Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science

  • John Henry
Icon Books/Totem Books: 2002. 176 pp. £9.99/$15
Dark forces? Gerrit Dou's painting Astronomer by Candlelight evokes a world of mystery.

The sensational claims of the book's subtitle are highlighted by a cover illustration of Gerrit Dou's mid-seventeenth-century depiction of an astronomer working by candlelight, hinting at some sort of supernatural skulduggery. It must be said that Dou's astronomer doesn't look anything like Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, and there are bound to be Bacon scholars who would baulk at the idea of magic and apocalyptic visions having much to do with baconian natural philosophy. But John Henry's short study makes an interesting case for looking at the supposed father of modern science in a slightly different light.

Some recent criticism of Bacon has taken issue with his continued pre-eminence in so many fields, and Henry readily admits that the man “made no new discoveries, developed no technical innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature”. But he is convinced of Bacon's importance as “a philosopher of science — perhaps the first one who really mattered”. Before Bacon, he argues, “there was no such thing as science in our modern sense of the word”. He points to three key factors comprising Bacon's importance: an insistence on experimental method rather than armchair speculation; the notion that a new knowledge of nature should be turned to the practical benefit of mankind; and the championing of inductive over deductive logic. “In a very real sense,” he concludes, “Bacon invented modern science.”

This is all quite traditional. Where Henry makes the case more pertinently is in his reading of Bacon's motivations: one practical and one spiritual. Following recent biographical emphases, Henry stresses Bacon's status as a career civil servant, saying he “always believed that the fully comprehensive and practically useful science he envisaged could only properly be pursued under the aegis of the state”. This vision, most fully explained in the description of Solomon's House in Bacon's fable New Atlantis, remained unrealized in his own lifetime. But Bacon was prophetic, Henry argues, in understanding the need for state subsidy of scientific experiment.

Perhaps the most compelling section of the book deals with Bacon's “magic”, by which Henry means religion. Here he makes a more convincing case than many for the profoundly religious underpinning of Bacon's philosophical project. The title page of the 1620 Novum Organum famously pictures the Straits of Gibraltar, the very edge of the Old World, and the motto “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia” (“Many will go to and fro, and knowledge will be increased”). As Henry notes, the line is taken from the Book of Daniel (chapter 12, verse 4), and Daniel is to the Old Testament what Revelations is to the New — here, then, is the apocalyptic vision.

Bacon firmly believed that he was living in the era in which the scriptures predicted that knowledge would increase beyond all recognition. Had not the past decades seen crucial advances in learning, warfare and navigation, in the form (respectively) of the printing press, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, he asked? Part of his Instauratio Magna was entitled Parasceve, the Greek word for 'preparation', but particularly the day of preparation for the Sabbath, the ultimate Sabbath of the Day of Judgement. “What else can the prophet mean... in speaking about the last times?” Bacon asked rhetorically in his Refutation of Philosophies in 1608. “Does he not imply that the passing to and fro or perambulation of the round earth and the increase or multiplication of science were destined to the same age and century?”

Henry expounds his case with the contagious, even bullish, enthusiasm of the committed teacher. The book is carefully pitched at an interested but not necessarily informed readership, and has a useful glossary of the more opaque technical terms and a brief practical guide for further reading. But although Knowledge is Power will find its primary audience as an introduction to Bacon, it still has something to offer the seasoned Bacon scholar.