Bacon and Descartes. Instead of mingling their science with theological posi-
tions, they presented it in as pure and unentangled a form as possible. This
was in sharp contrast to previous self-announced radicals. Bruno, a defender
on occasion of Copernican astronomy and other scientific innovations, pro-
claimed Christ a magus and hermeticism and magic as the bases for universal
religious reform. Campanella, less heretical, limited the appeal of his philoso-
phy by attaching it to the religious politics of church reunification under the
pope. The strategy of Bacon and Descartes went entirely the other way. Both
were conventionally respectful to religion; both assiduously avoided theological
specifics and any taint of heresy. Their philosophy was designed not to rise or
fall with the fortunes of religious reform. It was a philosophical revolution
precisely because it successfully claimed an autonomous attention space.
Bacon was a busy lawyer, politician, and litterateur; in science he was a
dabbler, but this was his advantage over specialized scientists writing on
method, since he could take an overview of the broadest ideological basis for
every field of investigation. Bacon wove science into a classification of all the
branches of knowledge, comprising poesy (knowledge of the imagination),
history (knowledge of memory), and philosophy (knowledge of reason) (De
Dignitate 2.1). Bacon’s most striking claim is that “the art of discovery” itself
may advance, and that with its use “the discovery of all causes and sciences
would be but the work of a few years” (New Organon, 130, 112). Bacon
captures most explicitly the underlying social characteristic of the scientific
revolution, the emergence of rapid-discovery science.
That is not to say that Bacon’s method formulated what the scientists had
actually been doing, nor did it provide any real guidance to the work that was
to come. Bacon was more of a philosophical outrider to the scientific revolution
than its leader. His inductive program was to collect information and classify
and compare it in “Tables of Difference,” from which principles of successively
higher generality might be derived. It was not the method of Copernicus and
Kepler in astronomy, nor of Galileo’s physics, nor even of Vesalius and the
anatomists. Although Bacon touches on subtle points regarding unobservables
and experimentation and occasionally mentions mathematics, his emphasis is
on the overall effect of his rhetoric rather than penetration or even consistency
in the details. His description of Salomon’s House is of a royal endowment
indiscriminately collecting marvels and reports from travels and from old
books, with only a minor part from new observation and experiment; it reads
like a Baconian set piece from his Essays depicting the perfect garden adorned
with every flower and fruit. The New Atlantis is one of Bacon’s more popu-
laristic works, but the propagandistic touch is characteristic. Bacon’s vision
served later to give some legitimation to the Royal Society but did not fore-
shadow its activities very closely. The active scientists no doubt welcomed
564 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths