Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

140 FRANCIS BACON AND MAN’S TWO-FACED KINGDOM
struggle in the particles is modified also; it is not sluggish, but hurried
[incitatus] and with violence [cum impetu nonnullo].
(Nov. Org. II, 20; iv, 153; i, 266)
This is, in Bacon’s phrase, the ‘first vintage’ or permissio intellectus, which is
obviously a way of saying his first hypothesis after the exclusions and rejections
resulting from the Tables. Now, it would be utterly useless to seek the relevant
adjectives (incitatus, expansivus…) in the foregoing Tables—those indeed that
make possible the exercise of ‘inductive’ reason—nor in the main thesis itself,
namely that heat is a species of motion of such and such a kind. Bacon’s
reasoning now is neither deductive nor inductive but analogical, that is, it seems
to leap beyond what logic proper would allow. If Bacon calls these highly
speculative jumps permissiones intellectus, and the moment the mind is allowed
to make them vindemiatio or vintage, then one has to stress that in such stages
negative instances are the most valuable and trustworthy of all: major est vis
instantiae negativae (Nov. Org. I, 46). This, of course, no verificationist would
adopt as a guideline. But when, how and why is it ‘permissible’ for the human
intellect to proceed to such flights of creative imagination is something Bacon
leaves embarrassingly in the dark: his approach is, so to speak, phenomenological
as regards the inquiring mind, rather than, as with Descartes and
others, foundationist or legitimatizing. Thus, that heat is a motion of such and
such characteristics is the result of our ‘first vintage’ in the investigation of that
phenomenon or natura, but as a theoretical statement it only possesses a certain
degree of certainty: the method of inference is gradual (Nov. Org. II, 18), and
hypothetical (Nov. Org. II, 18, 20). All this notwithstanding, a crucial
qualification should be made here, and this sends us back to our chief thesis
about Bacon’s being a proponent of the ergetic ideal or of a maker’s knowledge
type of epistemology. In a nutshell, although the statements resulting from the
first vintage are not in themselves theoretically definitive or binding and, in
Bacon’s gradualist epistemology, they are subject to further revisions and
refinements, all of them should be true in one all-important aspect, that is, as
rules of action or as recipes for the successful manipulation of Nature. That is
why the above aphorism continues in one breath:
Viewed with reference to operation, it is the same thing [res eadem]. For
the direction is this: If in any natural body you can excite a dilating or
expanding motion, and can so repress this motion and turn it back upon
itself, that the dilatation shall not proceed equably, but have its way in one
part and be counteracted in another, you will undoubtedly [proculdubio]
generate heat.
(IV, 155; I, 266)
That Bacon’s ‘rule of action’ has rather a conative character should not detain us
here. The essential point to grasp is that, though the process of investigating