Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 133
the term had come to express in most Western languages. 16 Thus, Bacon
explicitly refers to God as ‘Deus universi, conditor, conservator, instaurator’(II,
15). Or, as he puts it in the celebrated lines of Novum Organum II, 52:
Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from
his dominion over Creation. Both of these losses, however, can even in this
life be in some part repaired, the former by religion and faith, the latter by
arts and sciences.
(IV, 247f.; I, 365f.)
Further yet, when Bacon expresses himself in a more sober manner, what he
seems to present as his own golden age of thought turns out to be the pre-
Socratic period, as though the tradition of ‘yet former ages’ had an unexplored
potential that modern thought, however innovative, could perhaps restore but
hardly surpass or emulate.
Bacon’s instauratio ab imis fundamentis (‘a new beginning from the very
foundations’, IV, 53) in fact leads from past-oriented humanism and
Christian ideas of innovation to the early modern concept of revolution, for
which antecedents become irrelevant. Instauratio is a flexible vehicle that
helps Bacon to leap that distance. 17
There is a second starting-point in Bacon’s speculations which is not, historically
speaking, so tied to the particular kind of culture to which Bacon belonged and
against which he reacted. Like Plato’s Myth of the Cave or Kant’s Dove of
Reason, Bacon’s typology of human error can be understood and appreciated
(and in fact it usually is) outside the specific province of Bacon’s philosophy. So
his theory of the Idols or canonical forms of error imprinted on the human mind
(Nov. Org. I, 39–41) is one of the most brilliant precedents of later attempts at
systematically building up a catalogue or anthropological classification of
ideologies. 18 Mankind, according to Bacon, is fatally prone to err for a variety of
reasons. As a species, it has its own limitations which make error inescapable; such
intellectual and sensory constraints are called Idola Tribus or Idols of the Tribe,
and there is no hint of an optimistic note as to whether they can be overcome or
cured (Nov. Org. I, 399–41). Moreover, each man, when trying to know anything,
invariably brings with him his own set of preferences and dislikes, that is, his
own psychological make-up, which will colour whatever he attempts to cognize
in its purity. These prejudices are the so-called Idola Specus or Idols of the Cave
(Bacon is alluding to Plato’s image in Republic 514A–519D), to which all of us,
as individuals, are subject (Nov. Org. I, 42). Further yet, man is the hopeless
victim of the traps and delusions of language, that is, of his own great tool of
knowledge and communication, and hence he will fall prey to the Idola Fori or
Idols of the Marketplace, which unavoidably result from his being a speaking
animal (Nov. Org. I, 43). And, lastly, the very act of entering into intercourse