Bacon’s support but deprecated his advice; Harvey said, “He philosophizes like
a Lord Chancellor” (CMH, 1902–1911: 5:724).
Bacon’s creativity was grounded in the intellectual networks around the
English court, where scientific interests were best represented by men Bacon
considered his rivals. The royal physician Gilbert published his famous com-
pendium of information on the magnet in 1600, five years before Bacon set
out his program with The Advancement of Learning. Bacon frequently cites
Gilbert as exemplar of an obstacle to the true method, overgeneralizing from
“the narrowness and darkness of a few experiments” (New Organon 64.347;
also Bacon, 1965: 349, 233). Another rival was Raleigh, who introduced
potatoes and tobacco in the 1590s from his explorations of the Americas, did
chemical experiments, and wrote a History of the World in 1614 while impris-
oned in the Tower. Bacon, who had switched to the winning side in the same
court intrigue which ruined Raleigh, prosecuted him officially and brought
about his beheading in 1618. Bacon’s scientific efforts were in the same vein
as his rivals’; he carried out a few scrappy collections on “The Natural History
of Winds,” on “Life and Death,” and planned vast compendia, never finished,
on topics such as “The History of Sympathy and Antipathy of Things” (Bacon,
1965: 9–10). The only sciences that Bacon knew much about were the natu-
ralist observations, and these were the areas where interest had been building
but no techniques of discovery had emerged such as those in the mathematical
or mechanical fields.
Bacon’s method reflects these connections. The method of collection and
comparison was most appropriate for the naturalist. We find a parallel ver-
sion of “Baconian” inductivism formulated independently in Hamburg, in the
1630s, in a work of logic by Jungius, otherwise known for his classification
of plants and chemicals.^32 Bacon sharpens his arguments against the looseness
of Gilbert’s experimental inferences, whom he lumps with the alchemists.
Experiment, as represented by the alchemical practice of repeated heatings and
refinings, is not enough to establish a broad basis of knowledge; wide com-
parisons of similarities and differences should take one further. He observes
too that narrowly seeking immediate practical results does not pay off, and
deprecates “idle magical ceremonies” of just the sort that Raleigh and his
assistant Harriot were reputed to carry out in their notorious “School of
Night” (New Organon 52.392, 349; Gatti, 1989). Bacon too was an offshoot
of the network of empiricists and occultists which gathered around the court;
but he was an offshoot of opposition, critically assessing the others’ shortcom-
ings, and building his critique into a general method.
The real distinction of the Elizabethan court was not scientific but literary.
Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare were already famous in the 1580s
and 1590s. The literary and philosophical-scientific networks are connected,
Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science • 565