Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

138 FRANCIS BACON AND MAN’S TWO-FACED KINGDOM
unfolding of the whole inquiry: unde terminatur questio (I, 294; IV, 150).
Amongst other things, such privileged or prerogative instances (like main
witnesses in a judicial hearing) are to help the investigator to establish the three
canonical tables of Baconian inductio, that is, of Absence, Presence, and Degree
of the natura in question, according as to whether a given phenomenon or natura
appears always on its own, always accompanied by another, concomitant
phenomenon, or sometimes varies in its conjunction according to circumstances
that the investigator has to determine or manipulate (IV, 149–55; I, 261–8). Now,
it is self-evident that the result of all these procedures is to isolate the
phenomenon X, with whose manifestation we started, in order to find a kind of
explanation (forma) of its essence or innermost being, as Bacon profusely
illustrated with the cases of heat and motion in Novum Organum II, 20. In his own
worked-out example, heat turns out to be, after all due rejections have been
made, a species or particular class of motion, duly qualified and distinct. But
here something exceptionally important happens. It is not the inductive work, that
is, the summative or accumulative operation consisting of tabulating the different
types of heat and their concomitant naturae, that seems to be functioning now,
but a calculated series of deductive procedures aiming for the most part at
eliminating redundant material in the form of a battery of deductive tests, that is,
prerogative instances whose ‘inductive’ role is to serve as a deductive canon.
These instances are sometimes falsification procedures of sorts, sometimes
verificationist or probative attempts. For clarity, let us dwell on the following
example. Bacon is here discussing the natura and forma of weight, that is, the
best explanation which could answer this particular query: is weight, as a natura,
a quality inherent in all bodies (something akin to form and extension) or is the
weight of a particular body a variable depending on that body’s distance from the
Earth? The following reasoning belongs to Bacon’s induction, but its deductive
credentials are impeccable when he casts his argumentation into the scheme of
an instantia crucis, or Instance of the Fingerpost in Victorian English:
Let the nature in question be Weight or Heaviness. Here the road will
branch into two, thus. It must needs be that heavy and weighty bodies
either tend of their own nature to the centre of the Earth by reason of their
proper configuration [per proprium schematismum]; or else that they are
attracted by the mass or body of the Earth itself [a massa corporea ipsius
Terrae] as by the congregation of kindred substances, and move to it by
sympathy [per consensum]. If the latter be the case, it follows that, the
nearer heavy bodies approach the Earth, the more rapid and violent is their
motion; and that the further they are from the Earth, the feeble and more
tardy is their motion (as in the case of magnetical attraction); and that
this action is confined to certain limits [intra spatium certum], so that if
they were removed to such a distance from the Earth that the Earth’s virtue
could not act upon them, they would remain suspended like the Earth
itself, and not fall at all.