The Dignity and Advancement of Bacon

TT'RANCIS B A C O N denied the circulation of the blood, didn't understand the work of Galileo, rejected Gilbert on magnetism and Copernicus on the sun. He was not a scientist, but a lawyer, a practical politician, and a man of letters; he created no new science, but preached a new philosophy—though by William Harvey it was disparaged as the work of one "who writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." By which he meant, one may assume, that there was a certain amount of "ham" in Bacon. In every sense he was a child of his age; his contemporaneousness doubtless stems from the fact that today we are all Elizabethans at heart. Yet Bacon was nothing if not a prophet, the bellwether of a new generation of scientists. He envisaged a world perfected by a reformed science, and though he made no striking or successful experiment contributing any important fact to man's store of natural knowledge, with conscious power and statesmanlike eloquence he gave authentic voice to a philosophy of inductive science unimagined by others who were, in reality, better scientists than he. There was in Bacon's philosophy the spirit of adventure, even as in the exploits of Hakluyt, Drake, and Raleigh. Like Galileo, Tartaglia, Descartes, and Newton, he strove for the emancipation of physical doctrine from the presuppositions of scholastic ontology and espoused epistemology as the rational highway to the goal of all natural science. "It is idle," he wrote, "to expect any great advancement in science from the super-inducing and grafting of new things upon old. We begin anew from the very founDr. Shera is Dean, School of Library Science, Western Reserve University. He delivered this speech at Monteith College, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, on the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis Bacon.