their use of this distinction, however, reveals the fundamental difference between the situation of the scientist and the predicament of the sell While the ultimate goal of Bacon's scientific method is useful knowledge, consideration of the practical "fruits" of knowledge threatens to warp the process of scientific inquiry by polluting the inductive process with predetermined ends. Thus the application of the scientist's discoveries is left to the "arts mechanical," i.e., to technology. In education, however, studies and experience must be combined in a single enterprise in order to achieve the proper end common to both: the formation of the self. In describing how these two elements combine in the education of the individual, Bacon uses language familiar from our examination of the conflict between the public and the private self:
[Studies] perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. (VI: 497)
Insofar as "perfection" here implies the unique and proper telos of a thing, study would appear to be the proper activity of man, actualizing his "natural abilities."[9] The simile which expands on the aphorism emphasizes the idea of a growth directed towards a predetermined end. Pruning a "natural plant" directs the plant's growth by blocking the wasteful or inefficient use of its resources in order that they may be expended, and the plant expanded, in a narrower yet more fruitful direction. The educational process thus resembles the secret prunings of illiberality in children prescribed in "Of Parents and Children." Studies and experience direct the individual's energies by a careful, cooperative modulation of control and release.
The subordinate clause in which the "pruning" simile appears in this sentence, was added in the final 1625 edition. The other 1625 additions to this essay are likewise interesting for what they suggest about Bacon's developing conception not only of the essay's form but of the Essays'audience and purpose as well. As many critics have noted, Bacon's revisions of earlier essays, as well as those essays which appear for the first time in 1612 and 1625 editions, evince a greater emphasis on formal partitio (Vickers 217-24; Kiernan xxxv-vi). If this tendency seems less evident in the revisions of "Of Studies," it is because the initial version of 1612 already divides its topic quite artfully into a series of roughly parallel triplicates, starting with the opening sentence: "Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability." Many of the 1625 additions to this essay--among them the "pruning" simile--tend to expand on the third element of a triplicate. These elaborations tend to mark more clearly the boundaries of the various topics; they also confirm that each triplicate represents an ascending order of importance: thus "delight" is a less valuable application of studies than "ornament," which is in turn less valuable than "ability." At the same time, however, many such elaborations in the later editions of the Essays tend to render an initial aphorism ambiguous by illustrating it with observations which qualify rather than confirm it.
The revisions of"Of Studies" reveal both of these tendencies in the structural development of the Essays. In addition, however, they seem to reflect a parallel development in the student towards a kind of self-organization. In the following passage from "Of Studies," the 1625 additions have been underlined to illustrate this new emphasis:
[Studies'] chief use . . . for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. [In the 1597 and 1612 versions the last clause reads: "but learned men are fittest to judge or censure."] (VI: 497,525, 575)
The revision of this passage clarifies the distinction between execution and judgment by elaborating on each one. Moreover, though, the revision is itself an act of the "disposition" and "marshalling" which are the results of study. The concern with such organization is not, in this essay at least, simply a rhetorical revision; rather it seems to incorporate the "wisdom" of business which the later version of the essay emphasizes both here and in the earlier "pruning" simile. The martial connotations of the words "disposition" and "marshalling" suggest the potential dangers contained and controlled by learning; the "expert," on the other hand, deals with such "affairs" only case-by-case. A consequence of learning is thus an increased sense of security, maintained by strategies of containment and control.
Another major revision to "Of Studies," added in 1612 and expanded in 1625, likewise describes study as a process of channeling and controlling creative energies.
Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; . . . So if a man's wit be wandring, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. [If his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another [in 1612 edition: "find out resemblances"], let him study the lawyer's cases. (VI: 498, 576; 1625 additions underlined)
Those essays which deal with domestic ties tended to recommend a redirecting of energy which would otherwise be bottled up in less profitable pursuits; this passage argues that studies can both unclog and fortify the channels through which those energies will be translated into action. In addressing questions of conduct in the world of action more directly, the majority of the remaining essays develop this notion of husbandry into a more jealous view of the self which places a much greater premium on conservation than on useful or creative production.
One other essay focuses primarily on the process of education. Unlike "Of Studies," "Of Travel," which appears only in 1625, and thus well after the formulation of the scientific method, describes education as 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 prematurely exclude, preclude, or edit new observations and information. 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, cannot afford such inefficiencies. Unlike induction, the aim of education is not just discovery but use.
The aim in "Of Travel" is efficiency. Though recommending exposure to a variety of objects of study, it encourages a specific, narrow focus on points of practical, contemporary interest, especially commercial and governmental institutions. Thus the "havens and harbors" of the Continent are as worthy of study as its "antiquities and ruins." The structure of the essay itself, centered on a lengthy list of such "things to be seen and observed," suggests an almost comical haste. The whirlwind pace of this catalog justifies the recommendation which precedes it, that a diary "be brought in use." The aim of the tour is to "have a young man to put his travel into a little room, and in short time to gather much," to "abridge his travel with much profit." Important above all, therefore, is to keep moving:
Let him keep also a diary. Let him not stay long in one city or town; more or less as the place deserveth, but not long; nay, when he stayeth in one city or town, let him change his lodging from one end and part of the town to another . . . (VI: 418)
In his rush, Bacon seems to forget that he has already packed his diary several sentences earlier.
In seeking out guides--like the diary, another efficient mediation between the student and the objects of his studies--Bacon recommends employing ambassadorial staff:
As for the acquaintance which is to be sought in travel; that which is most of all profitable is acquaintance with the secretaries and employed men of ambassadors: for so in travelling in one country he shall suck the experience of many. (VI: 418)
Such vampirism (deriving from the conventional figure of the student as a bee who sups at many flowers) complements the premium placed on efficiency in "Of Studies." The influx of information is susceptible to and ought to be controlled by the same mechanisms of conservation which are elsewhere recommended to regulate the student's future output. The xenophobic impulse which seems to want to hurry the student through this necessary step in his education arises in part from a related fear of allowing the self to be absorbed into the massive selflessness represented by the detailed variety of the world outside both one's country and oneself.
IIIThe essays examined so far represent supporting arches buttressing the central structure of the project of the Essays, a structure which, not unlike the scientific project is composed of discrete units of knowledge. The primary difference between the two projects is that science is allowed the luxury of reaching its fulfillment in properly developed axioms, unhurried by any pressure to produce useful results on a schedule. Science can wait for its results. The project of the essays, however, aims at the production of a man who can participate in the world. While some of the essays, including those already discussed, are primarily concerned with guiding such a man to the world, the majority aim at guiding him through it. The same model of the self, expressed in similar metaphors, informs the majority of these essays on the "science of negociation." "Of Counsel" and "Of Friendship" are a useful pair by which to illustrate the persistence and use of this underlying model of the self, because both concern the relationship of the self to other selves.
"Of Counsel" focuses on the self in what would seem to be its most secure and efficiently potent state: kingship. However, the paranoia which in fact characterizes the self's position at the top of the hierarchy of its fellow selves is not unique to that position. Rather, kingship represents the paradigm of the matured self in the world: now able to exercise its power, yet all the more susceptible to and jealous of losing control of how that power is deployed. "Of Counsel" is consequently concerned with almost nothing but the maintenance of control over one's power, as epitomized in the problems of kingship. The myth of Athena's birth figures the desire of the matured self jealously to guard its own powers so as neither to depend on the infusions of others nor to disperse wastefully one's own vital energies.
The ancient times do set forth in figure both the incorporation and inseparable conjunction of counsel with kings, and the wise and politic use of counsel by kings: the one, in that they say Jupiter did marry Metis, which signifieth counsel; whereby they intend that Sovereignty is married to Counsel: the other in that which followeth, which was thus: They say, after Jupiter was married to Metis, she conceived by him and was with child, but Jupiter suffered her not to stay till she brought forth, but eat her up; whereby he became himself with child, and was delivered of Pallas armed, out of his head. Which monstrous fable containeth a secret of empire; how kings are to make use of their counsel of state. That first they ought to refer matters unto them, which is the first begetting or impregnation; but when they are elaborate, moulded, and shaped in the womb of their Counsel, and grow ripe and ready to be brought forth, that then they suffer not their Counsel to go through with the resolution and direction, as if it depended on them; but take the matter back into their own hands, and make it appear to the world that the decrees and final directions (which, because they come forth with prudence and power, are resembled to Pallas Armed) proceeded from themselves; and not only from their authority, but (the more to add reputation to themselves) from their head and device. (VI: 424)
The force of this "monstrous Fable"--a rare device in the Essays--is not so much in its illumination of the political stratagem described, but rather in its almost literal embodiment of the problem of personal power. The figure is an assertion--similar to others noted above--of the dependence of physical body on the control of creative power. The jealousy it represents is not simply a jealousy of one's "Authority" but of one's personal security. For the close reader of the essays, the politics of the counsel room recalls the economics of the self detailed in the essays on domestic relations and education. The fable also illustrates, however, that with proper handling this threat of loss or dismemberment can in fact be turned to profit, for the marriage to Metis can be redeemed as marriage to one's wife cannot. As the domestic essays have shown, a wife cannot increase the efficiency of the economy of self-hood, but is rather a drain on the self. Metis, on the other hand, can be swallowed by the clever king; in fact, it is his ability to do so which constitutes and preserves his power over others. Authority is maintained by maintaining the appearance that ideas gleaned from others in fact emanate from oneself. As in several of the domestic essays, the efficient use of personal power is validated by public recognition, though "Of Counsel" suggests that, like domestic exertions, public work may also involve a certain secrecy. To main-rain this fiction of self-sufficiency, and thus personal power, counselors must be made dependent for their own safety on the safety of the king.
Most of the rest of this essay is devoted to enumerating "the inconveniences of counsel, and . . . the remedies" (VI: 424). These "inconveniencies" are three: the difficult of maintaining secrecy, the threat to authority described in the "Fable," and the more specific threat posed by "unfaithful" or self-interested counsellors. In each case counsel represents a threat to the process of maintaining power; absent is any mention of the benefits of counsel.
This, it turns out, is the subject addressed in the 1625 revision of "Of Friendship." In 1612, this topic generated only a brief, highly aphoristic essay, one of the shortest in the collection. The revised version retains the flavor of the earlier essay only in its opening paragraph. The rest details the three "fruits" of friendship. This metaphor echoes figural language used in both the essays on domestic life and those on education. As in those, here the concern is exclusively with the fruits which grow on the boughs of the self. The first and most completely discussed of these "fruits" sets the tone for all the rest:
A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs,joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession. (VI: 437-38)
Thus the "principal fruit of friendship" is based on the model of the self sketched out so far, on both the necessity of giving its energies proper outlets and the attendant jealousy with which those energies ought to be husbanded. The ideal friend is a confessor: an anonymous receptacle of potentially dangerous passions, into which the overflowings of the self are vented and in which they are contained in secrecy: Like the ends of education, the ******** of a "true friend" is not understood to exist in any benefits beyond those to the self, but only in terms of his ability to help safely direct and secure the creative--and thus potentially disruptive--forces of the self.
The second and third fruits of friendship are no less selfish. The second fruit arises from conversation, the benefit of which proceeds not from the combination of two perspectives or opinions but from hearing one's own ideas aired:
. . . certain it is that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and bread up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. (VI: 440)
The military figure for the disposition of energies is familiar, as is the ultimately selfish nature of this sort of improvement. One might almost as well be talking to oneself; it is the regulation of an internal pressure--here apparently intellectual though elsewhere less clearly specified--that is important, not the regulator itself:
Neither is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such friends as are able tO give a man counsel; (they indeed are best;) but even without that, a man learneth of himself, and bringeth his own thoughts to light, and whetteth his wits as against a stone, which itself cuts not. In a word, a man were better relate himself to a statua or a picture, than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother. (VI: 440-41)
The final fruit of friendship--the ability of friends to do things one cannot do oneself--is likewise couched entirely in terms of a profitable economy the self. Friends become one's "deputies," lesser yet ********al extensions of the self. Though by this point in the essay the more specific initial focus on the friends of kings has been dropped, interpersonal relations at all levels continue to be represented hierarchically: the self is sovereign and as such embodies its own state and its own bounded economy striving for self-sufficiency (see Faulkner 116-26).
IVThis economy represents the mature stage of the self first developed in the essays on domestic relations and education. Those introductory essays represent the self as an entity possessed of limited resources which must be profitably employed within a limited span of time and opportunity. The essays on domestic life are concerned with harnessing those energies so as to maximize their productivity; metaphors of agriculture and husbandry help these essays to argue that domesticity exploits these energies inefficiently and even dangerously. The essays on education offer ways to develop the self and its energies as quickly and efficiently as possible. Finally, in at least two essays addressing the apparently matured self, the economic model of the self culminates in the view of the self as a jealous sovereign anxious about maintaining and securing its power and dominion in the public sphere.
A consistent corollary of this model is that the self's security is a ******** of public perception. Thus Bacon's Essays return consistently to the importance of fashioning a specifically public self which is constituted in the responses of others. These responses are the final, delicate fruit of the self-cultivation the Essays recommend to the public man. Compared to the fruits which are the goals and justification posited for Bacon's scientific methods, reputation might seem an ephemeral good and one even opposed to truth (however conceived[10]). Within the tangible spatial and temporal compass of an individual life, however, reputation produces concrete benefits. The scientist, on the other hand, working his way carefully and warily towards truths, must acknowledge, as Bacon did of his own unfinished scientific project, that the work may not bear fruits in his lifetime.
The individual self is the object of the Essays. Though their model of induction may inform the style of the Essays, the scientific writings differ in both object and, consequently, purpose. The scientific works set forth a program which encourages patience in the interests of a cautious expansion of knowledge in the public interest. The Essays, however, reveal--and in fact arise from--an anxiety over the concerns of personal and professional security to which the individual, political flesh is heir. The Essays therefore value efficiency over methodological rigor, conservation over progress, personal over public good, the self over truth. The Essays demonstrate a recognition of the limits of the scientific program as a guide of practical conduct, for the methods of Baconian science do not apply within the micro-economics of the bounded self.
[S]imple experience . . . , if taken as it comes, is called accident; if sought for, experiment. But this kind of experience is not better than a broom without its band, as the saying is--a mere groping, as of men in the dark, that feel all round them for the chance of finding their way, when they had much better wait for daylight, or light a candle, and then go. But the true method of experience, on the contrary, first lights the candle, and then by means of the candle shows the way; commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments; even as it was not without order and method that the divine word operated on the created mass. Let men therefore cease to wonder that the course of science is not yet wholly run, seeing that they have gone altogether astray, either leaving and abandoning experience entirely, or losing their way in it and wandering round and round as in a labyrinth. Whereas a method rightly ordered leads by an unbroken route through the woods of experience to the open ground of axioms.
Passages on the danger of hasty generalization are too frequent to need citation, but the reader may be referred in Aphorisms XXXVIII-LXVIII, where the Idols are introduced and discussed.
There is formed in every thing a double nature of good: the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself; the other, as it is a part or member of a greater body; whereof the later is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tendeth to the conservation of a more general form. (III: 420)
The opposition here, however, is between public and personal good rather than between public and domestic exertions. For a discussion of Bacon's thoughts on the value of "communicative good" and its analogies in his writings on other subjects, particularly mechanics, see Johann Mouton, "'The Summary Law of Nature': Revisiting Bacon's Views on the Unity of Sciences" in Francis Bacon's Legacy of Texts. Ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS, 1990), 139-50.
Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding. 14 vols. London, 1864-74.
-----. The New Organon and Related Writings. Ed. Fulton H. Anderson. New York: Liberal Arts, 1960.
----- The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Ed. Arthur Johnston. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974
----- The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.
Croll, Morris W. "Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon." Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. Ed.J. Max Patrick. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. 167-202.
Faulkner, Robert K. Francis Bacon and the Project of Proffress. Lanham, MD: Rowman, 1993.
Fish, Stanley. "Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon's Essays." Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.78-155.
Hall, Joan Wylie. "Bacon's Triple Curative: The 1597 Essayes, Meditations, and Places. "Papers on Language and Literature 21 (1985): 345-58.
-----. "'Loving Brothers' and 'Excellent Lords': The 'Epistles Dedicatorie' to Bacon's Essays. "CLA Journal 32 (1988): 81-90.
Jardine, Lisa. Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974.
Martin, Julian. Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Mouton, Johann. "'The Summary Law of Nature': Revisiting Bacon's Views on the Unity of Sciences:" Francis Bacon's Legacy of Texts. Ed. William Sessions. New York: AMS, 1990. 139-50.
Urbach, Peter. Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987.
Vickers, Brian. Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968.
Whitney, Charles. Francis Bacon and Modernity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
Zeitlin, Jacob. "The Development of Bacon's Essays and Montaigne." JEGP 27 (1928): 503.
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By JOHN J. MILLER
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In recent years, Francis Bacon has been receiving long overdue attention. As we directly confront the problems of modernity, scholars have begun to reexamine the thoughts of the man held by so many philosophers to be the very founder of modernity itself. Some find reasons to blame Bacon for current messes; some search for solutions that he might have suggested. That Bacon's life's work is largely responsible for our present situation is recognized by virtually all modern commentators. Jerry Weinberger, in his introduction to The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, points out that "there is no disagreement at all" about the fact that "whatever it is that makes our world modern, the History has much to teach about it and in fact did much to bring it into being" (p. 16). And not just Bacon's History, but his theoretical works, the Essays, even his legal writings, are now acknowledged to have shaped a new political and social order (pp. 3-5). Nieves Mathews cites dozens of famous philosophers, poets, and statesmen who attest to Bacon's profound influence in Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination. Robert K. Faulkner's Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, an impressive analysis of Bacon's moral and political thought as a whole, is launched with these words: "Sometimes the importance of a topic is obvious" (p. 3). He also affirms that "it is not difficult to show that our familiar notions of progress are inherited from a more comprehensive plan, such as Bacon's" (p. 5). Understanding modernity may well require paying close attention to Francis Bacon.
Weinberger classifies interpretations of the History into three main categories: the first type seems to conclude that Bacon was interesting but a flawed thinker compared to "me"; the second category generally maintains "what counts is not what Bacon thought of his own work, but how later writers were influenced by the thought paradigms...which [his work] transmitted quite unseen by Bacon himself" (p. 13); and the third, the "intentionalist" type, begin with the salutary interpretive premise that Bacon might have been self conscious about what he is doing (p. 14). Though Weinberger does not say so, these categories may be applicable to scholarship on Bacon generally, and seem to correspond in reverse order to the three types of brains mentioned by both Machiavelli and Aristotle (Prince, chap. 22; Nicomachean Ethics 1095b), borrowed from Hesiod: "That man is all-best who himself works out every problem and solves it, seeing what will be best late and in the end. That man, too, is admirable who follows one who speaks well. He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly useless" (Works and Days, 292-97; Lattimore translation).
Unfortunately, many treatments of Bacon seem to correspond to the useless type, based as they are on the historicist presumption of our superiority. So we need not bother to try to learn from Bacon--only pay attention long enough to flatter ourselves, like the dwarf climbing upon the giant's back. Happily, none of these three books slide into that category. Indeed, all three authors are acutely aware of the problems of such interpretive prejudices about history and philosophy. Faulkner, for example, disparages "an all-too -common historicism." Bacon may well be more self conscious than a careless reader can perceive. Faulkner acknowledges that the times forced Bacon to disguise his criticism of Christianity by means of literary art, and, citing Lisa Jardine's Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), Faulkner lists some techniques Bacon employed for concealment: "he twists authorities, plays on familiar-sounding notions, quotes misleadingly, makes 'opportunistic' use of myths to 'communicate precepts in persuasive form,' and takes care to manipulate the ear's proclivities for pleasant sounds. But beneath it all is arrangement and calculation, 'every move' in a discourse, according to Jardine, being 'planned so as to insinuate the desired conclusion into the mind of the audience'"(p. 31).
There are two quite simple reasons for the poor treatment Bacon has received. The first reason (which is addressed later) is that Bacon deliberately made his books difficult to understand by his acroamatic writing: Bacon, like all true political philosophers, wrote esoterically and this immediately poses a problem for interpretation. The second is based on the dominant opinions about Bacon the man: someone viewed as corrupt, obsequious, and sleazy is not readily approached as though he might be able to teach us what we desperately need to know. Instead, it is typically more gratifying to feel superior to famous people of dubious morality and intellect. Psychologically, this issue must be dealt with first. Mathews mounts an attack on this common perception with her scrutiny of the evidence surrounding the charges repeatedly leveled against Bacon; her examination concludes that the ignominy slapped upon Bacon constitutes an unjust character assassination.
For over a century, Bacon's position in the history of modernity has been controversial. This is partly due to the specialization endemic to academia which makes it virtually impossible for someone academically trained to be educated enough to appreciate the full range of Bacon's thought and work. As Mathews so rightly points out, even many who admire parts of Bacon's philosophy have trouble integrating the whole range of his genius, and thus either are peripherally troubled by the controversies surrounding his life or ignore them. "The few people actively engaged in Baconian scholarship, as one of them put it informally, know perfectly well that nearly all the charges brought against the man and his work 'are misconceived, wrong or plain loopy.' Yet many of these specialists tend to shrug their shoulders. Bacon the man is irrelevant to the particular aspect of Bacon the thinker they are concerned with" (p. 431). Faced with Mathews's big (600-page) book, I too wondered if I wanted to read that much about a man whose life I had been inclined to ignore in the interests of examining his ideas, because "he probably was not a very likable guy." Well, Nieves Mathews has pierced my easy complacency; I must recant every slur on his character that I foolishly repeated over the years--lucky for me and other readers, none of mine are in print.
Mathews's book is painstakingly researched, with over 100 pages of citations (2,072 notes), many compiled of multiple sources. In the course of thirty-four chapters, she details the evidence for and against Bacon, and is apparently conversant with every biography of him. But hers is no mere citation index of biographies, no mere democratic count of the number of times Bacon is praised versus the number of times he is criticized. Mathews recognizes the essential scholarly duty of judgment and evaluation that should be involved in assessing sources before writing a work for unsuspecting readers (who may yet become scholars): "Readers may be forgiven for succumbing to the deceptions practiced upon them by the trained minds who have placed their scholarship at the service of a preconceived image. The best historians have been taken in by the scholarly apparatus with which Abbott and his followers support the deft manipulations whereby Bacon is made to advocate what he deplored and Spedding to express mistrust where he was affirming his belief in Bacon's truthfulness. These unscholarly scholars cite but fail to evaluate the reliability of their sources" (p. 434).
Mathews vindicates Bacon against the charges of treachery to Essex, of fraud and corruption in office, and of being a cold, ambitious, selfish schemer. With regard to Essex, Mathews presents scads of evidence indicating Essex had for years engaged in suspicious if not outright treasonous behavior, and she cites some of Bacon's actual correspondence with Essex, demonstrating that he had cautioned Essex all along. Mathews's most powerful evidence is brought forth in the twelve chapters she devotes to the charges that Bacon was a corrupt chancellor (pp. 89-225). My initial thoughts were, "What can she hope to achieve by way of defense? Didn't Bacon confess?" Well, this is where the story gets exciting.
Among the many parts of the episode Mathews dissects are the irregularities in the trial in the House of Lords; the very irregularity of the "trial" being in the House of Lords; Bacon's apparent "confession" actually being an itemized answer to charges; the inclusion of gifts Bacon never accepted; Coke's flip-flop on some issues; witnesses who were few and guilty; the fact that more than one of the cases had actually been decided against the party who nevertheless gave the customary tip; the fact none of Bacon's decisions were ever overturned, even though the fame of the "trial" encouraged appeals, and several cases were appealed, repeatedly; and the fact that only eight of the charges might even have qualified as instances of accepting gratuities from someone who had a case before the courts. There is much in these twelve chapters worth knowing about the workings of politics.
A reader of Mathews cannot help becoming involved in the twists and turns of the evidence, in the amazing slanders, and in how easy it is to maintain a libelous legend. About a third of the way through, we begin rooting for Bacon, and cheering him on as the evidence against his detractors mounts; we become frustrated by the slander and libel that seem to have a creeping life of their own. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, one sits back, recognizing that Mathews must be right: a frightful fraud has been perpetrated in the guise of scholarship, and something is seriously wrong with academia as well as with "historians" such as Macauley, Abbott et. al. if such scholarship continues to be rewarded.
With regard to Bacon's personal dealings, Mathews cites hundreds of sources which contradict the absurd and shameless errors of biographers who repeat the charges as though they were justified. Bacon was not as obsequious as most, and at times he was quite blunt in his criticisms of those in positions of power over him, rebuking Essex, admonishing Buckingham, and exhorting King James, even to the point of telling him to bridle his tongue (pp. 266-80).
Mathews declares that it would take someone with the abilities of Bacon to write the biography of Bacon. Referring to biographer Iris Origo, Mathews describes the duty of the historian: "He must, at least for a time, give up self, and cast his own opinions aside. This is not easy. But if a few trustworthy historians have succeeded so far in giving us a glimpse of the rich reality that Bacon was, it is because, as [Origo] enjoins, they did not drown his voice in their own. ... May Bacon meet with the biographer he deserves" (p. 444). Something similar may be said of Bacon's interpreters.
Faulkner and Weinberger provide an antidote to the other cause of inadequate treatments of Bacon: they acknowledge he was a profound thinker. Bacon, like all politically aware people, knew that we must not speak exactly the same way to everyone--and not only to save our own skins, although that is often justified. But esoteric writing presents what seems at first glance (but only at first glance) an insurmountable problem with interpretation: When have you gone deep enough, and what, if anything, can be taken at face value? The answer, though this is not the place to expound upon it, is that the interpretation must conform to the full requirements of rational coherence. When an author deliberately writes esoterically, he will anticipate that not all readers will understand his deepest teaching. Some will see apparent contradictions and therefore believe themselves superior to the author. Hence the increasing number of shallow debunkers of great philosophers--multiple dwarfs on the giants' backs.
Faulkner's Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress is a wide-ranging book presenting the fruit of his long study of Bacon and modernity. He provides an incisive diagnosis of the critical elements of modernity, and reveals the shallowness of some postmodern and so-called critical-theorist analyses. His is a much more profound understanding. This book elaborates the complex architecture of the interconnected elements of modernity, from the modern state, the reliance on technology, a new psychology with a new view of the human self, a new focus on economics, the administrative state, the management of hopes, the emphasis on security, etc., all essential elements of our modern world. Faulkner analyzes each and unearths their roots (indeed, not only the roots, but various trunks, stems, and even some of the flowers) in Bacon's writings. Therein too, however, lie buried the roots of the angst and nihilism of the modern world.
"Remove the old veils and the tacit but imported premises, and one can discern the gray shades of contemporary nihilism. Does a pursuit of power without limit deconstruct what delimits human being and therefore what defines a life worth living?" (pp. 276-77). Faulkner points to a major problem of modernity. The use of power without a corresponding inquiry into rationally knowable standards to guide change or determine its proper use leads to tyrannical destruction or nihilism. Faulkner finds that Bacon's critique of ancient philosophy, particularly his critique of teleology and of the contemplative life, leads him to this point. Bacon, of course, often defends teleology and contemplation too. His enigmatic style of writing has left many commentators bemused, for it is hard to pin him down. Faulkner argues that whatever seems a defense of antiquity in Bacon's writing is put there by Bacon in order that the "odor" or "scent" of antiquity will appeal to learned lovers of antiquity, who will not find Bacon a harsh antagonist. According to Faulkner, Bacon can thus insinuate his modern teachings under the old veils.
If Bacon disowned everything Aristotelian, as Faulkner argues, then the modern project would have undercut itself; but Faulkner adds, "what seems in contemporary philosophy a crisis of nihilism has its origin in the foundation of modern philosophy. It is then a limited crisis. There remain now as ever paths to serious lives" (p. 277). If Bacon fully believed in the truth of the modernity he launched, then Faulkner sees Bacon involved in two profound contradictions characteristic of that modernity. First, Bacon's argument that observations should be prior to theories seems itself, in key instances, to be based upon theory, not observations: "a theory of nature controls Bacon's decisive observations; it controls what it was supposed to control." His account depends on something that his theory would exclude (p. 274). And second, Faulkner finds Bacon to be involved in a contradiction whenever he ranks human lives, which Bacon does repeatedly: "the gravest difficulty is a reliance on notions of human quality that Bacon's critical epistemology would exclude" (p. 275). "In short, Bacon had to borrow from precritical and prescientific human awareness, moral and intellectual, in order to destroy the authority of morality and ordinary knowing. Intellect, soul, justice, the noble, beauty, friendship, and even life, become but reconstituted shadows, artificial and calculated representations and powers of the self. But the new constructions cannot be extricated from the new criticism. The things that Bacon's theory alleged to be real, such as 'bodies in motion,' 'power,' and the self itself, are in his formulation reducible to but artificial and invented abstractions. The conquest of nature may afflict man's environment, but the most serious effects are on man. However fruitful of human power and the security of human bodies, the projects of progress leads toward an emptiness for human being" (p. 277).
In addition to his penetrating critique of modernity, in his second chapter, "The Art of Enlightenment," Faulkner tantalizingly provides us with the conclusions of his years of studying Bacon's Essays: there is an order to the Essays beneath their apparent disorder, an order that complies with Bacon's great project of progress. This chapter almost irresistibly invites the reader to devote the next few months to Bacon's Essays to see if the threads of the arguments really bear out his interpretation. Faulkner's book may help to promote the activity of philosophy itself, by inciting the reader to return to Bacon and to rethink the issues posed by the Essays. Bacon would not expect more from an interpreter.
Weinberger's book, a new edition of Bacon's The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, complete with interpretive essay and many valuable annotations, will be of lasting interest to students of history and historiography as well as to political theorists and Bacon scholars. Weinberger's annotations (on average, four to five per page) range from relatively simple glosses, through changes from the Latin edition and notations on the manu******, to Bacon's departures from history or from other historians' accounts.
Weinberger's introduction discusses how to approach a work like this, in which, admittedly, Bacon invented many speeches and often made up historical details. "Likewise, there is no possible corroboration for Bacon's account of Henry's thoughts, material unique to Bacon" (p. 8). Though the History does not conform to modern academic standards of writing history, it would be a mistake to dismiss Bacon upon finding an historical "error" in his History. Thucydides and others have established the utility of writing this kind of history. But how are we to understand Bacon's purposes in creating a Henry superior to the actual King Henry?
"Bacon shows the way to his teaching with his own observations and conclusions, but they are sufficiently incomplete or contradictory as to leave its truth secret and retired, as is appropriate, so he says, for the science of government" (p. 224). Following his own advice about interpreting Bacon--advice rendered plausible by Bacon's own many discussions about the importance of circumspection in political matters--Weinberger examines Bacon's apparent criticism of Henry's shortsightedness, convincingly reveals the several layers of Bacon's text, and shows us what might be at stake in approaching Henry and the History with historicist dogmatism. As Weinberger's detailed examination of the text reveals, we "have reason to doubt the honesty of Bacon's claim about Henry's lack of foresight" (p. 228). The doubts arise from Bacon's own words, but so that it takes careful reading to notice that his Henry is even wiser than he openly says. By tracing out some of the apparently contradictory assessments Bacon makes about Henry, Weinberger provides in his brief but illuminating interpretation, a clear example of how to read Bacon. For instance, if Bacon says that only two courses are prudent, and then Bacon shows that Henry took a third, and things worked out very well, we are invited to rethink the other two courses, as well as the third, and then synthesize them into a new understanding of political prudence. Although Weinberger's entire, densely argued interpretation cannot be presented here, an example might entice a serious student to reread Bacon's History and read Weinberger's essay. In the context of Henry's dealing with conspiracies--a topic likely to attract spirited youth--Weinberger's interpretation of Bacon reveals that the apparent "troubles" in Henry's regime were anything but proof of his shortsightedness. "Bacon tells us not that the conspiracy caught Henry unaware, but rather that he knew of it all along and chose not to follow the obvious course of declaring the testimony of the still-living assassin. ...Instead of simply debunking the rumors, Henry chose to abet them and to penetrate every recess of the conspiracy" (p. 233). "The extraordinary point is that Henry did not dispel the rumors, because his 'nature and customs' inclined him to a 'fashion rather to create doubts than assurance'" (p. 229). Bacon's Henry knew when to aid and abet conspiracies against himself (p. 237). "Bacon shows careful readers that these 'troubles' [in Henry's reign] were intended" (p. 238). We learn an important lesson about people and princes, a lesson that "Henry-as-Bacon- invents-him" already knows.
In agreement with Faulkner (and to some extent with Matthews) Weinberger interprets the History as being an integral part of Bacon's larger project: to bring about progress in the political and social order. Bacon also is not unwittingly under the sway of some ideology of the time: "There is nothing in the History that could be correctly related to a Machiavellian 'paradigm,' unless one begin with the assumption that Bacon was not able to know his own mind" (p. 241). Weinberger says explicitly: "It is possible that a farsighted Bacon could understand modernity more clearly than we do, since, situated at its dawn, he was not himself in the grip of its long-established certainties and habits as thought" (p. 221). Bacon may have understood only too well that at least two accounts of modernity must be provided, one more palatable and hopeful, the other more realistic. As Weinberger puts it, "Bacon thus presents us with two outwardly different future models: the morally familiar world indicated by Henry's laws and the strictly utilitarian world [actually] produced by Henry's laws and policy. The latter is the aim of Bacon's project, and its essence is unmasked by the grim, lobotomized, technological hedonism of the New Atlantis. Because this world to come is at once Bacon's goal and also so repellent, Bacon doubts that the real world to come will ever dispense with the trappings of the more familiar republicanism suggested by Henry's laws. For Bacon, the truth of the world to come will always be at odds with its moral facade" (p. 244). Faulkner suggests something similar; "the image of beneficence to come requires the concealment of dangers that will also come" (p. 55). Mathews, too, points out, "alone among the forerunners of modern science, Bacon had foreseen the potential dangers of man's domination over nature" (p. 411) It seems quite plausible, therefore, that Bacon self consciously made modernity his goal, while aware of its dangers. It seems, to me, that the obvious next question is: Why did Bacon make this his goal? What was his ultimate purpose, and why did he choose to devote his genius and energy to the founding of modernity? Perhaps the modern project, even with its angst and nihilism, was preferable to something else and was required to sustain Bacon's refounding of philosophy.
It seems hazardous to presume that Bacon himself was caught in the contradiction that Faulkner perceives in modernity. Bacon might have escaped that contradiction despite his apparent attack on the ancients. Perhaps Bacon's understanding of nature and of morality fits into neither the materialists' camp nor into textbook Aristotelianism. It may be too simplistic to conclude that the only important dichotomy in philosophy is that of anticontemplative, antiteleological moderns like Machiavelli versus the procontemplation, proteleology ancients like Aristotle and Plato. Bacon may have discerned a rationally coherent alternative to both, and the full range of reasons for esoteric writing (including philosophic reasons as well as political) might account for why he sounds both modern and ancient. I, for one, am unwilling to conclude at this point that there can be no other choice, or no "middle ground," or no mixing and matching. There is, after all, another interfering player on the scene: Christianity. Perhaps Bacon thought Christianity poses unique and serious dangers to philosophy, partly because of its surface ability to co-opt so much Aristotle and Plato. Not every attack on Christianity, however, can be constructed as an attack on ancient philosophy. Bacon with his acroamatic and inimitable style, may have a new, as yet untried, solution to fundamental questions of philosophy. Weinberger directs future scholarship on Bacon toward a promising possibility. In the final pages of his interpretive essay, in what seems to begin a debate between himself and other "intentionalists" (perhaps including Faulkner), Weinberger suggests, without of course having the space to present the case, that perhaps Bacon was not involved in a fundamental contradiction after all.
As Weinberger says after explaining Bacon's elaborate, infolded, and complex argument that Henry did not lack foresight, "Bacon makes it hard to rest easy with the conclusion that his metaphysical teaching about nature and morality was genuinely dogmatic. When we discover an obvious contradiction, we should be prepared to look for a broader teaching or argument that explains the contradiction and makes it disappear" (p. 252). And as Faulkner points out: "Bacon explicitly recommends forms of enigmatic and unmethodical writing. As particular and compact, such techniques have the power to convey and provoke; as compressed, ambiguous, and scattered, they are politic in disguising a strange whole" (p. 28). Bacon's "strange whole" may hold answers to fundamental philosophic questions, answers that have not yet been articulated by any scholar. I suspect that Faulkner is right that the key to understanding the precise difference between Bacon and the ancients does indeed lie in their understandings of philosophy and the contemplative life. And I suspect the key to that difference is that Bacon thinks Aristotle's three categories of knowledge (theoretical, practical and productive) and the notion of "contemplation for its own sake" may not be humanly sustainable (just as the distinction that replaced Aristotle's--pure vs. applied science--breaks down). Yet Bacon may be correct about this. No one, least of all a philosopher, would deny himself the opportunity to act in light of his understanding of what is true about the world. Second, even Aristotle conceded that some knowledge is too important not to use (e.g., military knowledge). And third, knowledge that is discovered "for its own sake" is nevertheless open to being sold to the highest bidder by anyone who learns it (as our science of genetics has made abundantly clear, this can even apply to knowledge of being). Or maybe Bacon disagreed with something else of Aristotle's. He still might be right. Let us investigate further. However much we may be in doubt about answers to the biggest philosophical questions, we must recognize that the possibility of philosophy requires that we can doubt. Bacon certainly deplored what the "christianization" of Aristotle had done to the possibility of philosophy. But Bacon would not likely have thrown out the plates with the dish-water, though he took pains to rinse the suds of Christian dogmatism from the utensils.
Postmodernists and most other historicists will not like these three books, for all three treat Bacon seriously. They portray interpretations of Bacon that seek to grasp his comprehensive vision of the world, as a preliminary step on the route to the question of whether he could have been right.
Robert K. Faulkner, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress. (Lanham and London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993, pp. 308. $12.95.)
Nieves Mathews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, pp. xiii, 592. $50.00.)
Jerry Weinberger, Francis Bacon: The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, a New Edition with Introduction Annotation, and Interpretive Essay. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 260. $29.95.)
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By Heidi D. Studer
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Francis Bacon. By Perez Zagorin. Princeton. $29.95.
In the sumptuously appointed Master's Lodge of Trinity College, Cambridge University hang adjacent to one another portraits of Francis Bacon and Elizabeth I. This proximity would have caused some pain to Bacon, one of Trinity's most illustrious graduates. For it was the fabled British monarch Elizabeth who in large part caused Bacon the series of deep disappointments around which his life took shape. It was also she who unknowingly caused him to plumb the darker side of the human condition and advance learning so decisively as to justify yet another critical study of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Who was Francis Bacon? And do we need bother asking in order to accept or simply appreciate his works? Many have stepped up to the bat to answer these questions. In a masterfully concise 24 pages, Perez Zagorin handles both questions in his introduction to an exhaustively researched and impressively accessible new study. The early death of Bacon's father, couple(] with the absence of a significant inheritance for his widow and two children, left the plainly brilliant young Francis in the predicament of' having to work for a living. Like his father, Francis chose to earn his living as a courtier in royal service, one dependent upon the good will of the queen. Law was Francis's chosen profession, philosophy and science his passion.
Bacon continues to help us with his astute advice on how to compete for social advantage, power, and the gifts of fortune. Conception of this advice seemed to come easier than its execution, however, for Bacon's unfortunate schemes for self-advancement in the crown's service (aggrandizing himself through craft, flattery, and displaying himself in the best possible light) rarely worked. Alas, those whom Bacon sought to flatter and manipulate (including the queen herself) sometimes saw through his artifice and punished him for it. Similarities of Machiavelli's biography spring to mind while reading through this introduction. Zagorin shows its that despite Bacon's rejection of' Machiavelli's famously immoral standpoint, the Englishman's thought reflects the influence of the Italian. Bacon shared the Florentine theorist's instrumental approach to human affairs and his calculated appraisal, of means. No less than the latter did he insist on accommodation to times and circumstances as the pathway to success. In the advice Bacon gave to those who aspired to not socially, he recommended masking and role-playing, the manipulation of others, and a dissimulation that could easily become outright dishonesty. It is gospel Machiavelli.
As he matured, Bacon came to understand the anguished cry of Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII: "Wretched is the man who hangs upon a prince for favors!" Zagorin concludes that the tragedy of Bacon's life in polities was that he was compelled to humble himself repeatedly to intellectually inferior men in order to survive in the royal court. Zagorin's point in combining biography with critical exegesis is well taken. "Bacon was never a detached philosopher contemplating the human or natural world from a haven of serene seclusion. His political career, with its many frustrations, disappointments, and constant dependency on more powerful men, left deep traces on his personality, It also had a significant effect in shaping his outlook on man and society, giving to his thought in this domain its extreme worldliness, its markedly prudential character, and its preoccupation with success and the creation of one's own fortune." These frustrations hold a gossipy appeal that Zagorin negotiates tactfully. Bacon's coldly judgmental mother, whose Puritan zeal he did not share, suspected both of her sons of harboring desires to know the bodies of other men, apparently with good reason. Where other biographers have focused on this aspect of Bacon's personality, Zagorin judiciously allows the question only in order to ponder what effect homosexual activity and its necessary denial might have had on Bacon's advice to us for effective self-promotion.
As part of his worldly wisdom, Bacon took a keen interest in dissimulation and cunning. It was professional failure ultimately, not homosexuality, that gave rise to the most secretive and torturous side of Bacon's personality. In a culture that has readily absorbed the general insights of psychoanalysis, however, non-specialist readers might well have liked to follow Zagorin into a discussion of what damage Bacon's mother might have done to Francis. Zagorin, for better or for worse, does not lead us there.
Zagorin balances nicely the personal aspects of Bacon's life with a critical assessment of Bacon's philosophical and scientific achievements. Bacon wrote despite, or perhaps because of, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. When things went badly at work, Bacon went home to write philosophy. Failure and. the cruelty of others created time for Bacon's private ruminations. Bacon must have learned something important from reading Montaigne, one of our greatest commentators on human cruelty. Zagorin unfortunately does not explore Bacon's debt to Montaigne, preferring instead to focus on Bacon's scientific achievement. It is particularly in the course of his examination of Bacon's scientific contributions that Zagorin's work rewards our attention.
For centuries many have credited Descartes with the creation of a distinctly modern philosophy. Zagorin and other recent writers, however, have demonstrated that this honor might more correctly be bestowed on Bacon. Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind laid great stress on the necessity of a method to investigate the truth of things, while his subsequent Discourse on Method (1637)gave classic expression to the attempt to propound a method for the guidance of thought that would establish a foundation of absolute certainty for both the existence of God and a number of fundamental observations about the world. Well before Descartes, method was a subject of widespread interest among 16th-century philosophers, and to none more so than to Bacon, who saw in it the key to the renewal of natural philosophy. Bacon's exposure of the causes of intellectual error and their remedies may stand alongside Descartes's rules of method as a major effort to show how the mind ought to proceed in its quest for truth. Zagorin leaves us wondering whether Descartes had read Bacon, but appreciating the, boldness of Bacon's vision nonetheless.
In explaining the historical reasons for the backwardness of natural philosophy, Bacon always assigned a large importance to the role of religion. Zagorin criticizes others for having devoted much more attention to Bacon's concepts of philosophy and science than to his view of the relationship between philosophy and religion and theology. Some of the most engaging moments in Zagorin's study emerge from his discussion of religion. It was religious devotion that to a significant extent hindered scientific progress. Belief that Adam's fall condemned mortals to ignorance and that intellectual aspirations belied the cardinal sin of pride crippled the human race by discouraging scientific inquiry.
Of all the obstacles to the progress of science and the undertaking of the new tasks needed for its advance, Bacon believed that the greatest lay in the fact "that men despair and think things impossible." To eliminate this despair was one of the foremost objectives of Bacon's work. Zagorin argues cogently that Bacon's main and permanent significance is as a thinker about science the conditions favorable to its growth; the changes and procedures required to insure its progress; its contribution to the inauguration of a new regime of knowledge; and its technological and moral realization in works to improve the human condition.
In a decade in which the idea of another critical study of Bacon might seem superfluous, Perez Zagorin has succeeded not only in persuading us that other accounts have fallen somehow short, but 'also of helping us to appreciate Bacon's genius anew. As a skilled biographer, Zagorin lets the reader decide what Bacon wanted more to help us live better lives (through science), or to be celebrated as someone (the one) who helped us lead better lives?
The details of Bacon's private suffering invite speculation on whether his moral and scientific studies would merit ongoing study had he risen to the social ascendancy he long craved. We see that the same accident of fortune that separated Bacon from political success in Elizabeth's court enriched the essays that have earned for Bacon his reputation as one of the keenest psychologists in history, as well as of a pioneer of scientific method. Zagorin's book tells two interesting stories what modern scientific method owes to Bacon and that, for some of us at least, life is what happens when making other plans. Both stories come to life in the hands of the author, who has given us clearer reason to admire Francis Bacon.
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By JOHN PORTMANN
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The father of modern science recognized that internal psychological barriers to understanding nature were as constraining as sensory limitations.
We usually depict the Renaissance (literally, the Rebirth) as a clear, bubbling river of novelty that broke the medieval dam of rigidified scholasticism. But most participants in this great ferment cited the opposite of innovation as their motive. Renaissance thinkers and doers, as the name of their movement implied, looked backward, not forward, as they sought to rediscover and reinstitute the supposed perfection of intellect that Athens and Rome had achieved and a degraded Western culture had then forgotten.
I doubt that anyone ever called Francis Bacon (1561-1626) a modest man. Nonetheless, even the muse of ambition must have smiled at such an audacious gesture when this most important British philosopher since the death of William of Ockham in 1347, this chancellor of England (until his fall for financial improprieties), declared "all knowledge" as his "province" and announced that he would write a Great Instauration (defined by Webster's as "restoration after decay, lapse, or dilapidation"), both to codify the fruitful rules of reason and to summarize all useful results. As a procedural starting point, at the. dawn of a movement that would become modern science, Bacon rejected both the scholastic view that equated knowledge with conservation and the Renaissance reform that sought to recapture a long-lost perfection. Natural knowledge, he proclaimed, must be reconceptualized as a cumulative process of discovery, propelled by processing sensory data about the external world through the reasoning powers of the human brain.
Aristotle's writings on logic had been gathered into a compendium called the Organon (Tool). Bacon, with his usual flair, entitled the second book of his Instauratio Magna (Great Instauration) the Novum Organum, or new tool of reasoning, because the shift to such a different ideal--knowledge as cumulative and rooted in an increasing understanding of external reality--also demanded that the logic of reasoning itself be reexamined. Bacon therefore began the Novum Organum by analyzing impediments to our acquisition of accurate knowledge about the empirical world. Acknowledging the existence of such barriers required no novel insight. Aristotle himself had classified the common logical fallacies of human reasoning, while everyone recognized the external limits of missing data--stars too far away to study in detail (even with Galileo's newfangled telescope) or cities too long gone to leave any trace of their former existence.
But Bacon presented a brilliant and original analysis by concentrating instead on psychological barriers to knowledge about the natural world. He had, after all, envisioned the study of nature as a funneling of sensory data through mental processors, and he recognized that internal barriers at the second, or cerebral, stage could stand as high as the external impediments of sensory limitations. He also understood that the realm of conceptual hang-ups extended far beyond the cool, abstract logic of Aristotelian reason and into our interior world of fears, hopes, needs, feelings, and the structural limits of mental machinery. Bacon therefore developed a celebrated metaphor to classify these psychological barriers. He designated such impediments as idols and recognized four major categories--idola specus (of the cave), idola fori (of the forum, or marketplace), idola theatri (of the theater), and idola tribus (of the tribe).
Proceeding from the particular to the general, idols of the cave define the peculiarities of each individual. Some of us panic when we see a mathematical formula; others, for reasons of childhood suppression grafted upon basic temperament, dare not formulate thoughts that might challenge established orders. Idols of the marketplace, perhaps Bacon's most original concept, designate limits imposed by language--for how can we express, or even formulate, a concept that no words in our language can specify? (For example, in his brilliant story "Averroes' Search" Jorge Luis Borges--who loved Bacon's work and may well have written this tale to illustrate the idols--imagined the fruitless struggles of the greatest Arabic commentator on Aristotle to understand and translate the master's key concepts of "tragedy" and "comedy" for such notions could not be expressed, or even conceptualized, in Averroes's culture.)
Idols of the theater identify the most obvious category of impediments, based on older systems of thought. We will have one hell of a time trying to grasp Darwinism if we maintain absolute and unquestioned fealty to the "old-time religion" of Genesis literalism, with an Earth no more than a few thousand years old and all organisms created by a deity ex nihilo and in six days of twenty-four hours each. Finally, idols of the tribe--that is, our tribe of Homo sapiens--specify those foibles and errors of thinking that transcend the peculiarities of our diverse cultures and reflect the inherited structures and operations of the human brain. Idols of the tribe, in other words, lie deep within the constitution of what we call human nature itself.
Bacon emphasized two tribal idols in his examples: our tendency to explain all phenomena in the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe by familiar patterns in the only realm we know from the direct experience of our own bodies--that is, the domain of objects that live for a few decades and stand a few feet tall--and our propensity to make universal inferences from limited and biased observations, ignoring evident sources of data that do not impact our senses. (Bacon cites the lovely example of a culture convinced that the Sea God saves shipwrecked men who pray for his aid, because rescued sailors so testify. A skeptic, presented with this evidence, was asked "whether he did not now confess the divinity of Neptune and returned this counterquestion by way of answer: `Yea, but where are they painted, that are drowned?' And there is the same reason of all suchlike superstitions, as in astrology, dreams, divinations, and the rest.")
In the Great Instauration (written by Bacon in Latin and translated by Gilbert Wats in 1694), Bacon defines the idols in his characteristically pungent prose:
Idols are the profoundest fallacies of the mind of man. Nor do they deceive in particulars [that is, objects in the external world] ... but from a corrupt and crookedly-set predisposition of the mind; which cloth, as it were, wrest and inject all the anticipations of the understanding. For the mind of man ... is so far from being like a smooth, equal, and clearglass, which might sincerely take and reflect the beams of things, according to their true incidence; that it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstitions, apparitions, and impostures.
(Wats, Bacon's translator, called his subject "a learned man, happily the learned'st that ever lived since the decay of the Grecian and Roman empires, when learning was at a high pitch." Wats also appreciated Bacon's distinctive approach to defining the embryonic field of modern science as accumulating knowledge about the empirical world, obtained by passing sensory data through the biased processing machinery of the brain. Wats described Bacon as "the first that ever joyn'd rational and experimental philosophy in a regular correspondence, which before was either a subtilty of words, or a confusion of matter" He then epitomized Bacon's view in a striking image: "For Truth, as it reflects on us, is a congruent conformity of the intellect to the object ... when the intellectual globe, and the globe of the world, intermix their beams and irradiations, in a direct line of projection, to the generation of sciences.")
If our primary tribal idol resides in the ancient Greek proverb that "man [meaning all of us] is the measure of all things," then we should not be surprised to find our bodily fingerprints in nearly every assessment, even (or especially) in our words for abstractions--as in the strength of virility (from the Latin vir, an adult male), the immaturity of puerility (from puer, a boy), or the madness of hysteria (originally defined as an inherently feminine disease, from the Greek word for womb). However, in our proper objection to such sexual stereotyping, we may at least take wry comfort in a general rule of most Indo-European languages (not including English) that assign genders to nouns naming inanimate objects. Abstract concepts usually receive feminine designations--so the nobility of (manly) virtue presents herself as la vertu in France, while an even more distinctively manly virility also cross-dresses as la virilite.
We can, I believe, dig to an even deeper level in identifying tribal idols that probably lie in the evolved and inherited structures of neural wiring--the most basic and inherent substrate of "human nature" itself (if that ill-defined, overused, and much abused term has any meaning at all). Some properties of human thinking seem so general, so common to all people, that such an evolutionary encoding seems reasonable, at least as a working hypothesis. For example, neurologists have identified areas of the brain apparently dedicated to the perception of faces. (One can easily speculate about the evolutionary value of such a propensity, but we must also recognize that these inherent biases of perception can strongly distort our judgment in other circumstances--Bacon's reason for designating such mental preferences as idols--as when we think we see a face in the random pitting of a large sandstone block on Mars and then jump to conclusions about alien civilizations. I am not making this story up, by the way: the Martian face remains a staple of "proof" for the UFO and alien-abduction crowd.) I suspect that the neural mechanism for facial recognition becomes activated by the abstract pattern of two equal and adjacent circles with a line below--a configuration encountered in many places, not only in real faces.
In this "deeper" category of tribal idols, I doubt that any rule enjoys wider application, or engenders greater trouble at the same time, than our propensity for ordering nature by making dichotomous divisions into two opposite groups. (Claude Levi-Strauss and the French structuralists have based an entire theory of human nature and social history on this premise and two bits from this corner says they're right, even if a bit overextended in their application.) Thus, we start with a few basic divisions of male versus female and night versus day, and then we extend these concrete examples into greater generalities of nature versus culture ("the raw and the cooked," in Levi-Strauss's terminology), spirit versus matter (philosophical dualism), and the beautiful versus the sublime (in Burke's theory of aesthetics), and thence (and now often tragically) into ethical beliefs, anathematization, and sometimes warfare and genocide (the good versus the bad, the godly who must prevail versus the diabolical, ripe for burning).
Again, one can speculate about the evolutionary basis of such a strong propensity. In this case, I rather suspect that dichotomization represents some baggage from an evolutionary past of much simpler brains built only to reach those quick decisions--fight or flight, sleep or wake, mate or wait--that make all the difference in a Darwinian world. Perhaps we have never been able to transcend the mechanics of a machinery built to generate simple twofold divisions and have had to construct our greater complexities upon such a biased and inadequate substrate--perhaps the most limiting tribal idol of all.
I devoted the first part of this essay to a general discussion of our mental limitations because this framework, I believe, so well illuminates a particular problem in the history of paleontology that caught my fancy and attention, both for unusual intrigue in itself and for providing such an excellent test case of an important general pattern in the growth of scientific knowledge.
Classical authors, particularly Pliny in his Natural History, spoke in a limited way about fossils, usually (and correctly) attributing the shells found on mountaintops to a subsequent elevation of land from ancient seabeds. A few medieval authors (particularly Albert the Great in the thirteenth century) added some comments, while Leonardo da Vinci, in the Codex Leicester (written in the early 1500s), made extensive and brilliant paleontological observations that were, however, not published until the nineteenth century and therefore had no influence on the field's later development. Essentially, then, the modern history of paleontology began in the mid-sixteenth century with the publication of two great treatises on fossils by two remarkable scholars: the first published in 1546 by the German physician and mining engineer Georgius Agricola, and the second in 1565 (the year of the author's death in an epidemic of plague in Zurich) by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner.
In the compendium of Latinized folk names then used to identify fossils, most designations noted either a similarity in appearance to some natural or cultural phenomenon or a presumed and legendary mode of origin. Thus, the fiat and circular components of crinoid stems were called trochites, or wheel stones; the internal molds of rounded pairs of clamshells were bucardites, or bulls' hearts (see figure, left); well-rounded concretions of the appropriate size were enorchites, or testicle stones (and if three were joined together, they became triorchites, or "three balls"); and sea urchin tests were brontia, or thunder stones, because they supposedly fell from the sky in lightning storms.
A prominent group of fossils in this old taxonomy, and a puzzle (as we shall see) to early paleontologists, was called hysteroliths--also known, in various vernaculars, as woman stones, womb stones, mother stones, or vulva stones (with the scholarly name derived from the same root as "hysteria" an example cited earlier in this essay). The basis for this taxonomic consensus stands out in the first drawing of hysteroliths ever published--by the Danish natural historian Olaeus Worm in 1665. A prominent median slit on one side (sometimes both) of a rounded and flattened object can hardly fail to suggest the anatomical comparison--or, to cite Worm's own words, "quod muliebre pudendum figura exprimat"--"because the form imitates the female genitalia." (Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the literature on hysteroliths are mine, from Latin originals.) Interestingly, as. Worm's second figure (below) shows, the opposite side of some (but not all) hysteroliths seems to portray, albeit less obviously, a figure of the male counterpart (at right, below). The men who wrote the founding treatises of modern paleontology could hardly have failed to emphasize such a titillating object (especially in an age that provided few opportunities for approved and legitimate discussion and illustration of such intimate subjects).
This essay is not structured as a mystery yarn, so I spoil nothing, while (I hope) enhancing the intended intellectual theme by providing the true nature of hysteroliths up front. Hysteroliths are the internal molds of certain brachiopod shells (just as bucardites, discussed above, are internal molds of certain clamshells). Brachiopods are not closely related to clams, but they also grow shells made of two convex valves that open on a hinge located at one end of the shell and close by bringing the two valves together all along their edges. Therefore, if you make an internal mold by pouring plaster of paris into the closed shell, the resulting object will look roughly like a flattened sphere, with the degree of flattening specified by the convexity of the shell. Highly convex shells can produce nearly spherical molds (as in the fat clamshells that make bucardites). Shells of lower convexity--including most brachiopods and all the groups that make hysteroliths--yield more flattened molds.
Since molds are negative impressions of surrounding shapes, the suggestive parts of hysteroliths record features on the interior of a brachiopod shell in reverse. The slit that suggested a vulva and gave hysteroliths their name marks the negative impression of a raised and narrow linear ridge called the median septum--that runs right down the middle of many brachiopod shell interiors, effectively dividing the valve in half. (For a clarifying analogy, think of the ridge as a knife and the slit as a cut.) The less pronounced "male" features on the other side of some hysteroliths record, in positive relief, a cylindrical groove on the shell interior that houses part of the feeding skeleton (detached from the shell itself and rarely fossilized) in some groups of brachiopods.
By the mid-eighteenth century, paleontologists had reached a correct consensus. They knew that hysteroliths were internal molds of brachiopods, and they had also identified the particular kinds of brachiopods that left such impressions on their molds. They also recognized, of course, that the admittedly striking similarity with human genitalia recorded a sheer, if curious, accident, with no causal meaning or connection whatsoever.
We therefore obtain, in the story of hysteroliths, a clean, clear, and lovely example of science operating admirably by following the canonical definition of its very being and distinctiveness--a procedure dedicated to the sweetest of all goals: the construction of an accurate piece of natural knowledge. This odyssey through two centuries and several interesting stages progresses from the puzzled agnosticism of Agricola's first mention in 1546 to Linnaeus's unchallenged conclusion of 1753.
I certainly do not deny the broad outline of this story. Agricola and Gesner possessed few clues for choosing from a wide range of alternatives--from the correct answer that eventually prevailed, to an inorganic origin by plastic forces circulating through rocks, to generation by various ancient animals as a meaningful symbol that might even cure or alleviate human ailments of the genital organs. The correct answer may not have fulfilled all human hopes and uses, but hyseroliths really are brachiopod molds, and science supplied the tools for proper resolution.
I do, however, question the usual reading of such genuine scientific progress as a simple exercise in factual accumulation through accurate observation, guided by the objective principles of reasoning known as the scientific method. In this familiar model, the naivete of Agricola and Gesner arises from their lack of accurate knowledge, not from any mental failures or barriers. In this sense, these sixteenth-century scholars might well be us in miniature, with the diminution established by what they couldn't know but we have since learned by living several centuries later and enjoying the fruits of advancing scientific knowledge. But we should not so diminish such brilliant men and such interesting times. Gesner and Agricola cannot be judged as less worthy than we; they were only different from us (and probably a lot smarter than the vast majority of us) in viewing the world from entirely divergent points of view that would be fascinating for us to grasp and understand.
I particularly appreciate Bacon's metaphor of the idols, because this device can lead us toward a better appreciation of the complexities of creative thought and the unifying similarities between the style we now call science and all other modes of human insight and discovery (while acknowledging, of course, that science presides over distinct subject matter and pursues particular goals in trying to understand the factual character of a "real" external world). Bacon argued that we must filter sensory data about this world through mental processors and that these internal mechanisms always operate imperfectly because idols gum up the works. Discovery, therefore, arises from a complex intermeshing of these inside and outside components and not by the accumulated input of facts from the outside world, continually processed by a universal and unchanging machinery of internalized scientific logic.
Gesner did not use the same criteria that we employ today, with our differences then attributed to his tiny molehill of reliable facts compared with our mountain. Rather, the idols conspired in him (as they still do in us, but with different resulting blockages) to construct a distinct kind of processing machine. Science prospers as much by retuning, or demolishing and then rebuilding, such mental machinery as by accumulation of new factual information. Scientists don't simply observe and classify enough fossils until, one day, the status of hysteroliths as brachiopod molds becomes clear; rather, our theories about the nature of reality, and the meaning of explanation itself, must be decomposed and reconstructed before we can build a mental mansion to accommodate such information. And such reconstruction requires, above all, that we acknowledge, examine, and challenge the Baconian idols of our own interior world.
I argued at the beginning of this essay that the Baconian idols could be ordered by degree of generality. In tracing the history of the hysterolith problem, I noted an interesting progression in the release of blockages--from the most pervasive to the most particular idol--as paleontologists homed in on a solution over two centuries. Perhaps we must first dig the right kind of mine before we can find any particular nugget of great price.
1. Idols of the Tribe in the Sixteenth Century: Gesner and Agricola Rediscover Pliny and the Three Dichotomies. The hysterolith story begins as far back as the recorded history of paleontology can venture and as deeply as one can probe into the most pervasive and general of tribal idols, our propensity to dichotomize. Pliny the Elder, the great Roman statesman and natural historian who died with his boots on in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, wrote a compendium about the natural world that survived in legions of hand copies made by monks and other scholars for more than a millennium before Gutenberg, and then became one of the most widely published books in the first decades of printing. (In the trade, books printed before 1500 are called incunabulae, or "from the cradle.")
Agricola and Gesner, as Renaissance scholars committed to the recovery of ancient wisdom, sought above all to assign their specimens (and vernacular names) to forms and categories mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History. In an alphabetical list of rocks, minerals, and fossils placed in the thirty-seventh and last book of his great treatise, Pliny included a notable one-liner under the letter "D": "Diphyes duplex, candida ac nigra, mas ac femina"--"having the character of both sexes, white and black, male and female."
Pliny's treatise contained no pictures, so we cannot know what object he had meant to designate with such a sparse de******ion. But on the theme of tribal idols, I am fascinated that the first mention of a possible hysterolith features two of the most general impediments in this category: our tendency to read nature at all scales in terms of immediately familiar objects, particularly the human body, and our propensity for classification by dichotomy. In his single line, Pliny explicitly cites two of the most fundamental dichotomies: male and female, and white and black. (Later commentators assumed that Pliny's diphyes referred to stones that looked male on one side and female on the other--hence their identification with hysteroliths.)
Moreover, we should also note the implicit inclusion of a third great dichotomy--top and bottom--in Pliny's definition, for hysteroliths are built of two distinct and opposite halves: a stunning representation, literally set in stone, of our strongest mental idol, expressed geometrically. Moreover, all three dichotomies carry great emotional weight, both in their archetypal ideological status and in their embodiment of conventional rankings (by worth and moral status) in a hierarchical and xenophobic society: male, white, top versus female, black, bottom. Our modern perspective can only lead us to shiver when we grasp the full implication of such a multiply dichotomized classification.
In his De natura fossilium of 1546, the first published treatise on paleontology (the term "fossil" then designated any object found in the ground--a broad usage consistent with its status as past participle of the Latin verb fodere, "to dig up"--so this work treated all varieties of rocks and minerals, as well as the remains of organisms now exclusively called fossils), Agricola unearthed Pliny's one-liner, probably for the first time since antiquity, and applied the name diphyes to some fossils found near the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. A generation later, in his De rerum fossilium (On fossil objects) of 1565, Gesner first connected Pliny's name and Agricola's objects with the folk designation and technical moniker--"hysterolith"--that would then denote this group of fossils until their status as brachiopod molds became clear two hundred years later.
Sixteenth-century paleontology proceeded no further with hysteroliths, but we should not undervalue the achievements of Agricola and Gesner in terms of their own expressed aims. As men of the Renaissance, they wished to unite modern observations with classical wisdom--and the application of Pliny's forgotten and undocumented name to a clear category of appropriate objects seemed, to them, an achievement worth celebrating.
Moreover, when we note Gesner's placement of hysteroliths within his general taxonomy of fossils, we can peek through this window into the different intellectual domain of sixteenth-century explanation and also begin to appreciate the general shifts in world view that would have to occur before hysteroliths could be recognized as brachiopod molds. Gesner established fifteen categories of fossil objects, mostly based on presumed resemblances to more familiar parts of nature and descending in decreasing worthiness from the most regular, heavenly, and ethereal to the roughest and lowest. The first category included geometric forms (fossils of circular or spherical shape, for example); the second brought together all fossils that recalled heavenly bodies (including the star-shaped elements of crinoid stems); while the third held stones that supposedly fell from the sky. At the other end, the disparaged fossils of category 15 resembled insects and serpents. Gesner placed hysteroliths into category 12, not at the bottom but not very near the honored pinnacle either, for "those that have some resemblance to men or quadrupedal animals, or are found within them." As his first illustration in category 12, Gesner drew a specimen of native silver that looked like a mat of human hair.
2. Idols of the Theater in the Seventeenth Century: Animal or Mineral, Useful Symbol or Meaningless Accident? If classic tribal idols played a founding role in setting the very name and definition of hysteroliths--their designation for some particularly salient features of female anatomy and their de******ion, by Pliny himself, in terms of three basic dichotomies that build the framework of our mental architecture--then some equally important theatrical idols (that is, constraints imposed by older, traditional systems of thought) defined the central debate that established the course of seventeenth-century paleontology but then pervaded the century: What are fossils?
The view of mechanism and causality that we call modern science answers this question without any ambiguity: Fossils look like organisms in all their complex details, and we find them in rocks that formed in environments where modern relatives of these creatures now live. Therefore, fossils are remains of ancient organisms. This commonsense view had developed in ancient Greek times and never lost status as an available hypothesis. But the domain of seventeenth-century thought--the world that Bacon challenged and that modern science would eventually supplant--included other alternatives that may seem risible today but that made eminent sense under other constructions of natural reality.
Bacon called these alternative world views idols of the theater, or impediments set by outmoded systems of thought. Among the theatrical idols of seventeenth-century life, none was held in higher esteem among students of fossils than the Neoplatonic construction of nature as a static and eternal set of symbolic correspondences that reveal the wisdom and harmonious order of creating forces and that humans might exploit for medical and spiritual benefit. A network of formal relationships (not direct causal connections but symbolic resemblances in essential properties) pervaded the three kingdoms of nature animal, vegetable, and mineral--placing any object of one kingdom into meaningful correspondence with counterparts in each of the other two realms. If we could specify and understand this network, we might hold the key to nature's construction and meaning.
Within this Neoplatonic framework, a close resemblance between a petrified "fish" enclosed within a rock and a trout swimming in a stream does not identify the stony version as a genuine former organism of flesh and blood but suggests instead that plastic forces within the mineral kingdom can generate this archetypal form within a rock just as organic forces of another kingdom can grow a trout from an egg. Similarly, if various stones look like parts of the human body, then perhaps we can identify the mineral forces that resonate in maximal sympathy with the sources of our own animate being. Moreover, according to a theory of medicine now regarded as kooky and magical but once perfectly respectable in a Neoplatonic framework, if we could identify the vegetable and mineral counterparts of human organs, then we might derive cures by potentiating our ailing animal versions with the proper sympathies of other realms, for every part in the microcosm of the human body must vibrate in harmony with a designated counterpart in the macrocosm of Earth, the central body of the universe. If the ingested powder of a pulverized "foot stone" could soothe the pains of gout, then hysteroliths might also alleviate sexual disorders.
The availability of this alternative view, based on the theatrical idol of Neoplatonism, set the primary context for seventeenth-century discussions about hysteroliths. Scholars could hardly ask "What animal molds these fossils?" when they remained stymied by the logically prior and much more important question "Are hysteroliths remains of organisms or products of the mineral kingdom?" This framework then implied another primary question--also posed as a dichotomy (and thus illustrating the continuing intrusion of tribal idols as well)--among supporters of an inorganic origin for hysteroliths: If vulva stones originate within the mineral kingdom, does their resemblance to female genitalia reveal a deep harmony in nature, or does the similarity arise by accident and therefore embody no meaning, a mode of origin that scholars of the time called lusus naturae, "a game or sport of nature"?
In examples of these two views from an unfamiliar age, Olaeus Worm, supporting the first opinion, spoke of a meaningful correspondence (in the textural commentary to his first pictorial representation of hysteroliths in 1665), although he attributed the opinion to someone else, perhaps to allay any suspicion of partisanship:
These specimens were sent to me by the most learned Dr. J. D. Horst, the archiater [chief physician] to the most illustrious Landgrave of Darmstadt.... Dr. Horst states the following about the strength of these objects: these stones are, without doubt, useful in treating any loosening or constriction of the womb in females. And I think it not silly to believe, especially given the form of these objects [I assume that he refers here to hysteroliths that resemble female parts on one side and male features on the other], that, if worn suspended around the neck, they will give strength to people experiencing problems with virility, either through fear or weakness, thus promoting the interests of Venus in both sexes (Venerem in utroque sexu promovere).
But Worm's enthusiasm did not generate universal approbation among scholars who considered an origin for hysteroliths within the mineral kingdom. Anselm de Boot, in the 1644 French translation of his popular compendium on fossils (in the broad sense of anything found underground), writes laconically, "Elles n'ont aucone usage que je scache" ("They have no use that I know").
By the time that J.C. Kundmann--who wrote in vernacular German and lived in Bratislava, relatively isolated from the "happening" centers of European intellectual life--presented the last serious defense for the inorganic theory of fossils in 1737, the comfortable rug of Neoplatonism had already been snatched away by time. (The great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher had written the last major defense of Neoplatonism in paleontology in 1664, in his Mundus subterraneus, or "Underground World.") Kundmann therefore enjoyed little intellectual maneuvering room beyond a statement that the resemblances to female genitalia could only be accidental--for after all, he argued, a slit in a round rock can arise by many mechanical routes. In a long chapter devoted to hysteroliths, Kundmann allowed that these fossils might be internal molds of shells and even admitted that some examples described by others might be so formed. But he defends an inorganic origin for his own specimens because he finds no evidence of any surrounding shell material or form--"an excellent argument that these stones have nothing to do with clamshells, and must be considered as lapides sui generis" (figured stones that arise by their own generation: a signature phase used by supporters of an inorganic origin for fossils).
3. Idols of the Marketplace in the Eighteenth Century: Reordering the Language of Classification to Potentiate the Correct Answer. As stated above, the inorganic theory lost its best potential rationale when the late-seventeenth-century triumph of modern scientific styles of thinking (the movement of Newton's generation that historians of science call the scientific revolution) doomed Neoplatonism as an acceptable mode of explanation. In this new eighteenth-century context, with the organic theory of fossils victorious by default, a clear path should have opened toward a proper interpretation of hysteroliths.
But Bacon, in his most insightful argument of all, had recognized that even when old theories (idols of the theater) die and when deep biases of human nature (idols of the tribe) can be recognized and discounted, we may still be impeded by the language we use and the pictures we draw--idols of the marketplace, where people gather to converse. Indeed, in eighteenth-century paleontology, the accepted language of de******ion and the traditional schemes of classification (often passively passed on from a former Neoplatonic heritage without recognition of the biases thus imposed) established major and final barriers to solving the old problem of the nature of hysteroliths.
At the most fundamental level, remains of organisms had finally been separated as a category from other "things in rocks" that happened to look like parts or products of the animal and vegetable kingdom. But this newly restricted category received no recognized name, for the word "fossil" still covered everything found underground (and would continue to do so until the early nineteenth century). Scholars proposed several solutions--for example, calling organic remains "extraneous fossils" because they entered the mineral kingdom from other realms, while designating rocks and minerals as "intrinsic fossils"--but no consensus developed during the eighteenth century. In 1804 the British amateur paleontologist James Parkinson (a physician in his day job, and the man who gave his name to Parkinson's disease), recognizing the power of Bacon's idols of the marketplace, deplored this linguistic impediment, arguing that classes without names could not be properly explained or even conceptualized:
But when the discovery was made, that most of these figured stones were remains of subjects of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, these modes of expression were found insufficient; and, whilst endeavouring to find appropriate terms, a considerable difficulty arose; language not possessing a sign to represent that idea, which the mind of man had not till now conceived.
The retention of older categories of classification imposed an even greater linguistic restriction. For example, so long as some paleontologists continued to use such general categories as lapides idiomorphoi (figured stones), true organic remains would never be properly distinguished from accidental resemblances (a concretion recalling an owl's head, for example, or an agate displaying in its color banding a rough picture of Jesus dying on the cross, to cite two actual cases widely discussed by eighteenth-century scholars). And absent such a separation, and a clear assignment of hysteroliths to the animal kingdom, why should anyone favor the hypothesis of brachiopod molds, when the very name "vulva stone" suggested a primary residence in the category of accidents--for no one had ever argued that hysteroliths could be actual fossilized remains of detached parts of female bodies.
As a pictorial example, consider the taxonomic placement of hysteroliths in a 1755 treatise by the French natural historian Dezallier d'Argenville. He draws his true hysterolith (A in the figure at left) right next to slits in rocks that arose for other reasons (B and 3) and, more importantly, beneath a stalactite (1) that happens to look like a penis with two appended testicles. Now we know that the stalactite originated from dripping calcite in a cave, so we recognize this unusual resemblance as accidental. But if hysteroliths really belong in the same taxonomic category, why should we regard them as formed in any fundamentally different way?
When these idols of the marketplace finally receded, and hysteroliths joined other remains of plants and animals in an exclusive category of organic remains--and when the name "hysterolith" itself, as a vestige of a different view that emphasized accidental resemblance over actual mode of origin, faded from use--these objects could be seen and judged in a proper light for potential resolution.
Even then, the correct consensus did not burst forth all at once but developed more slowly and through several stages, as scientists, now finally on the right track, moved toward a solution by answering a series of questions--all dichotomously framed, once again--that eventually reached the correct solution by successive restriction and convergence.
First, are hysteroliths molds of an organism, or are they actual petrified parts or wholes? Some proposals in the second category now seem far-fetched--for example, C.N. Lang's in 1708 on hysteroliths as fossilized sea anemones of the coral phylum (colonies of some species do grow with a large slit on top), or M. Barrere's in 1746 on cunnulites (as he called them, with an obvious etymology not suitable for citation in a family publication) as end pieces of the long bones (femora and humeri) in juvenile vertebrates, before these termini fuse with the main shafts in adulthood. But at least paleontologists now operated within a consensus that recognized hysteroliths as remains of organisms.
Second, are hysteroliths the molds of plants or of animals, with nuts and clams as major contenders in each kingdom (with a quick and decisive victory for the animals in this case)? Third, are hysteroliths the internal molds of clams or of brachiopods? This is a debate that now, at the very end of the story, really could be solved by something close to pure observation, for consensus had finally been reached on what questions to ask and how they might be answered. Once enough interiors of brachiopod shells had been examined (not so easy, because almost all brachiopod fossils expose the outside of the shell, while few living brachiopods had been discovered, for they live mostly in deep waters or in dark crevices within shallower seas), the answer could not be long delayed.
We may close this happy tale of virtue (for both sexes) and knowledge triumphant by citing words and pictures from two of the most celebrated intellectuals of the eighteenth century. In 1773 Elie Bertrand published a classification of fossils commissioned by Voltaire himself as a guide for arranging collections. His preface, addressed to Voltaire, defends mode of origin as the best criterion for a proper classification--a good epitome for the central theme of this essay. Turning specifically to hysteroliths, Bertrand advises his patron:
There is almost no shell, which does not form internal molds, sometimes with the shell still covering the mold, but often with only the mold preserved, though this mold will display all the interior marks of the shell that has been destroyed. This is the situation encountered in hysteroliths, for example, whose origin has been debated for so long. They are the internal molds of...terebratulids [a group of brachiopods]. (Author's translation)
But if a good picture can balance thousands of words, consider the elegant statement made by Linnaeus himself in the catalog of Count C. G. Tessin's collection, published in 1753. The hysteroliths (see figure, right), depicted with both their male and female resemblances (2,A-D), stand next to other brachiopod molds that do not resemble human genitalia (1,A and B)--thus establishing the overall category by zoological affinity rather than by external appearance. In numbers 3-6, Linnaeus seals his case by drawing the fossilized shells of related brachiopods--two pictures to guide and establish a transition from the lost and superseded world of Dezallier d'Argenville's theory of meaning by accidental resemblance to distant objects of other domains, to Linnaeus's modern classification by physical origin rather than superficial appearance.
Bacon's idols can help or harm us along these difficult and perilous paths to the accurate, factual knowledge of nature. Idols of the tribe may lie deep within the structure of human nature, but we should also thank our evolutionary constitution for another ineradicable trait of mind that will keep us going and questioning until we break through these constraining idols--our drive to ask and to know. We cannot look at the sky and not wonder why we see blue. We cannot observe that lightning kills good and bad people alike without demanding to know why. The first question can be answered; the second cannot, at least in the terms that prompt our demands. But we cannot stop asking.
Let me close by tying the sequential themes of this essay together with a story that unites Bacon (the anchor of the first part) with Pliny (the progenitor of the second part) in their common commitment to this liberating compulsion to ask and know. Pliny died because he could not forego a unique opportunity to learn something about the natural world--as he ventured too close to the noxious fumes of Vesuvius when he needed to observe a volcanic eruption more closely. Bacon died, albeit less dramatically, in the same noble cause and manner when he devised an experiment one cold day to determine whether snow could retard putrefaction. He stopped his carriage, bought a hen from a poultryman, and stuffed it with snow. The experiment worked, but the doctor died (not the patient this time, for the hen had expired before the procedure began!), as Bacon developed a cold that progressed to bronchitis, pneumonia, and death. He wrote a touching last letter (also quoted in a footnote to last month's essay) that establishes an explicit connection with Pliny: "I was likely to have the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius: for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, touching on the conversion and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well, but..."
Tribal idols may surround us, but our obsessively stubborn tribal need to ask and know can also push us through, as we follow Jesus' dictum that the truth will make us free. But we must also remember that Jesus then declined to answer Pilate's question: "What is truth?" Perhaps he understood that the idols conspire within us to convert this apparently simple inquiry into the most difficult of all questions. But, then, Jesus also knew, from the core of his being (in the conventional Christian interpretation), that human nature features an indivisible mixture of earthy constraint and (metaphorically, at least) heavenly possibilities for liberation by knowledge--a paradox that virtually defines both the fascination and frustration of human existence. We needed two hundred years of debate and discovery to turn a vulva stone into a brachiopod, but the same process has also stretched our understanding out to distant galaxies and back to the big bang.
A
shift in paradigms was necessary before scientists could view these
"male and female vulva stones" as internal casts of brachiopod shells
from Devonian seas.
A bucardite (bull's heart)--actually the internal mold of paired clamshells--as published by Olaeus Worm in 1665.
S
(BLACK & WHITE): Hysteroliths, or womb stones, were first
illustrated by Olaeus Worm in 1665. The "female" side is at left, the
"male" at right.
S (BLACK & WHITE): In 1755, Dezallier d'Argenville pictured hysteroliths along with a phallic stalactite.
S (BLACK & WHITE): Linnaeus illustrated hysteroliths along with other brachiopods in 1753.
~~~~~~~~
By Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard University. He is also the Frederick P. Rose Honorary Curator in Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History.
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