Francis Bacon

Before building, Bacon means to purge the mind of what distorts it: these are the four idols (idola), the systematic biases of knowledge. Idols of the tribe, inherent in the species, which lends nature more order than it has; idols of the cave, proper to each individual and his history; idols of the marketplace, slipped into thought by language and ill-made words; idols of the theatre, the received philosophical systems taken as so many fables played out on a stage. A belief is therefore justified not by tracing it back to a first indubitable intuition, but by the reliability of the process that produces it, once the mind is scoured of its idols and submitted to the experimental rule. The warrant lies on the side of method, not of an inner foundation.

Four kinds of idols beset the human mind.Novum Organum, I, §39

Novum Organum, I, §38-68 (the idols)

Long before positivism, Bacon raises the methodical knowledge of nature into the royal road of human learning, alone capable of growing and bearing fruit, where the philosophy of the schools turns in circles. He does not go so far as to dismiss every other truth, for he reserves a domain of its own to religion, but he strips the metaphysics of the Ancients of its authority and makes experimental inquiry the arbiter of what we may legitimately hold to be known.

The Advancement of Learning, I-II · Novum Organum, I, §79-92

If method is worth reforming, it is because there are, beneath the phenomena, real forms and laws to be discovered, not invented. The whole Baconian reform presupposes an ordered nature, independent of our mind, whose right knowledge fits its structure; knowledge is moreover measured by its operative power over things, the warrant that it has grasped the real and not a fiction of the mind.

Novum Organum, II, §1-4 (the doctrine of forms)

Bacon rejects at once the skepticism that despairs of knowledge and the dogmatic assurance of systems, which "decide" too quickly. His way is gradual ascent: rising from facts to axioms by sure degrees, without leaping to premature generalities. Certainty is not a starting point but the term of a patient, correctable march, in which one posits nothing one has not tested. It is less a fallibilism than a certainty slowly won, by the exclusion of errors.

Novum Organum, I, §19-20 and §104

Against the prejudice that reveres Antiquity as the age of wisdom, Bacon reverses the argument: the Ancients were the youth of the world, and it is we, coming after so many accumulated centuries, who are the true elders. The authority of the received masters has therefore no value in itself; knowledge is not an inheritance to preserve but an open building site, indefinitely perfectible. This trust in the reforming power of reason holds first for the sciences; in politics, the great servant of the Crown remained cautious, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Novum Organum, I, §84 · The Advancement of Learning, I

Knowledge, for Bacon, is cumulative: each generation inherits the gains of the last and can surpass them, so that the history of the sciences traces a march toward the better, not a cycle nor a decline from a golden age. His "great instauration" assumes that humanity can progress and that the future, better equipped, will outdo the past. This direction remains above all that of knowledge and its fruits, not a general law of all history.

Novum Organum, I, §84 and §129

New Atlantis sketches an ideal city, Bensalem, organized around "Salomon's House": Bacon uses the utopian genre to picture what a society governed by science would be. But it is a utopia of a singular kind, which does not project a perfect social order to be imposed on people: it imagines above all the institution of collective knowledge, while the seasoned statesman of the Essays remains a shrewd judge of human beings as they are, hence a position only moderate.

New Atlantis

Bacon conceives his enterprise as a bequest: he sows for harvests he will not see, founds a knowledge whose benefits will accrue to ages to come, and works for posterity more than for his own time. Yet this orientation toward those who will come is not the preservation principle of a Jonas, who seeks to shield future generations from our power: it is the reverse, the hope of handing down that increased power to them as a benefit.

Novum Organum, preface to the Great Instauration

Salomon's House makes the inquiry into nature a collective work, parceled into coordinated tasks, and sets it at the summit of human dignity: to transform the world through methodical labor honors and fulfills the human being, far from being a mere chore. Still, Bacon prizes this work for its fruits and the utility it yields, which keeps an instrumental share in it.

New Atlantis (Salomon's House)

Bacon sharply separates the two books in which God may be read, that of Scripture and that of nature: science must keep to second causes and borrow nothing from theology, which for its part falls to faith and revelation, not to proof. To confuse the two spoils both, as the scholastics did. He thus keeps for religion its own domain, intact but distinct, which places him on the side of separate domains rather than Thomist harmony.

The Advancement of Learning, II · Novum Organum, I, §65 and §89