Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 131
consensus which transcends the limits of what can be reasonably termed
‘philosophy’ and adopts the sweeping pathos of an all-embracing ideology, we
can profitably read this anonymous passage 5 from the Quarterly Review—a
sample of Bacon’s cult in Victorian England:
The Baconian philosophy, having for its object the increase of human
pleasures and the decrease of human pains, has on this principle made all
its brilliant discoveries in the physical world, and having thereby effected
our vast progress in the mechanical arts, has proved itself to be the allsufficient
philosophy.
This evaluation has radically changed in our century. Bacon’s philosophy has
been solemnly declared a fraud, bearing, as a methodology, no relation
whatsoever to the heritage of the true founding fathers of modern science—all of
them representatives of mathematically inspired patterns of thought, that is, men
such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes or Mersenne. Thus, any talk about
Bacon’s methodology has been dismissed as ‘provincial and illiterate’. 6 Now and
then, however, Baconian apologiae have appeared, for example Paolo Rossi’s
book Francesco Bacone. Dalla Magia alla Scienza (Italian original published in
1957), 7 but it is a most telling sign of the ostensibly difficult position that wouldbe
apologists have to defend that nowadays the terms of the debate are most of
the time centred around the ‘arts of communication and rhetoric’, the general
history of ideas, politics and literature, rather than dealing with philosophy proper. 8
Reminders such as Paolo Rossi’s have been all too rare, and scant attention has
been paid to Bacon’s philosophical credentials:
One very obvious thing must not be forgotten: the science of the 17th and
18th centuries was at once Galilean and Baconian and Cartesian. 9
Yet, the sense in which a branch at least of the new science was Baconian
remains opaque if a precise answer is not given to this precise historical query:
what exactly makes a science Baconian?
Now, it is the great merit of T.S.Kuhn to have solved (partly at least) this
scholarly enigma by providing a highly plausible profile of that new entity in
Western culture: the Baconian sciences which, both as regards their objects of
knowledge and their methodology, entered the sanctioned canon of secular
research about half a century after the death of their inspirer. Contrary to his
mathematically tutored counterpart, the Baconian natural philosopher aspired to
isolate some humble pieces of knowledge by drawing copious histories or
inventories of the phenomena under investigation—sometimes viewing them for
the first time as worthy objects of study—and then cautiously and provisionally
theorizing on his findings. 10 In brief, the Baconian natural philosopher created or
partook of a novel ‘style of scientific thinking’. 11 The contention that
experimenting in certain new fields of research— e.g. magnetism, electricity,