Francis Bacons Natural History 115

Chapter 7

Francis Bacons Natural History and

Problems of the Communication of
Scientific Knowledge

W. Boyd Rayward
Abstract
In this chapter, I contend that our modern view of information and of the
kinds of infrastructure within which it is constituted and from which it
cannot be separated has among its historical roots the work of Francis
Bacon. He articulated a new view of what would constitute valid and
useful knowledge. He suggested what was required for the production of
this knowledge and what its production would mean for society and the
welfare of mankind. In effect Bacon formulated conditions necessary for
a new kind of understanding of the world that in less than two genera-
tions after his death contributed to the rise of modern science and the
communication practices that it entails. These practices, which Bacon
himself did not explore at any length or theoretically, took some time to
take the form that has continued down through the centuries to the present

115

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day where they are now being challenged by the emerging possibilities of
digitization, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

Bacon conceived science to be a continuous, instrument-supported, col-

laborative process that would be materially assisted by state sponsorship,
by the creation of what we might describe as a professional cadre of re-
search personnel, and by the renovation or transformation of a variety of
institutional arrangements necessary for carrying it on. Central to its suc-
cess in the future would be what we might today describe as a commonly
held, empirical research methodology which he believed he was delin-
eating for the first time. He was also convinced that for any real advances
to occur in the sciences, a preliminary and comprehensive survey of their
current status was necessary. From this could be determined what could
be accepted as securely known from what was merely traditional or con-
ventional knowledge. Such a survey would assist in charting the direc-
tion of future research. The codification of the results of this survey he
called his Natural History, a form of encyclopedia involving special re-
quirements for what was to be included and how it was to be expressed.
The prescriptions contained in Bacons proposals for the renovation
of learning led him to confront the problems inherent in the management
of what we now call scientific information without which his great ency-
clopedic natural history project could not have been completed. The growth
of scientific knowledge for him involved both the addition of new knowl-
edge and the correction of previous errors, from which he admitted his
own work would not be free. He recognized that the new regime of knowl-
edge production that he was laying the foundation for would necessarily
involve a long collaborative process involving generations of scientists.
They would form a cohesive international community on the basis of the
commonly held methodology of research that he was promulgating.
Though he is brief and superficial about how the knowledge individuals
would arrive at is to be communicated and cumulated within this com-
munity, his views are of interest both in their anticipation of what was to
come and in suggesting how difficult throwing off the habits and mind-
sets of the past can be.

Francis Bacon and the Reform of Learning

Francis Bacon, first Baron Veralum and Viscount St. Albans, Keeper of
the Great Seal and Chancellor of England, was born in 1561. He was a
highly ambitious and political man much of whose life was spent in the

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search for preferment at court and in the law. He died at the then ripe old
age of sixty-five in 1626 having taken a chill, according to one story,
conducting an experiment in winter with a dead chicken. He wanted to
see if filling its cavities with snow would keep it fresh. He composed
monumental works in English and Latin in the last few years of his life
when he was sequestered from court and in political disgrace for taking
bribes (1, 2). But these works of his retirement were not something new;
they were a culmination. Thirty or so years before, in a letter to his uncle,
Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I, Bacon observed
that: I wax now somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great deal of
sand in the hour-glass. He went on to make this remarkable statement:

I confess I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil

ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province. And if I could
purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputa-
tions, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments
and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils,
I hope I may bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions
and profitable inventions and discoveries. (3, pp. 1089)

This is a key statement, it seems to me, and encompasses so much of

what the scholar and philosopher Bacon was about. He sought nothing
less than the creation of an entirely new approach to the generation, test-
ing, cumulation, deployment, and management of knowledge. He ex-
pounded his ideas in a number of published and unpublished works.
Among the most important of the published works from the point of view
of this study was the Advancement of Learning of 1605 (4). This was
later expanded and translated into Latin as De Augmentis Scientiarum
(1623), On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning (5). The Instauratio
Magna (1620), the Great Restoration or Renewal, was to have a number
of parts of which the Novum Organon (1620) (6) is key to his ideas about
method. These works are occasionally repetitive reflections on what was
wrong with the current state of learning, how it had come to its present
parlous condition, why it was necessary to reform it, what had to be done
to achieve reform, the need for what we would call a scientific methodol-
ogy as an aspect of this reform, how the project as a whole was to be
staged, who would be involved, and what this meant for Bacon himself
and his posterity.
Bacons objective is clear. He is not, like many of his contemporar-
ies, abstractly concerned with contemplating the Divine or the mysteries
of God in nature or, more concretely, preoccupied with establishing his

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superiority in the pecking order of contemporary scholarship. He accepts

that his proposals for the reform of learning must advance the interests of
the Sovereign or the State, and he may have been essentially conservative
in his views of the nature of the social order (7, 8, pp. 2, 97, 102). But he
is emphatic that those, like himself, who seek knowledge, should seek it
not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to
others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but
for the benefit and use of life. He tells us that he is attempting to lay the
foundation . . . of human utility and power, the creation of something
destined for the common good (6, pp. 2021).
The scale of his scholarly ambition is revealed in a remark about
ambition. He suggests that mankind has three kinds of ambition, the first
is personal and the second for country. The third, however, is much more
elevated: if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and do-
minion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambi-
tion it can be called) is without a doubt both a more wholesome and a
more noble thing than the other two. (6, p. 114). Bacon necessarily car-
ried with him intellectually, for he could not be other than a product of his
time, a great deal of residual conceptual baggage reflecting a kind of
medieval worldview that the main thrust of his work was directed at sub-
verting. This background has attracted much interest from various schol-
ars. But when Bacon suggests that mans empire over things depended
entirely on the arts and sciences (6, p. 114), he reveals how far he has
moved beyond the medieval world across a critical threshold into the
secular, empiricist world with which we are familiar today. He points the
way to a world in which it was believedat least until challenged by the
post-moderniststhat human experience and reason disciplined by the
scientific method and assisted by technology can procure the steady ad-
vance of civilization and its emergence from the tyrannical hold of the
past.

The Setting: The Scientific Infrastructure

of the State
State Funding and Support
Bacons project for reforming learning is set against a broad picture of
the kind of scholarly and intellectual infrastructure that would be needed

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and within which someone like him could locate his own work. The issue
is what is needed at the level of support by the state in the person of the
kingthe acts which have been undertaken and performed by Kings . . .
for the increase and advancement of learning (4, p. 322)as opposed to
what the individual researcher and scholar might be able to do by himself
or in combination with others of his own kind. For the king nothing could
be more worthy than the further endowment of the world with sound
and fruitful knowledge. The adjectivessound and fruitfulcap-
ture the essential thrust of Bacons project. The devotion of the king to
the advancement of learning will lead him to attain that triplicity which
in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes; the power and
fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the
learning and universality of a Philosopher (4, p. 263). But Bacon is clear
that it is necessary to distinguish what is merely monumental and aggran-
dizing, matters of magnificence and memory, from the much more im-
portant works and acts that are intended for progression and proficiency
(5, p. 284).
Bacon presents an elaborate view of a new world of knowledge pro-
duced and displayed in the service of the state in the New Atlantis. This
was left incomplete at his death in 1626, but was soon published by Wil-
liam Rawley, his chaplain and amanuensis. Rawley described this fable
as exhibiting a model or description of a college instituted for interpret-
ing of nature and the producing of great and marvelous works for the
benefit of men, under the name of Salomons House (9, p. 127). Salomons
House is devoted to the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things;
and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of
things possible (p. 156). A complex scientific infrastructure is described
in the New Atlantis to support experimentation, dissection and trials,
that will extend our knowledge of nature and the physical human body
(p. 159). There are salt and freshwater lakes, gardens, and menageries,
but there are also laboratories devoted to the study of phenomena related
to the senses of sight, hearing, and smell as well as observatories, animal
experiment laboratories, and engineering and instrument workshops. And
of course there are to be cabinets of curiosities, museums, to contain rare,
beautiful, and strange things. What we would call meteorology, cosmog-
raphy, medicine, genetics, geology, chemistry, and agriculture are among
the subjects identified for study.
The one thing that is not to be found on the island of Bensalem or in
the House of Salomon is a library! I will come back to this.

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Places of Learning
In his dedication of the Advancement of Learning and its Latin expansion
as De Augmentis Scientiarum to King Charles I, Bacon describes what is
in effect the kinds of state support that is need for learning to flourish
with respect to the places of learning, the books of learning, and the
persons of the learned (4, pp. 322323; 5, pp. 284290). He suggests
that universities, colleges, and schools should be supported financially
by the state and should all tend to retirement and quietness of life and a
release from cares and troubles. He condemns the scholastic leaning
then typical of such places which should rather be devoted to fundamen-
tal studies of the arts and sciences. They should also provide a new kind
of education for the civil servants who are destined to manage the busi-
ness of the state. Universities and colleges must be carefully regulated to
ensure that their curricula and educational practices are kept up to date
and relevant to social needs. They should reflect the image of life and
represent the real actions of life (5, p. 289). He suggests that not only
should universities be properly organized and governed individually if
they are to contribute to the advancement of learning, they should form
an international community or network (5, p. 289).

Libraries
Bacon is brief about books of learning:

The works touching books are two: first libraries, which are as shrines
where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue and that
without delusion or imposture [as Bacons editor notes, this phrase is
omitted from the 1620 Latin text], are preserved and reposed; secondly,
new editions of authors, with more correct impressions, more faithful
translations, more profitable glosses, more diligent annotations and the
like. (4, p. 323; 5, p. 285)

Academic Personnel
In commenting on the need for academic personnel to be paid and paid
adequately, Bacon distinguishes between lecturers concerned with es-
tablished knowledge, what he calls the arts already extant, and those
whose concern is primarily research, writers and inquirers concerning
those parts of learning not yet sufficiently labored and prosecuted (4, p.
323). He also suggests that research expenses need to be separately pro-

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vided for. Again the analogy is with life beyond the academy. In general,
it may be held for certain that there will hardly be any great progress in
the unraveling and unlocking of the secrets of nature, except there be a
full allowance for expenses about experiments; whether they be experi-
ments appertaining to Vulcan or Daedalus, furnace or engine, or any other
kind (4, p. 325). He goes on, perhaps reflecting the life of espionage of
his brother, to whom he was close (2), as secretaries and emissaries of
princes are allowed to bring in bills of expenses for their diligence in
exploring and unraveling plots and civil secrets, so the searchers and spies
of nature must have their expenses paid (5, p. 287). Among such ex-
penses are those necessary for providing various instruments and facili-
ties for research, including with respect to the latter botanical gardens
and anatomical theaters.

Instruments and Experimentation

In the Gesta Grayorum and the New Atlantis, Bacon touches on the kinds
of institutional facilities that will be needed for researchthe laborato-
ries, botanical gardens, anatomy theaters, workshops, and specimens of
various kinds both animate an inanimate. These will support what is now
required for progress in the sciencesnot books and book learning but
instruments and experiments. The fundamental problem to be addressed
is the inadequacy of knowledge obtained through the unmediated senses
and a new methodology of instrumentbased research is necessary to tran-
scend the limitations of knowledge derived from the senses. Only in this
way can the various errors or fallacies of the mind that Bacon has fa-
mously called idols be effectively combated (5, chapter IV; 6, pp. 53
69). To meet these difficulties, I have sought on all sides diligently and
faithfully to provide helps for the sensesubstitutes to supply its fail-
ures, rectification to correct its errors; and this I endeavor to accomplish
not so much by instruments as by experiments (6, p. 26).

A Scientific Community
Bacon discusses his work, especially its incompleteness and what is re-
quired to carry it on, in very personal terms, but these serve as a basis for
the recommendations he offers for making good these deficiencies by
others in the future. They lead him into the notion of a new kind of scien-
tific and scholarly community (see especially in this connection 10, chapter
5). I am laboring, he says, to lay the foundation, not of any sect or

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doctrine, but of human utility and power. His new method of investigat-
ing nature, he asserts, the processes of induction based on what we would
call the experimental method as set out in the Novum Organum, will be
the ultimate source of beneficial and useful knowledge (6, p. 21).
But method is not enough in itself. My Organon, even if it were
completed, would not without the natural history much advance the
instauration of the sciences, whereas the natural history, without the Or-
ganon would advance it not a little. There are, he says, doubtless many
wits scattered over Europe, capacious, open, lofty, subtle, solid and con-
stant. But any one of these persons, even if he tried to follow the Or-
ganum, would not know how to contribute effectively to the natural history
or to make experiments of arts of the kind Bacon envisages. What is
needed is a model and Bacon has decided to make some anticipation
thereof and to enter upon it at once (11, pp. 133134).
Thus, his major tasks are to point out what has to be done and how it
is to be done as well as providing examples that might inspire others to
follow his example. He also wants it to be clear that he knows that in his
own work he will have made errors that those who come after him will
have to correct. But, even so, when one thinks what he has been able to
do acting alone and under adverse personal circumstances, then

how much more may be expected (after the way has been thus indi-
cated) from men abounding in leisure, and from the association of la-
bors, and from the succession of the ages: the rather because it is not a
way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that
of reasoning), but one in which the labors and industries of men (espe-
cially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the best effect
be first distributed and then combined. (5, p. 102)

Thus, in the future, knowledge production will benefit from collabora-

tion and specialization. They will have become possible, Bacon believes,
both because of what he has been able to achieve in his own work and
because of the model his work presents to those who will come after him.

The Components of the Baconian Project

Survey
There were a number of distinct parts to Bacons plan for the reconstruc-
tion or renovation of knowledge in such a way that the arts and sciences

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might be perfected and man establish the sorts of power over nature that
he believed was possible.

The first part exhibits a summary or general description of the knowl-

edge which the human race at present possesses. For I thought it good
to make some pause upon that which is received; that thereby the old
may be the most easily made and the new more easily approached. . . .
We will therefore make a coasting voyage along the shores of the arts
and sciences. (6, p. 22)

And he concludes his actual survey of current learning with a related

metaphor: now therefore I have made as it were a small globe of the
intellectual world, as faithfully as I could (12, p. 118).
Such a survey was needed, he believed, as much to point out errors
and omissions as to deal with what is known. Some of what might be
revealed as omitted might well be considered to be problematic, he sug-
gests, especially those things that might seem too difficult and almost
impossible to be compassed and effected by man. As to this, in the Ad-
vancement of Learning he makes a ringing declaration that still echoed in
the ears of Denis Diderot over 130 years later as he worked on the
Encyclopdie, which is as much an embodiment of Bacons ideals as a
monument of the French Enlightenment. Diderot was to quote the fol-
lowing passage from Bacon several times: I take it that all those things
are held to be possible and performable, which may be done by some
persons, though not by everyone; and which may be done by many to-
gether, though not by one alone; and which may be done in succession of
the ages, though not in one mans life; and lastly, which may be done by
public designation and expense, though not by private means and en-
deavor (5, p. 291; 13, p. 211; 14, p. 363).

Method
A central feature of Bacons plan for the reform of learning was to pro-
pose a new method of investigation of nature, a process of induction based
on careful observation and experimentation. The foundation for recon-
structing knowledge on new principles, he says, must be laid in natural
history, and that of a new kind and gathered on a new principle (6, p.
28). Bacons concern was with nature, the natural world, with our experi-
ence of it and with man as part of it, and the inadequate way in which they
have hitherto been studied. Man, said Bacon, is but the servant and
interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has

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observed of natures order in fact or in thought (6, p. 29). He is aston-

ished that hitherto no one has seriously applied himself to the opening
and laying out of a road for the human understanding direct from the
sense by a course of experiment orderly conducted and well built up; but
that all has been left either to the mist of tradition, or the whirl and eddy
of argument, or the fluctuations and mazes of chance and of vague and
ill-digested experience (5, p. 80). As a result, with respect to the grounds
of experiencesince to experience we must come, he says, we have
as yet either none or very weak ones; no search has been made to collect
a store of particular observations sufficient in number, or in kind, or in
certainty, to inform the understanding (6, p. 94).
What is needed in Bacons view, are new instrument-based method-
ological proceduresan entirely different method, order and process
for carrying on and advancing experience (6, p. 95).

Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is

this: I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence
of the senses, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I
retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense, I for the
most part reject. There remains but one course for the recovery of a
sound and healthy conditionnamely, that the entire work of under-
standing be commenced afresh, and that the mind itself be from the
outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step; and the
business be done as if by machinery. (6, pp. 4041)

I have, he says in the Epistle Dedicatory to the king, provided the

machine, but the stuff must be gathered from the facts of nature (6, p.
12).

A New Structure of Knowledge

For my purposes it is enough here to recognize the new insistence by
Bacon on nature, observation, experiment, the need to link observation
and experiment to theory or hypothesis, the provisional statements of facts
(what he called axioms) and back again to observation in small, tightly
interconnected steps, for our road does not lie on a level, but ascends
and descends; first ascending to axioms, then descending to works (6, p.
96). In terms of generating theory, Bacon stresses the need to proceed
slowly and deliberately, not leaping to conclusions. What is needed is a
just scale of ascent, and by successive steps not interrupted or broken,
we rise from particulars to lesser axioms, and then to the middle axioms,
one above the other; and last of all to the most general (6, p. 97). Bacon

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condemns the current philosophical practice as he sees it of snatching a

variety of common instances from experience which then, rather than
being diligently examined and weighed, merely become the basis for
meditation and agitation of wit (6, p. 60). Nothing duly investigated,
nothing verified, nothing counted, weighed, or measured, is to be found
in natural history; and what in observation is loose and vague, is in infor-
mation deceptive and treacherous (6, p. 94). And in an exactly parallel
passage he asserts: Everything relating both to bodies and virtues in
nature [must] be set forth (as far as may be) numbered, weighed, mea-
sured, defined. For it is works we are in pursuit of, not speculation and
practical working comes of the due combination of physics and math-
ematics (6, p. 259).
This insistence is the basis for Bacons rejection of what Zagorin (1,
p. 29) aptly calls the old regime of knowledge. Bacon, listing the vari-
ous philosophical systems of the past, observes that they are like so many
arguments of plays. Such systems continue to be produced by contem-
porary thinkers. There is not and never will be an end or limit to this, he
concludes, one catches one thing, another another; each has his favorite
fancy; pure and open light there is none; everyone philosophizes out of
the cells of his own imagination. Men have been kept back, he goes
on as by a kind of enchantment from the progress of the sciences by
reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men (6, p. 81). He is vehe-
ment: away with antiquities, and citations or testimonies of authors, and
also with disputes and controversies and differing opinionseverything,
in short, which is philological (6, p. 254). It is to nature in all her variety,
richness, complexity, and apparent intractability that we must come.

Bacons Natural and Experimental History:

An Encyclopedia
But first, the major task to be completed before we can attain true phi-
losophy and advance confidently toward new kinds of discovery, Bacon
believed, was the creation of an encyclopedia of contemporary knowl-
edge. Bacon called this a natural and experimental history. Reflecting
his critique of current regimes of knowledge production, he wanted his
natural history to be true and severe (unencumbered with literature and
book-learning), such as philosophy may be built upon (6, p. 12). It is to
come from the laboratory and the rigorous observation of nature, not the
library. He is using the term history in a now obsolete sense, according
to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, of a systematic account (with-
out reference to time) of a set of natural phenomenaan encyclopedia

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in effect (15, p. 968). Without such a natural history, he says, no progress

worthy of the human race could have been or can be made in philosophy
and the sciences. But he concludes rather optimistically that, if we had
such a history in hand along with the experiments that compiling it will
also require, the investigation of nature will be the work of a few years
(6, p. 101).
But the natural history he is proposing must be complete. It must
omit nothing in nature. It must be genuinely, universally encyclopedic
not selective according to the fads and fashions of the times. This means
that it must admit things that are mean and filthy . . . no less than the
most splendid and costly . . . for whatever deserves to exist deserves also
to be known for knowledge is the image of existence and things mean
and splendid exist alike (6, p. 107). He is, he says, building in the hu-
man understanding a true model of the world, such as it is in fact, not
such as mans own reason would have it be; a thing which cannot be done
without a very diligent dissection and anatomy of the world (6, p. 110).
He comes back to this idea:

In the history which I require and design, special care should be taken
that it be of wide range and made to the measure of the universe. For
the world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding . . .
but the understanding to be expanded and opened until it can take in the
image of the world as it is in fact. (5, p. 256)

The ultimate objective is to be so comprehensive that nothing will re-

main unprovided whereby the sense can be equipped for information of
the understanding. And then we shall we be no longer kept dancing within
little rings, like persons bewitched, but our range and circuit will be as
wide as the compass of the world (6, p. 257).
A basic component of the history must be something that has in his
view been much neglectedthe crafts and trades, what he calls the me-
chanical arts. They are central to the new approach to the creation of
knowledge that he is proposing because through them can come future
inventions and discoveries that will assist the progress of society and
bring relief to the miseries of mankind. Most writers of natural history,
he says, think they have done enough when they have given an account
of animals or plants or minerals, omitting all mention of the experiments
of mechanical arts (5, p. 294). Yet experiments familiar and vulgar, he
says in the interpretation of nature are of equal, if not more value then
those which are less common. He goes on:

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But if my judgement be of any weight, the use of History Mechanical

is, of all others, the most radical and fundamental towards natural phi-
losophy; such natural philosophy I mean as shall not vanish in the fumes
of subtle or sublime speculations, but as shall be operative to relieve
the inconveniences of mans estate . . . I must add that the body of this
kind of history should not be made up from the mechanical arts alone,
but also from the operative parts of the liberal sciences as well as from
any other practices which have not as yet grown up into arts; so as to
omit nothing which may tend to inform the intellect. (5, pp. 296297)

For him ultimately it is what we may call the technologies of daily life
that are of paramount importance for a new kind of learning and scholar-
ship that would one day be given the name science. The best chance
of bringing down as from heaven a shower of inventions at once useful
and new, he says, is to bring within the knowledge of one man, or a few
who may sharpen one another by conference, the experiments of a num-
ber of mechanical arts (5, p. 417).
He instances among the important arts to include those which . . .
exhibit, alter, and prepare natural bodies and materials of things, such as
agriculture, cookery, chemistry, dyeing, the manufacture of glass, enamel,
sugar, gunpowder, artificial fires, paper and the like. And there are oth-
ers that must also be included. These consist principally in the subtle
motion of the hands or instruments . . . such as weaving, carpentry, archi-
tecture, manufacture of mills, clocks, and the like (6, p. 258).
He does not proceed at this point to what he sees as the next stage of
the encyclopedic work he has been discussing, the delineation of the
particular histories, because he tells us, I have at present so many other
things to do. He simply subjoins a catalogue of their titles (6, p.
263). These are what one might call the major chapters for the encyclope-
dia and he lists 130 of them, a subject taxonomy or directory, in the jar-
gon of the Internet. They encompass a series on astronomy, cosmography,
and meteorology, another on what he called Histories of the Greater
Masses (fire, earth, air and water), yet another on the histories of Man
including what we would call anatomy, biology, social organization, and
all of the most basic trades, crafts and manufactures of the time. Bacon,
as Diderot observed, given the impossibility of creating the history of
what we know, created one of what we needed to learn (13, p. 215).
But Bacon to provide an example of what is needed and to get the
project underway does begin to compile some of the histories that he
believes must be attempted. In the Rule of the Present History that is
part of the preliminary matter to the Natural and Experimental History

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for the Foundation of Philosophy or Phenomena of the Universe, he indi-

cates that he has reserved for himself a number of the titles he had given
in the catalog at the end of the Novum Organum. The titles in the cata-
logue (seeing it is beyond my power to handle them all) I have not taken
in order, but made a selection; choosing those whereof the inquiry was
either most important in respect of use, or most convenient on account of
the abundance of experiments. Within a six-month period he proposes
to deal with: History of the Winds; History of Dense and Rare and of the
Contraction and Expansion of Matter in Space; History of Heavy and
Light; History of the Sympathy and Antipathy of Things; History of Sul-
phur, Mercury, and Salt; History of life and Death (11, p. 129).

The Problem of Managing Information

How is the great natural history to be constructed? How are these indi-
vidual histories to be most effectively completed? How are they to incor-
porate old and new knowledge? How are the labors and industries of
men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) with the best
effect be first distributed and then combined? (6, p. 102). The knowl-
edge of the past, which is to be found in books, cannot be denied or disre-
garded. We need to understand how what has already published is to be
examined and ordered. New knowledge will be created cooperatively
through the observational and logical processes involved in the new meth-
odology Bacon is proposing for the study of nature. If this is so, what
kinds of processing will be necessary to combine and organize all of what
will be essentially dispersed material in such a way that we will be able to
encompass the measure of the universe and create the image of the
world as it is in fact? (5, p. 289).
It is difficult to determine precisely how all of this is to be done.
Bacon does not address these kinds of questions systematically. How-
ever, there are indications of a process, incompletely spelled out with
perhaps overlapping components, that involves the following elements:
an inventory, common places, axioms, and tables of discovery.

The Inventory of Knowledge

Bacon suggests that one of the first things to be done as a basis for decid-
ing on future work in science is to draw up a complex Inventory of the
Possessions of Man,

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wherein should be set down and briefly enumerated all the goods and
possessions (whether derived from the fruits and proceeds of nature or
of art) which men now hold and enjoy; with the additions of things
known but now lost; in order that those who address themselves to the
discovery of new inventions may not waste their pains up on things
already discovered and extant . . . [we must add to this] those things
which are in common opinion reputed impossible in every kind, not-
ing, in connection with each, what thing is extant which comes nearest
in degree to that impossibility; that by the one human invention may be
stimulated, and by the other it may to a certain extent be diffracted; and
that by these optatives and potentials active discoveries may be the
more readily deduced. (5, pp. 368369)

Established Knowledge: Books and Libraries.

Such an inventory resembles the survey of knowledge, that coasting
voyage along the shores of the arts and sciences, that is the basis of the
Advancement of Learning. We have to come back to books. Such a voy-
age has in some fundamental and substantial measure to be conducted in
and through the books that have been tumbling from the presses through-
out Europe for a period of more than 150 years at the time Bacon wrote.
What is he to do with them? How is Bacon to identify and make use of
the knowledge that they contain in his encyclopedic project for a natural
history. However deficient in various ways his learning may have been
with regard to contemporary science and philosophy (16), he was, of
course, widely read in the classics, law, and much of the other the learned
literature of the day, still mostly written in Latin of which he himself was
a master. He is fully cognizant of, and apparently effortless in, his de-
ployment of the scholarly practices of the times in terms of classical allu-
sions and citations and the scholastic and, perhaps more important, legal
formalities of elaborating an argument.
In fact Bacon is in a great dilemma. On the one hand he is deeply
suspicious of book learning which his new approach to the study of na-
ture is designed to subvert. On the other he cannot avoid it if he is to map
what is known, identify what is erroneous, and suggest new directions of
research.
It is crystal clear that for Bacon books and libraries are extremely
problematic elements in the requirements for the new regime of knowl-
edge production and management that he is laying out. The reference in
the Dedication of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning to books and
libraries in terms of what is needed for a research infrastructure, dis-
cussed above, is essentially conventional. Could it be that the reference

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to shrines wherein all the relics of the ancient saints full of true virtues
are preserved and that without delusion or imposture of 1605 becomes
ironical when the phrase and that without delusion or imposture is
omitted (see above)? And aware of the omission by collating the two
versions, might not the modern reader infer that Bacon attributed both
imposture and delusion to these relics? Moreover he speaks only in terms
of new editions and so on of the work of the ancient saints with no
suggestion of how books and libraries might contribute to the progres-
sion and proficiency that he had suggested were necessary in the new
work to be supported by kings and others (5, p. 284; 4, p. 322). And, as
I have already mentioned, it is noteworthy that, though there are all sorts
of establishments to support research and education in the Bensalem of
the New Atlantis, there is no library.
Bacon is led by powerful arguments to reject much of what come
down to us from the past and what is currently available in books. The
problem with libraries is precisely that they contain books, for books con-
tain knowledge as it has been understood in the past. He observes that
The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books
and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and
derivations from a few things already known, not in the number of axi-
oms (6, p. 48). Books simply comprise opinions, doctrines, and specu-
lation . . . without number and without end (6, p. 262). Bacon returns
again and again to this theme: Let a man look carefully into all that
variety of books with which the arts and sciences abound, he will find
everywhere endless repetitions of the same thing, varying in the method
of treatment, but not new in substance (6, p. 13). There is in Bacons
view little in the library to detain the scholar who must, if the imperfect
state of knowledge as represented in books is to be rectified, turn to na-
ture and experiment:

if a man turn from the workshop to the library, and wonder at the im-
mense variety of books he sees there, let him but examine and dili-
gently inspect their matter and contents, and his wonder will assuredly
be turned the other way; for observing their endless repetitions, and
how men are ever saying and doing what has been said and done be-
fore, he will pass from admiration of the variety to astonishment at the
poverty and scantiness of the subjects which till now have occupied
and possessed the mind of men. (6, pp. 8384)

He suggests that existing natural histories are problematic in just this

way. He speaks of an extant natural history that is large in its bulk,
pleasing in its variety, curious often in its diligence; yet weed it of fables,

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 Francis Bacons Natural History 131

antiquities, quotations, idle controversies, philology and ornaments . . .

and it will shrink into a small compass. He concludes that in a word all
the natural history we have, whether in mode of inquiry or in matter col-
lected, is quite unfit for the end which I have mentioned, namely the
foundation of philosophy (5, p. 299).
There is no relying, then, on the past and as for the present, he in-
veighs against the continuing influence of Aristotle and scholastic proce-
dures which have led to the great quantity of books that make a show
rather of superfluity than lack (5, p. 290). He hastens to add that for this
problem the true remedy is not to destroy the old books, but to make
more good ones. Yet, curiously, he takes a scholastic line about this.
What is now needed, he says, as mentioned above, is new editions of
authors, with more correct impressions, more faithful translations, more
profitable commentaries, more diligent annotations, and the like (5, p.
285). Here curiously there is no suggestion of producing new books con-
taining new knowledge or new kinds of books for new knowledge, sim-
ply more correct and informative editions of established authors.

Common Places and the Commonplace Book

But it is equally clear, of course, that whatever his reservations about
books and libraries, the inimical influence of Aristotle and the rhetorical
superfluities of current scholastic literary productions, the creation of an
inventory of knowledge as outlined above as well as the substantive com-
pilation of his natural history would have to depend, as I say, in part on
what he could collect from existing publications. In practice, as Moss has
pointed out, Bacon draws on the tradition of the commonplace book when
dealing with the issue of established knowledge, of what is currently known
(17). Bacon deals with the idea of the common place in a fairly conven-
tional way when he talks of general topics. But, again as Moss points out,
he also goes beyond this to propose a new approach. At the heart of his
rethinking of the purposes of place lies a realignment of language to things
(17, p. 269). He removes the methodology of the commonplace book
from the conventions of contemporary practices in rhetoric and dialectics
to align it with his new approach to the discovery of knowledge.
Bacon observes that the common places traditionally used to assist
memory and in the elaboration of arguments may not only

prompt and suggest what we should affirm and assert, but also what we
should inquire or ask. For a faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowl-
edge. . . . The same places therefore which will help us to shake out the

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folds of the intellect within us and to draw forth the knowledge stored
within, will also help us to gain knowledge from without; so that if a man
of learning and experience were before us, we should know how to ques-
tion him wisely and to the purpose; and in like manner how to select
and peruse with advantage those authors and books, and parts of books,
which may best instruct us concerning that which we seek. (5, p. 423)

Bacon is making a subtle distinction in the nature and use of common

places or topics. First are what he calls the general topics, perhaps to be
thought of as general headings, where a thing is to be looked for . . . and
as it were indexed (5, p. 422). Under these headings arguments con-
cerning such matters as commonly fall out and come under discussion
may be composed beforehand and laid up for use. These headings are
given a head and are like a preexisting system of subject headings or
scheme of classification. What is to be included selectively under them
requires a process of analytical indexing of authors and books, and parts
of book. The headings, however, are inadequate because they reflect
what is accepted and established.
He expands on this notion in the chapter in Of the Dignity and Ad-
vancement of Learning on Divisions of the Art of Retaining into Doc-
trines Concerning Helps to Memory:

There can hardly be anything more useful even for the old and popular
sciences, than a sound help for the memory; that is a good and learned
Digest of common places. I am aware indeed that the transferring of the
things we read and learn into common-place books is thought by some
to be detrimental to learning, as retarding the course of the reader and
inviting memory to take a holiday. . . . I hold diligence and labor in the
entry of common places to be a matter of great use and support in study-
ing; as that which supplies matter to invention, and contracts the sight
of the judgement to a point.

Yet he goes on to observe, echoing once again his fundamental criticisms

of contemporary learning, that of the methods and frameworks of com-
mon places which I have hitherto seen, there is none of any worth; all of
them carrying in their titles merely the face of a school and not of a (sic)
world; and using vulgar and pedantical divisions, not such as pierce to
the pith and heart of things (5, p. 435).
On the other hand Particular Topics are based in the matter in hand
and what is problematical and suggestive in such matter. They are essen-
tially a systematically elaborated set of questions. Unlike general topics,
they are not necessarily given ahead but emerge and change as the knowl-
edge they encapsulate changes.

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 Francis Bacons Natural History 133

But Particular Topics contribute much more to those purposes whereof

I speak, and are to be accounted most useful. . . . I for my part receive a
particular Topics (that is the places of invention and inquiry appropri-
ated to particular subjects and sciences) as things of prime use. They
are a kind of mixtures of logic with the proper matter of each science.
(5, p. 423)

As knowledge of particular subjects accumulates and is ordered within

the structure provided by particular topics, that structure itself changes
and suggests how further developments may be pursued. It is indeed
like journeying in a champaign country; for when we have gone some
part of our way, we are no nearer to our journeys end, but we can like-
wise see better that part of the way which remains. In the same manner in
sciences every step forward on the journey gives a nearer view of that
which is to come (5, p. 423).

Aphorisms
The process of accumulating knowledge from observation and from the
analysis of what has been written leads to the formulation of aphorisms.
Bacon opposes the openness of tersely expressed aphorisms to the closed
nature of more systematically expressed knowledge.

Delivery by aphorisms has many excellent virtues whereto the methodi-

cal delivery does not attain. . . . For aphorisms, not to be ridiculous,
must be made out of the pith and heart of sciences. For illustrations and
excursion are cut off; variety of examples is cut off; deduction and con-
nection are cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off; so there is noth-
ing left to make the aphorisms but some good quantity of observation.
(5, p. 451)

But this pithiness has another great benefit that is obscured in systemati-
cally elaborated discourse: aphorisms, representing only portions and as
it were fragments of knowledge, invite others to contribute and add some-
thing in their turn; whereas methodical delivery, carrying the show of a
total, makes men careless, as if they were already at an end. Aphorisms
are antithetical to the seemingly endless creation both in antiquity and in
the present of philosophical systems which Bacon heartily condemns as
leading to his fourth idol, that of theater (5, p. 431). Those who follow
Bacon can make their contributions, he believes, because his methodol-
ogy is such that it can be generally adopted, because it deals with particu-
lars not systems and so can respond as necessary to new particulars, and

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 134 W. Boyd Rayward

because the simple, precise, common language that will be used to com-
municate axiomatic knowledge is available to all.

Tables of DiscoveryTo Examine Upon Interrogatories

The next step in information management or knowledge processing is
to create tables of discovery. All the particulars which pertain to the
subject of inquiry shall, by means of tables of discovery, apt, well ar-
ranged, and, as it were, animate, be drawn up and marshaled; and the
mind be set to work upon the helps duly prepared and digested which
these tables supply (6, p. 96). Bacon gives as an example how such a
table emerges from a series of inquiries about the nature and effects of
Heavy and Light. These are the questions that stimulate and guide inves-
tigation. For we can command our questions, he concludes, though
we cannot command the nature of things (5, p. 424). He is clearly draw-
ing on his background as a lawyer when in an extraordinary passage at
the end of the Novum Organon he discusses the kinds of history he in-
tends himself to write.

I mean to draw up a set of questions on the several subjects, and to

explain what points with regard to each of the histories are especially to
be inquired and collected, as conducting to the end I have in viewlike
a kind of particular topics. In other words, I mean (according to the
practice in civil causes) in this great plea or suit granted by the divine
favor and providence (whereby the human race seeks to recover its
rights over nature), to examine nature herself and the arts upon inter-
rogatories. (6, p. 263)

As the particulars are digested and arranged in tables of discovery, they

constitute in effect what Bacon calls lesser axioms. As Mary Poovey
observes, only after Bacon complained that universals did not coalesce
spontaneously out of the common experience of particulars, that they had
to constructed somehow out of the philosophers patient observation of
natural phenomena, was it possible to conceptualize a nugget of experi-
ence detached from theory as a valid unit of knowledge production (8,
p. 8). But such nuggets, though first seen as detached, isolated, and frag-
mentary, are incorporated into a process of generalization, into a just
scale of ascent . . . [as] by successive steps not interrupted or broken, we
rise from particulars to lesser axioms, and then to the middle axioms, one
above the other; and last of all to the most general (6, p. 97). Thus axi-
oms are statements of a hypothetical kind involving different levels of
generality from which theory is ultimately to be derived.

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 Francis Bacons Natural History 135

The complex issue of how axioms are themselves derived from ob-
servation, experiment, or what one might call bibliographical analysis,
and how they are related to aphorisms in Bacons thinking is not dealt
with here. The tables of discovery in which what is known is ordered, like
the natural history itself, are intended to embrace all knowledge from
individual feelings and intellectual processes to social phenomena and
the external physical world : For I form a history and tables of discovery
for anger, fear, shame and the like; for matters political; and again for the
mental operations of memory, composition and division, judgement and
the rest; not less than for heat and cold, or light, or vegetation, or the like
(p. 112).
An ideal statement of the nature and levels of knowledge processing
that the compilation of Bacons natural history would require may well
be reflected in the section of the New Atlantis in which he describes how
knowledge published abroad was acquired and then processed in the
House of Salomon. Merchants of light were sent abroad to bring us
the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts.

We have three that collect the experiments which are in all books. These
we call depredators. We have three that collect the experiments of all
mechanical arts, and also of liberal sciences, and also of practices which
are not brought into arts. These we call mystery-men. We have three
that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call
pioneers or miners. We have three that draw the experiments of the
former four into titles and tables, to give the better light for the drawing
of observations and axioms out of them. These we call compilers.

There follows a process of testing, consolidation, and the performance of

new experiments that ends in the raising of the former discoveries by
experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. Those
responsible for this process of theory building are called interpreters of
nature.

The Problem of Scientific Communication

Developing the natural history was for Bacon complex and difficult and
though he sets forth elaborate desiderata for what was to be done and
how it was to be done in order to create the new regime of knowledge
production that is his objective, he nowhere systematically addresses the
issue of how to communicate and coordinate the results of the observa-
tion and experiment on which it depends. It is true that in Book VI on the

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 136 W. Boyd Rayward

Art of Transmitting in Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning he

speaks among other things of the handing on of the Lamp, or Method of
Delivery to Posterity (5, p. 450). But these chapters, apart from the dis-
cussion of aphorism as a mode of delivery (5, p. 451), in their concern for
grammar, codes and cyphers, and rhetoric, seem not to grapple with what
looking back we may consider a central issue: the provisions that have to
be made for disseminating and cumulating discoveries as they occur within
the scientific community whose existence Bacon foreshadows. He makes
a distinction between what is presented to a general public, the crowd of
learners, from what is presented to other students who must understand
from what is said the methods and detail of what was done. But this is
rather obscurely expressed: but knowledge that is delivered to others as
a thread to be spun on ought to be insinuated (if it were possible) in the
same method wherein it was originally invented (5, p. 449).
What he sees as desirable as a basis for communication emerges in-
directly in his discussion of the inadequacies of his own work for the
natural history. His inductive natural history, he tells us, though it is bet-
ter than the negligent and inexact histories currently available, remains
problematic:

my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and would wish to
state again, is this . . . from works and experiments to extract causes
and axioms, and again from those causes and axioms new works and
experiments, as a legitimate interpreter of nature. And although in my
tables of discovery (which compose the fourth part of the Instaura-tion),
and also in the examples of particulars (which I have adduced in the
second part), and moreover in my observations on the history (which I
have drawn out in the third part), any reader of even moderate sagacity
and intelligence will everywhere observe indications and outlines of
many noble works; still I candidly confess that the natural history which
I now have, whether collected from books or from my own investiga-
tions, is neither sufficiently copious nor verified with sufficient accu-
racy to serve the purposes of legitimate interpretation. (6, p. 105)

To move forward from this state of affairs requires the participation

and cooperation of others. Bacon deals with this essentially from the point
of view of the detection and rectification of errors in his own work. This
has two aspects. The nature of the language in which observations and
experiments are to be reported (some mention of which has been made
above) and the way in which this language is to be used in constructing
the argument of these reports. In the New Organon, Bacon observes,
for example, employing a famous metaphor:

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 Francis Bacons Natural History 137

And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of

eloquence, and such like emptinesses, let it be utterly dismissed. Also
let all those things which are admitted be themselves set down briefly
and concisely, so that they may be nothing less than words. For no man
who is collecting and storing up materials for ship building or the like,
thinks of arranging them elegantly, as in a shop, and displaying them as
to please the eye; all his care is that they be sound and good. And that
they be so arranged as to take up as little room as possible in the ware-
house. (6, pp. 274275)

Simple, clear statements in ordinary everyday language will minimize

obfuscation and facilitate communication.
But in addition the reports must be presented in a clear straightfor-
ward way without any rhetorical flourishes or subtlety that might exert an
extraneous influence on the judgment of those reading them. Bacon says
that he presents what he has done naked and open. It is therefore easy
to mark and set aside his errors before the mass of knowledge be further
infected by them; and it will be easy for others to continue and carry on
my labors (6, p. 19). He has propounded his opinions everywhere
naked and unarmed, without seeking to prejudice liberty of mens judge-
ments by disputes or confutations (12, p. 119). Reports must be such
that they lead others to things in themselves and the concordances of
things, that they may see for themselves what they have, what they can
dispute, what they can add and contribute to the common stock (6, p.
19). To do this, reports about matters of interest must also indicate their
truth status: whether something is certainly true, doubtful whether true
or not, or certainly not true. In the last case, if these untruths continue to
have some currency they must in express words be proscribed, that the
science may no more be troubled with them (6, p. 259).
There is a strong thread in Bacons writing that seems to suggest that
the transmission of knowledge is group-based and by conference. He
takes it as given that the dissemination of knowledge will encourage the
creation of a shower of inventions at once useful and new. But this will
arise either as a result of individual action or as a result of the stimulation
that those who are concerned with the mechanical arts will experience
when they sharpen by conference (6, p. 417) the information that they
will receive. The notion of conference on the one hand harks back to the
disputations of medieval scholasticism to which Bacon was otherwise so
opposed, and on the other raises the issue of the legal processes by which
truth is established in the courts of law. His utopian account of a rational
knowledge-based society, the House of Salomon, is essentially a descrip-
tion of a college or a scientific institute, sufficient unto itself in terms of

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 138 W. Boyd Rayward

the generation, testing, and cumulation of knowledge. Here, presumably

knowledge is shared in person and by discussion, not by publication.
Implicit in what Bacon has proposed, the idea of carefully but sim-
ply described experimentation, the collection of instances, the generation
and testing of individual axioms, and the careful graded movement of
generalization from instances and axioms, imply so much that has be-
come part of the conventions of scientific enquiry and the publication of
science today. The question of publication as part of the scientific pro-
cess, however, was left as something that Bacons successors in the Royal
Society had to grapple with as they worked toward inventing what be-
comes the scientific journal and what Derek de Sola Price has called the
device of the learned paper. Price describes this as one of the most
distinctive innovations of the Scientific Revolution (18, p. 95). This surely
was made for the Baconian particular and axiom. This device, rooted
though implicit in Bacons understanding of the nature of knowledge pro-
duction, took on its now familiar shape only after a long period of experi-
mentation in evolving new kinds of social processes for authenticating
what is being proposed as new knowledge, recognizing individual claims
of responsibility for it, and authorizing its dissemination publicly.

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