Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 67

Bacon argued that letters of the Latin alphabet are conventional signs, but the

Chinese characters recently reported to the Europeans^84 were “real characters, not

nominal” which he said

represent neither letters nor words, but things and notions; insomuch that a number of

nations whose languages are altogether different, but who agree in the use of such charac-

ters... communicate with each other in writing; to an extent that indeed any book written

in characters of this kind can be read off by each nation in their own language.^85

Words are signs that can represent the world, or they can be false and misleading,
which he called “Idols of the Marketplace, ... idols which have crept into the under-
standing through the alliances of words and names.”^86 Slaughter comments that for
Bacon linguistic problems merely reect conceptual problems. He wrote,

[t]here is no soundness in our notions whether logical or physical. Substance, Quality,

Passion, Essence itself, are not sound notions; much less are Heavy, Light, Dense,

Rare, Moist, Dry, Generation, Corruption, Attraction, Repulsion, Element, Matter,

Form and the like; but all are fantastical and ill dened.^87

Bacon goes on to say that we can be pretty sure that words for animal species and

simple sensory perceptions are accurate enough:

Our notions of less general species, as Man, Dog, Dove and of the immediate percep-

tions of the sense, as Hot, Cold, Black, White, do not materially mislead us; yet even

these are sometimes confused by the ux and alteration of matter and mixing of one

thing with another. All the others which men have adopted are but wanderings, not

being abstracted and formed by proper methods.^88

So, there is a method (organon) one must adopt to do this properly, says Bacon:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one

ies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these prin-

ciples, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and

to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives

axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so it

arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.^89

Bacon, in effect, treats science as a bottom-up process of generalization, in opposition

to the top-down classication practiced by the Aristotelians. As Slaughter comments,

enumeration under Bacon’s methodology is followed by classication, which is the “criti-

cal operation in the discovery and the denition of the essences of things. Natures could

(^84) Porter 2001.
(^85) Quoted in Slaughter 1982, 40.
(^86) Bacon 1960, I.lix; cf. Slaughter 1982, 92.
(^87) Bacon 1960, I.xv.
(^88) Bacon 1960, I.xvi.
(^89) Bacon 1960, I.xix.