312 Thurs
methodological meditations of William Whewell, whose 1840 Philosophy
of the Inductive Sciences headed a long list of writings on method, and John
Stuart Mill, whose 1843 System of Logic engaged Whewell in a prolonged
battle over the proper means of making knowledge.^13 Instead of revolving
around something called scientifi c method, however, such talk centered
on a different series of keywords, especially “fact” and “induction.”
Invocation of these two terms frequently culminated in what histori-
ans have often, and contemporaries sometimes, called Baconianism. The
term derived from the name of the late- sixteenth- and early- seventeenth-
century English essayist, courtier, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon.
In his New Organon, he claimed that previous practitioners of natural phi-
losophy had tended to fl y upward to generalities too quickly. Bacon ar-
gued that the proper method of fi nding truth proceeded inductively from
“senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that
it arrives at the most general axioms of all.” As the seventeenth century
ended and the eighteenth progressed, Anglo- American authors increas-
ingly cast the study of nature in Baconian terms. By the early 1800s, Bacon
had achieved a kind of iconic status. In 1845, a columnist in the Southern
Quarterly Review announced that “Lord Bacon, of all philosophers, was
the only true one,” who divined the only “natural and equitable mode
of acquiring knowledge”—that is, proceeding inductively from particu-
lar facts to generalities.^14 Bacon was mentioned as a methodological role
model far more often than his nearest competitor, Isaac Newton, who was
typically associated with his work on gravity rather than with setting any
ground rules for science. In 1831, Newton’s biographer, David Brewster,
complained that Newton “is represented as having owed all his discover-
ies to the application of the principles of” Bacon.^15
From the modern point of view, Baconianism often implies a certain
degree of parochialism. As Brewster’s complaint suggests, some contempo-
raries seemed to agree. But in practice, like the scientifi c method of a later
age, early- nineteenth- century methodological rhetoric was elastic enough
to accommodate a wide range of interpretations. While many thinkers,
such as John Stuart Mill, championed a strongly fact- centered and induc-
tive method, others, including John Herschel and William Whewell, sug-
gested the value of hypothesis in the study of nature. Whewell in particu-
lar rejected a single- minded focus on facts and defended not only the use
of hypothesis but also the necessity of certain inherent intuitions, such as
space and time, to make sense of basic observation. Yet, neither Herschel,
who included an engraving of Bacon on the title page of his Preliminary
Discourse, nor Whewell completely discarded Bacon’s ideas and both pack-
aged their proposals in terms of induction.^16 Many practicing American