The starting point for Bacon's reform of natural inquiry is his assessment of the present situation, which he describes as a state of ‘universal madness’ (insania universalis).Footnote 1 Men, he argues, have unknowingly exchanged ‘reason for madness [rationem cum insania], and the world for fable’.Footnote 2 Bacon, however, was not the first to make this claim. The notion that most people are insane finds a pre-Socratic precursor in Heraclitus’ statement, which Bacon knew and approved, that most people inhabit their own little worlds rather than the one common to all.Footnote 3 Kindred notions occur in Renaissance literature as a kind of satirical caprice.Footnote 4 Several of Bacon's contemporaries made isolated assertions to the same effect.Footnote 5 But to find the idea treated with comparable philosophical seriousness and analytical depth we must turn to the heirs of Heraclitus, namely the Stoics, who notoriously maintained that the foolish are mad and all but the sage are fools.Footnote 6
As Marke Ahonen points out, ‘The Stoic dictum according to which everyone, apart from the non-existent wise, is equally mad, crazy, and insane (mainesthai, insanire), was notorious in antiquity, and is cited by numerous Greek and Latin authors (comprising philosophers, poets, satirists, and medical authors) as a staple Stoic doctrine’.Footnote 7 The Stoics recognized ‘the notorious “general madness” (insania publica), which they claimed affected all mankind’.Footnote 8 For the Stoics, people are deluded because they do not correctly distinguish between what lies within their power and what does not, and so they fail to judge external impressions accurately, mixing passions with perceptions. Bacon was undoubtedly influenced by the Stoic doctrine, but he treated mass lunacy as an immediate consequence of his theory of the idols.Footnote 9 His doctrine of error (famously delineated in terms of the four idols) provides an in-depth account of why all are mad. He believes that the mind is capable of sanity but only if purged and restrained.
At the heart of contemporary institutions in both church and state lay the Organon of Aristotle – in Bacon's words, ‘a kind of art of madness’.Footnote 10 Bacon's project for the regeneration of learning required the replacement of Aristotle's Organon with his New Organon (1620). In Book 1, Aphorism 10, he suggests that ‘all our choice meditations, speculations and controversies are mere madness [res male-sana sint], except there is no one there to tell us so’.Footnote 11 The learned but unsupervised mind has the uncontrolled spontaneity of a lunatic, and yet this insanity goes undiagnosed. He is at pains to point out (again in the Novum organum) that consensus is no guarantee of truth: ‘even if men went mad [insanirent] in the same copycat way, they could still agree among themselves well enough’.Footnote 12 In fact, he declares, ‘the worst of all omens in intellectual matters is taken from consent’.Footnote 13 According to Bacon, ‘so far distant is this consensus from true and solid authority that it even induces a violent presumption to the contrary. For the famous Greek very well said “What have I done wrong?” when they joined together in applause for him’.Footnote 14
Bacon thinks that philosophers go about their business insane in the same way; they agree because they all accept the philosophical status quo. They are blind to the devastating consequences of their slavish submission to Aristotle, and institutions of learning only reinforce the prevailing madness. No institution, group, or individual escapes Bacon's indictment of existing philosophical practices. His three refutations – ‘of Native Human Reason left to itself’, ‘of Demonstrations’, and ‘of Theories, or of received philosophies and doctrines’ – are far more than mere intellectual opposition.Footnote 15 Rather, they constitute a wholesale demolition of all human learning, which, in his assessment, is rotten to the core.
By diagnosing men as mad, Bacon highlights the challenging nature of the problem: unaware of their affliction, madmen are not amenable to advice.Footnote 16 According to Seneca, the Stoic Aristo noted this feature of madness:
Between the insanity of people in general [Inter insaniam publicam] and the insanity which is subject to medical treatment, there is no difference, except that the latter is suffering from disease and the former from false opinions. In the one case, the symptoms of madness may be traced to ill-health; the other is the ill-health of the mind. If one should offer precepts to a madman – how he ought to speak, how he ought to walk … he would be more of a lunatic than the person whom he was advising. What is really necessary is to treat the black bile and remove the essential cause of the madness. And this is what should also be done in the other case – that of the mind diseased. The madness itself must be shaken off; otherwise, your words of advice will vanish into thin air.Footnote 17
Bacon takes a similar position. He does not think that madness can be simply shaken off, but he shares the view that one cannot straightforwardly offer precepts to madmen. Instead, one must first address ‘the essential cause of the madness’. This is the thinking behind his two-step procedure in the Novum organum. First, he reveals the causes of insanity (Book 1), and then he offers a practical remedy (Book 2). The doctrine of idols was meant to awaken people to their madness so that they would accept treatment in the form of his radical new method.
This paper first considers some of the reasons why Bacon's diagnosis of universal madness has been widely overlooked. To show how his theory of idols explains this diagnosis, it then focuses on the material and cultural sources of the mind's tendency towards error, in contrast to interpretations that locate Bacon's doctrine of error and recovery within the biblical narrative of the Fall.Footnote 18 We shall see that for Bacon madness has its roots in the restless and unruly imagination. Bacon's identification of the imagination as the source of error and madness leads into an analysis of the relationship between his doctrine of idols and materialist psychology. He maintains that even mental operations are motions inherent in certain constellations of suitably refined matter.Footnote 19 Thus the source of error cannot be eliminated in any straightforward manner since it is rooted in our physical constitution. The paper then considers Bacon's view that language, traditional learning bolstered by pride, and syllogistic reasoning all serve to further entrench errors, thereby compounding the madness. It concludes by indicating how Bacon's new method proposed to solve the problems he identified, and it suggests that his diagnosis of madness influenced John Locke.
An unwelcome diagnosis
Bacon was shrewd enough to know that a diagnosis of universal madness would be a bitter pill for many to swallow, and yet swallow it they must if they were to regain their sanity. In view of the harsh nature of his critique, he proceeds with caution and restraint. Writing in the third person in Cogitata et visa (c.1607), he says,
He could not forget that inveterate errors, like the delusions of the insane [tanquam phreneticorum deliramenta], must be artfully circumvented rather than exasperated by violent opposition. Accordingly, to avoid fanning rather than quenching the flames of contention … he recognised the desirability of a certain measure of prudent conformity. To this end he proposed a work on the interpretation of nature and on nature itself, designed to eradicate errors with the least possible offence and thus to effect a peaceable entry into the apprehensions of men.Footnote 20
Bacon's desire to avoid stirring up controversy helps to explain why scholars have seldom noticed his language of madness. He made his diagnosis of insanity both in the texts that were unpublished in his lifetime and in the works he actually published, including the Novum organum.Footnote 21 His early unpublished onslaught on insanity is somewhat moderated in the later published writings, yet it is nonetheless textually evidenced. This is exactly what one would expect, given Bacon's recognition that it is unproductive to try to alter men's wits in a direct and confrontational manner. As the passage above shows, he clearly and consciously realized that one does not begin to persuade one's audience by first calling them madmen. On many occasions he spoke of his desire to avoid stoking controversy; he planned instead to insinuate his views into suitably predisposed minds. He likened his strategy to that employed by Roderigo Borgia, who
was wont to say of the expedition of the french for Naples, that they came with Chaulke in their hands to marke vp their lodgings, and not with weapons to fight: So I like better that entrie of truth which commeth peaceably with Chaulke, to marke vp those Mindes, which are capable to lodge and harbour it, then that which commeth with pugnacitie and contention.Footnote 22
Bacon's problem was how to seek out suitable and receptive minds. In Valerius Terminus (c.1603), he approves the strategy ‘of publishing part, and reserving part to a private succession, and of publishing in a manner whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all’, which, he says, ‘is not to be laid aside, both for the avoiding of abuse in the excluded, and the strengthening of affection in the admitted’.Footnote 23 A number of Bacon's early unpublished writings are addressed to the ‘sons of the sciences’ (filii scientiarum), and we know that he privately circulated at least some of these writings in manuscript among a select few.Footnote 24 His published works, by contrast, relied on an esoteric mode of writing ‘that might set aside for itself and as it were adopt a suitable and legitimate reader’.Footnote 25 We would therefore expect to find some differences in tone and content between the early unpublished and later published writings. These differences should not, however, be exaggerated.
Many of Bacon's early Latin philosophical writings were not translated in the Spedding, Ellis and Heath edition of his works.Footnote 26 Benjamin Farrington later translated three texts in his Philosophy of Francis Bacon – Temporis partus masculus, Cogitata et visa, and the so-called Redargutio philosophiarum.Footnote 27 Consequently, these texts have received more attention than Bacon's other early Latin works. Among Farrington's texts, the Temporis partus masculus (c.1603–1608) stands out in that, in it, Bacon notoriously used a kind of polemic hyperbole to launch a scathing attack on the philosophers or positions he critiqued.Footnote 28 However, while Bacon's rhetorical strategy here is untypical, the overall message is consistent with his other works. As Farrington recognized, ‘the judgements expressed by Bacon in The Masculine Birth of Time … however harshly phrased, represent permanently held convictions. To understand them is to understand the essentials of his attitude’.Footnote 29 Similarly, James Spedding observes that the second chapter of the Temporis partus masculus aims to counteract the idols of the theatre and that Bacon ‘goes over the same ground in another paper entitled Redargutio Philosophiarum, and again in the Novum Organum’.Footnote 30 Bacon incorporated much of Redargutio philosophiarum (c.1607–1608) and Cogitata et visa, along with parts of other lesser known pieces such as Aphorismi et consilia de auxiliis mentis (c.1607), De interpretatione naturae sententiae xii (c.1607), and Calor et frigus (date uncertain) into the Novum organum.Footnote 31 Moreover, as Spedding notes, Partis instaurationis secundae delineatio & argumentum (c.1606–1607) outlines ‘the entire scheme of the Instauratio Magna’ and ‘agrees exactly with the design ultimately developed in the Distributio Operis’.Footnote 32 Finally, Indicia vera de interpretatione naturae (which could have been written as early as 1607) is so close in form to the Novum organum preface that Spedding decided not to publish it separately.Footnote 33 Bacon's earlier and later writings, then, exhibit remarkable consistency in that the essential elements of his project are already present in the early works.
The question of the relationship between earlier and later works leads to deeper questions about the appropriate approach to reading Bacon's oeuvre. A full discussion of this issue lies outside the scope of this paper, but it is relevant to my interpretive strategy. My approach diverges from the prevailing developmental paradigm, which assumes that Bacon's plans and ambitions developed and changed so much over time that we cannot expect the sum of his writings to yield a single comprehensive and coherent project. Rather, my view is that Bacon established his project early in his philosophical career and that later writings elaborated and expanded on it from various directions.Footnote 34 If we focus our attention on the fundamentals of Bacon's thought, the views he presents do not change significantly. Instead we have expansions and elaborations of, and supporting additions to, precisely the same doctrines, together with some omissions motivated by the desire to avoid causing needless offence. William Rawley, Bacon's amanuensis and editor, likened the lengthy revision process to the way in which ‘many living creatures do lick their young ones, till they bring them to their strength of limbs’.Footnote 35 Later editors, too, consistently refer to Bacon's early philosophical texts as ‘rehearsals’, ‘sketches’, ‘rudiments’, ‘embryos’ and ‘early drafts of materials which eventually found their way into the 1620 edition’.Footnote 36 The positions Bacon set forth in his early writings were not staging posts he later abandoned; rather, they were cannibalized, elaborated, reiterated and re-expressed according to the contexts and genres within which he redeployed them.Footnote 37 I wish to stress that I do not claim that Bacon's views in every respect were forever set in stone at the outset of his publishing career. Graham Rees, for instance, has traced the developmental trajectory of Bacon's views on spiritus through manuscript drafts and published writings with particular reference to the issue of longevity.Footnote 38 Likewise, a number of scholars have attempted to chart the development of his theory of idols.Footnote 39 But Bacon's grand vision precedes and determines the task of refining and expanding that vision over the period during which he worked on his Instauration. Although tracing the adaptations and refinements in the way Bacon presents his philosophy is fascinating and important in its own right, understanding his overall project is paramount.Footnote 40
The developmentalist approach to Bacon's writings is ill-suited to uncovering the invariant core commitments discreetly embedded throughout his works by his disseminative style of presentation. Bacon intentionally fragments his discourse, leaving the task of reintegrating the fragments to his so-called ‘sons of the sciences’. Vittoria Perrone Compagni, William Newman and Lawrence Principe have drawn attention to the use of dispersion by Cornelius Agrippa and within the alchemical tradition more generally, while Ralph Lerner and Arthur Melzer have shown that figures as diverse as Clement of Alexandria, Maimonides and Michel de Montaigne practised this technique.Footnote 41 Agrippa, for example, concludes the De occulta philosophia (1533) by advising his ‘sons of wisdom and learning’ to ‘search diligently in this book, gathering together our dispersed intentions, which in divers places we have propounded, and what is hid in one place, we make manifest in another, that it may appear to you wise men’.Footnote 42 Compagni argues, ‘It is therefore necessary to take on the supplementary task of assembling the disiecta membra of an argumentation that, though consistent, is distributed in various parts of the text, when not actually in different texts. Once this task is carried out, one will find a coherent and unexpected structure’.Footnote 43
The same applies to Bacon's texts. He deliberately disperses his thoughts within and across his works so that the onus is on the reader to reassemble the scattered fragments into a coherent whole. Consequently, reading Bacon is rather like doing an enormous jigsaw puzzle. However, not only do readers have to impose order on a chaos of fragments but they must also supply essential connections. This idea too is found in Montaigne, who advocates writing ‘without an intricate criss-cross of words, linking things and stitching them together for the benefit of weak and inattentive ears’.Footnote 44 Bacon recommends leaving gaps so that the reader is forced to supply the missing links and contribute something of their own.Footnote 45 As he puts it in the Historia vitae & mortis (1623), some ‘principles and presuppositions … I have inserted and others kept back [alia Mente seruamus]’.Footnote 46
Yet Bacon's use of dispersal throughout his works has been mostly overlooked. In part, this is because his comments about the benefits of dispersed writing are mistakenly thought to apply only to the aphoristic genre, narrowly defined.Footnote 47 Rees, for example, rightly argues that Bacon withheld certain works from publication, choosing ‘to disassemble their doctrines before cautiously infiltrating the disjecta membra into Novum organum. In Novum organum these materials were not fragmentary but deliberately fragmented’.Footnote 48 He asserts that in his treatment of prerogative instances, ‘Bacon robbed out his own system of theories about the nature of things and, publishing them for the first time, set them forth dispersedly, and in such a way that perhaps he alone knew of the connective tissue holding them together’.Footnote 49 However, Rees does not view dispersal as a general strategy that Bacon employed across his works, although he does note that ‘Bacon's cosmology can be pieced together only by drawing on many passages scattered throughout his writings’.Footnote 50 Certainly Bacon saw the aphorism as the ideal vehicle for dispersion owing to its disconnectedness, but it was by no means the only literary form compatible with this technique.Footnote 51 For example, in the preface to the Prodromi sive anticipationes philosophiae secundae (c.1620–1623), which was to form Part V of the Instauratio magna, he does not mention aphorisms but says that he has ‘decided to scatter [spargere] the thoughts themselves and not connect them by rhetorical method’; in the Sylva sylvarum (1626) he presents his ideas sparsim (dispersedly), broken into a thousand experimental fragments.Footnote 52
To my knowledge only two commentators, both of whom focus on Bacon's theory of rhetoric, argue that dispersal occurs throughout his works, and that this has important implications for how we read his texts.Footnote 53 Karl Wallace says with respect to Bacon's views on public discourse, ‘One who endeavors to sketch an accurate, intelligible picture … must deal with sources that resemble patchwork. There are a multitude of suggestions and they are scattered throughout Bacon's writings’. Wallace makes the salutary observation that ‘Bacon's works do not present a systematic exposition of rhetorical theory; and in trying to present an ordered picture one must select what appears to be the proper point of emphasis, and must arrange relevantly about it a background that shows some balance, harmony, and perspective’.Footnote 54 John Briggs goes further, suggesting that ‘all of his [Bacon's] works are dispersals of deeper intent’, and that this is a deliberate strategy on Bacon's part.Footnote 55 Briggs draws an insightful comparison between how one must read Bacon and the interpretive strategy advocated by the Paracelsian Richard Bostocke in The Difference between the auncient Phisicke … and the latter Phisicke (1585). Bostocke advises his ‘sons of science’ (filii scientiae) that
if in one place the Author write darkly, in some other place some particuler thyng maie bee found that ioyned with the other may explicate the meanyng, for they disperse their meaning in seuerall places, to the ende they would be vnderstode onely of the deligent and painfull reader and not of the vnworthie.Footnote 56
The similarities to Agrippa's approach are obvious. Dispersal, as Newman and Principe point out, ‘was expected of many chymical writers, and readers recognized their obligation to hunt down, identify, and rejoin these dispersed fragments’.Footnote 57 We should not be altogether surprised to find Bacon, whose goal was an anti-occultist science of magic, adopting a technique widely deployed by alchemists and natural magicians. There is a misconception that Bacon disapproves of their esoteric writing, when in fact what he objects to is their (mis)use of this mode of communication to conceal ‘counterfeite Marchandizes’.Footnote 58 As is clear from his comments in Valerius Terminus and elsewhere, he recommends the practice of esoteric writing, while acknowledging that it has ‘by the precedent of many vain persons and deceivers’ been ‘disgraced’.Footnote 59 Bacon does not throw out the baby with the bathwater; he retains the practice as a means to deliver real and true content.Footnote 60 Moreover, as noted above, the technique of dispersal was by no means limited to alchemists and magicians but had an illustrious precedent among a diverse range of writers, including Montaigne. The strategy of dispersal enabled Bacon, among other things, to publish his ideas to a wide audience, but ‘in a manner whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all’.Footnote 61 His aim is to ‘find and light upon those minds and spirits which are apt to be kindled’, while sidestepping those which are not.Footnote 62 In light of the above, the interpretation presented here reconstructs Bacon's account of madness on the basis of fragments scattered throughout his works.Footnote 63
If we consider Bacon's diagnosis of a ‘mental disease which rages and is epidemic’, it is not difficult to see why he would wish to address only receptive readers.Footnote 64 In his 1885 biography of Bacon, Edwin Abbott perceptively remarked, ‘We can not be surprised that an author who stigmatized the present state of learning as “universal insanity,” should contemplate the anonymous publication of works likely to make himself widely disliked, suspected, or ridiculed’. Abbott is unusual in that he recognizes the force of Bacon's argument. In his brief discussion of the idols, Abbott notes that Bacon ‘proceeds to complain that the minds of all men are blocked or branded with false fancies (idols) which preclude the acceptance of truths. This “universal insanity” requires skill in preparing the way for the truth’.Footnote 65 Abbott's interpretation is based on his reading of the unpublished Temporis partus masculus, and the ‘anonymous publication’ to which he refers above is Valerius Terminus. Although it is not in fact the case that Bacon's charge of madness is confined to his unpublished works, Abbott's assessment of Bacon's predicament is astute. Bacon was undoubtedly aware that others had been subjected to ridicule and worse for advancing similar views. In his analysis of Stoic madness Ahonen notes that ‘the doctrine of all mankind's madness was criticised and ridiculed in antiquity for its absurdity and for its negative depiction of the human condition’.Footnote 66 Bacon knew that many readers would not welcome his diagnosis of dysfunctional epistemic culture. His demolition of traditional learning did not receive a sympathetic hearing from Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library, to whom he sent the manuscript of the Cogitata et visa in 1607. Bodley's reply reveals that he was deeply disturbed by Bacon's call to ‘renounce our common Notions, and cancell all our Actions, Rules, and Tenents’ in order to begin ‘afresh to create new principles of Sciences’. Indeed, Bodley warned, ‘there is nothing more certain in my understanding, then that it would instantly bring us to Barbarism’.Footnote 67 Bacon was clearly frustrated by Bodley's failure to appreciate the gravity of the situation and his response was dismissive. He made a playful threat to ‘add a Cogitation against Libraries’ but did not engage with Bodley's criticisms. Instead, he responded,
You are, I bear witness, slothful, and you help me nothing; so as I am half in conceit that you affect not the argument … I can say no more to you, but non canimus surdis, respondent omnia sylvae [‘We do not sing to the deaf, the woods echo all’]. If you be not of the lodgings chalked up (whereof I speak in my preface) I am but to pass by your door.Footnote 68
These are the same chalked-up lodgings mentioned above, and Bodley's response has only served to reinforce Bacon's conviction that he must ‘single [out] and adopt his reader’.Footnote 69 There is no point whatsoever in singing to deaf ears or aggravating lunatics.
Bacon's decision to select readers by publishing ‘in a manner whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all’ means that one can easily overlook key features of his philosophy. Rees expressed frustration at the tendency of scholars ‘to ignore or discount what failed to suit their tastes or competence’.Footnote 70 Similarly, Bacon's early eighteenth-century editor Peter Shaw suggested with respect to De interpretatione naturae sententiae xii, an unpublished writing addressed ad filios, that should a reader ‘be shocked, disgusted, or unentertained with the following Piece, he may please to examine himself, Whether he be of the Number of those for whom it was design'd’.Footnote 71 It is noteworthy that Shaw does not shy away from discussing Bacon's thoughts on what he terms ‘Philosophical Madness’. Commenting in a footnote on Bacon's reference to Aristotle's ‘art of madness’, he explains Bacon's view in the following terms:
as in Natural Madness, Men argue upon things that have no Existence or true Foundation; so, in Philosophical Madness, we reason about things, whose History, or true State, we have no clear and certain Knowledge of, from Experiment and Observation: But as Madmen do, take all for granted, according to our frantic Notions.Footnote 72
Furthermore, Shaw notes that the topic of madness is addressed in Book 1 of the Novum organum.Footnote 73 Shaw's willingness to embrace Bacon's language of madness contrasts markedly with Spedding's reluctance to acknowledge it. The Spedding and Ellis translation of the Novum organum omits Bacon's charge of insanity in Book 1, Aphorism 10:
so that all those specious meditations, speculations, and glosses in which men indulge are quite from the purpose, only there is no one by to observe it.Footnote 74
vt pulchrae illae meditationes, & speculationes humanae, & Causationes, res male-sana sint, nisi quod non adsit, qui aduertat.Footnote 75
Interestingly, in this case Spedding thought it prudent to add a footnote informing the reader that the Latin (quoted above) reads, ‘Literally, “are a thing insane”’.Footnote 76 Fortunately, modern translators have not shied away from expressing the full force of Bacon's words. Michael Silverthorne's translation conveys Bacon's sentiments: ‘so that men's fine [pulchrae] meditations, speculations and endless discussions are quite insane, except that there is no one who notices.’Footnote 77 Silverthorne even adds a footnote remarking, ‘Pulcher seems always to be used ironically in The New Organon’.Footnote 78 Likewise, Rees's translation previously quoted accurately conveys Bacon's meaning: ‘all our choice meditations, speculations and controversies are mere madness, except there is no one there to tell us so’.
In what follows we shall see that the doctrine of idols presented in Book 1 of the Novum organum fosters an awareness and understanding of the prevailing madness. In this way, Bacon hoped ‘to make ready the minds of men as much to understand as to accept what is to come’.Footnote 79 This was essential because he knew that people would only be willing to subject their minds to the severe constraints of his new method if they understood the severity of the problem. To this end, his doctrine of idols presents what Rees aptly characterizes as ‘a psycho-pathology of the intellect’.Footnote 80 Bacon dissects the mind with surgical precision to reveal ‘the seats pores and passages’ of error.Footnote 81
The imagination as the root of madness
Agreeing with Plato that the aim of inquiry is knowledge of the ‘partitions’ or ‘real dividing lines of nature’, Bacon quotes the well-known passage from the Phaedrus: ‘he who knows well how to define and divide, is to be counted as a god’.Footnote 82 He adopts the traditional image of the mind as a mirror, but in his account it is ‘rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture’.Footnote 83 He insists that ‘the human intellect is to the rays of things like an uneven mirror which mingles its own nature with the nature of things, and distorts and stains it’.Footnote 84 Rather than providing a true reflection of nature's dividing lines, the mind alters and misrepresents reality. In what follows, we shall see that Bacon identifies the imagination as the root cause of error.Footnote 85
In the Distributio operis, the plan of the six-part Instauratio magna, Bacon describes the way in which the ‘innate’ idols ‘are rooted in the very nature of the intellect’.Footnote 86 In the Novum organum he elaborates on this idea, explaining that the so-called idols of the tribe ‘are rooted in human nature itself and in the very tribe or race of men’, while the idols of the cave ‘originate from the peculiar nature of the individual, both body and soul, as well as from education, custom and accident’.Footnote 87 It is not possible here to give a comprehensive account of the manifold errors, but the innate idols can be traced to what Bacon calls the ‘grand deception of the senses’.Footnote 88 Perceiving the world as if through a distorted mirror, people mistakenly think that ‘the sense is [the] measure of things’ when in fact ‘the testimony and information of the sense is always made to the measure of man and not the universe’.Footnote 89 Yet sense impressions, Bacon says, ‘are not very misleading’.Footnote 90 The problem is that the sense is weak and the unaided mind cannot penetrate beyond the superficies of things. Despite this limitation, or rather because of it, the mind posits imaginary causes. Unable to pierce the darkness of matter, the mind ‘longs to leap up to higher generalities to find rest there’.Footnote 91
In the Novum organum Bacon explains that the vital spirit has a ‘restless motion’ (inquietus Motus) and constantly seeks satisfaction.Footnote 92 Since the mind ‘cannot stay still or rest’, it ‘always compulsively hankers’ after a deeper knowledge of nature's hidden causes. He describes how ‘the human intellect being unable to stop still lusts after things still better known to nature’.Footnote 93 He is drawing here on the Aristotelian distinction between what is better known to nature and what is better known to us. In Aristotelian philosophy, what is better known to nature signifies that which is first in the order of being and therefore least known to us. For Bacon, what is better known to nature denotes the hidden motions of matter or ‘the very things themselves’ (ipsissimae Res).Footnote 94 He identifies the mind's leap to imaginary causes, which it erroneously regards as better known to nature, as ‘the Roote of all error’. Men, he explains, ‘haue made too vntimely a departure, and to [sic] remote a recesse from particulars’.Footnote 95 The mind shortcuts the labour of traversing the ground of particulars, climbing steadily from particulars to lesser axioms and then to middle axioms, arriving at the highest and most general axioms ‘last of all’. Instead, it immediately ‘rushes up from the sense and particulars to axioms of the highest generality’.Footnote 96 Bacon refers to this ‘impetuous and premature’ way of proceeding, whereby the mind jumps and flies up to the highest axioms, by the term ‘Anticipations of Nature’.Footnote 97
A number of scholars, including Peter Urbach and Stephen Gaukroger, argue that Bacon's notion of anticipatio is strongly indebted to the Epicurean idea of prolepsis.Footnote 98 Yet as A.A. Long explains, prolepsis refers to ‘general concepts or mental pictures produced by repeated sense impressions which are both clear and similar in kind. They persist after particular sensations cease and constitute a record of our experience of the world’.Footnote 99 For the Epicureans, then, prolepsis is an indispensable part of sensory functioning. Epicurean prolepsis thus differs significantly from Bacon's notion of anticipatio, denoting an undesirable tendency to leap to premature conclusions. As Urbach himself acknowledges, Bacon's anticipatio was ‘different in many ways’ from Epicurus’ prolepsis and ‘he also added many details completely absent from any account we have from Epicurus’.Footnote 100 In fact, Bacon's account seems to have more in common with the Stoics, who, as Richard Bett points out, ‘condemned the holding of opinions, by which was meant assenting to a non-cognitive impression’.Footnote 101 Bett also notes that, according to Sextus Empiricus, the Stoics viewed opinion ‘as a mark of folly and moral failing. The “folly” seems to consist, more specifically, in rashness or precipitancy’.Footnote 102 Sextus explains that ‘the wise man’, by contrast, ‘will in all cases suspend judgement’.Footnote 103 Similarly, the Greek anthologist Stobaeus reports that the Stoics characterized inferior men by their ‘precipitancy’.Footnote 104 According to Stobaeus, the Stoics associated precipitate assent with ignorance. Furthermore, they identified ignorance with insanity, understood as ‘unstable and fluttering’ impulses:
they say that every inferior person is mad, because he is in a state of ignorance about himself and about things concerning him, which is madness. Ignorance is the vice that is opposite to prudence, and when it generates unstable and fluttering impulses [ἀκαταστάτους καὶ πτοιώδεις … τὰς ὁρμὰς] in relation to something, it is madness [μανίαν]. This is why they describe madness in this way: it is fluttering ignorance [ἄγνοιαν πτοιώδη].Footnote 105
The Stoic ideas of precipitate assent and ‘fluttering ignorance’ bear a striking resemblance to Bacon's characterization of anticipatio as ‘the premature and precipitate onrush of the intellect and its tendency to jump the gun and fly off towards the generalities and principles of things’.Footnote 106 There is, he says, ‘an impatience of doubt, and hast to assertion without due and mature suspention of iudgement’.Footnote 107 For Bacon, as for the Stoics, precipitate assent (anticipatio) leads to ignorance and insanity. The haste with which the intellect soars to lofty generalizations is a consequence of the imagination which substitutes the ideal for the real. Confronted with an epistemological impasse, the mind resorts to flights of fancy, speculation and pure guesswork. Men thus become victims of delusion and the result is madness.
We can now explain why Bacon identifies the frenetic pursuits of the hyperactive imagination as the root cause of error and delusion. In the simplest terms, the imagination takes over the work of the intellect. The powerful and expansive imagination, faced with the intellect's inability to penetrate nature's secrets, feigns knowledge. The mind, free and unfettered from experience and particulars, unwittingly succumbs to the tyranny of the imagination. In his psychology, Bacon adopted a triadic classification of the faculties.Footnote 108 This tripartite scheme derived from the Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan, who in his Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575) argued for a division of the mind into the closely related faculties of imagination, memory and understanding.Footnote 109 Likewise, Bacon holds that the mind has just three faculties – memory, imagination and reason – and that ‘there cannot be others or any more than these’. From these ‘three fountains’ spring the three divisions of human learning: history, poetry and philosophy.Footnote 110
Ideally, the faculties of the intellect would operate within their respective ambits and not trespass on one another's domains, but in reality they overlap and do not remain within fixed boundaries. As Bacon describes the intellectual process, all knowledge begins with ‘sense, which is the door of the intellect’. The individual objects of sense make an impression on the sense via the spirits in the sense organs. Next, ‘The images of those individuals – that is, the impressions which they make on the sense – fix themselves in the memory, and pass into it in the first instance whole as it were, just as they come’. The intellect then ‘proceeds to review and ruminate’ on these, and it is here that the real trouble begins.Footnote 111 The mind, ‘exercising its true function, puts together and divides their portions’, since ‘single individuals have something in common with each other and, on the other hand, something distinct and manifold’. There are, however, two possibilities: ‘this composition and division takes place either according to the mind's own way of acting’ or ‘according to the very evidence of things, and according as they truly reveal themselves in nature’.Footnote 112 When the mind is left to its own devices, the distorting influence of the imagination means that it does not reflect things as they really are in nature.
Bacon explains that ‘the imagination performs the office of an agent or messenger’ in two domains, ‘the judicial and the ministerial’. In the judicial sphere, ‘sense sends all kinds of images [idola] over to imagination for reason to judge of’, and then in the ministerial sphere, the sphere of action, imagination communicates the judgements of reason to the will and passions so that the ‘decree’ can be executed. However, in both the judicial and the ministerial domains, this apparently clear-cut relationship between the faculties is disrupted because imagination overpowers reason. As Bacon puts it, the imagination is not ‘simply and only a messenger; but it is either invested with or usurps no small authority in itself, besides the simple duty of the message’.Footnote 113 Errors occur in intellectual matters because the imagination takes over in the judicial sphere. The production of knowledge, the centrally important feature of the intellectual process, is ruined by a tyrannous imagination. Unlike the work of reason, the play of imagination ‘commonly exceeds the measure of nature, joining at pleasure things which in nature would never have come together, and introducing things which in nature would never have come to pass’. The imagination puts together an image of the world as it pleases, ‘just as Painting likewise does’.Footnote 114 Fuelled by a powerful desire to know and frustrated by the impenetrable darkness of matter, the imagination ignores the limitations of sense and, as in poetry or painting, ‘strays and makes up what it likes’. Whereas reason is ‘bound to things’, imagination is ‘released from such ties’ and is therefore ‘constrained by no law and necessity of nature or matter’.Footnote 115
We can now understand Bacon's conviction that the imagination is the root of madness. Imagination overpowers reason, with the result that the mind ‘faithlessly implants and intermixes its own nature with the nature of things when sorting out and devising its notions’.Footnote 116 But people are unaware of this and mistake fictions for reality. They think that man is ‘the common measure and mirror of nature’ when in fact the mind ‘like an uneven mirror’ distorts the light of nature. They have mistakenly put their trust in the mind's natural capacities, not realizing that the frenetic imagination causes mayhem when it trespasses on reason's domain. Wallace points out that an account of mental functioning ‘presented faculty by faculty, can be misleading if it implies that Bacon believed that man's powers had definite boundaries, each power to be located in its own pigeonhole’.Footnote 117 The partitioning of the faculties in Bacon's triadic mental model allows him to draw a theoretical distinction between the work of memory, reason and imagination. In reality, however, although Bacon sees segregation as desirable, the faculties do encroach on one another's territory. This is because the mental faculties are motions of a subtle but ‘corporeal and material substance’ known as spiritus.Footnote 118 To fully grasp Bacon's doctrine of error, we need to examine his materialist understanding of the faculties.
The ‘mental motions’ of spirit
Scholars are divided on the issue of Bacon's materialism, particularly as it relates to the human mind. Sorana Corneanu, for example, argues that Bacon did not identify mental operations with the motions of the spirit. According to Corneanu, he ‘attributed the higher mental activities in man (memory, imagination and reason) to the rational soul and understood them to stand in a complex relationship with the motions of the material vital spirit of man’.Footnote 119 Rees found the evidence contradictory but concluded that ‘on balance Bacon does appear to assign some of the higher faculties in man to the activity of the vital spirit’.Footnote 120 Elsewhere he went further, suggesting that ‘Bacon probably thought that human voluntary motion, sensation, sense, imagination, memory, and even reason were all products of vital spirit operating in the nerves and ventricles of the brain’.Footnote 121 I argue that Bacon did indeed attribute all mental operations to the motions of material vital spirit. He was a materialist in that he treated all phenomena, including mental activity, as modes and motions of matter. As he declared in the Novum organum, Book 2, Aphorism 2, ‘nothing really exists in nature besides individual bodies, carrying out pure, individual acts according to law’ – a remark repeated almost verbatim by the arch-materialist Thomas Hobbes.Footnote 122
My claim that Bacon ascribes all mental faculties to vital spirit echoes Wallace, who regards the different faculties as modulations of spirit:
A faculty … was not an entity to Bacon; it was a mode of behavior, a distinctive movement of spirit. When it received a name, say the understanding, the label designated a certain modulation of spirit activity – the physical basis of all organic life – that seemed to be different from another modulation of spirit, say the reason.Footnote 123
Wallace holds that all ‘faculties or powers had as their vehicle the motions of spirits. Each faculty modulated, shaped, and figured spirit movement in ways peculiar to it’. In his terms, ‘Thinking is like a radio carrier wave which is modulated according to the tasks it does. The faculties are types of modulation’.Footnote 124 Furthermore, Wallace makes the crucial observation that ‘the ranges of modulation overlap’.Footnote 125 The radio-wave analogy is also helpful for understanding Bacon's doctrine of error: when modulations overlap, the result is interference and distortion. The distortion of reality, which lies at the heart of the doctrine of idols, results from overlapping motions of spirit. The idols of the tribe are common to the entire human race because they derive from the material spirit that constitutes the human mind. The fluid and dynamic interactions among the ‘mental motions’ of spirit mean that the mind is always subject to interference from the imagination, which distorts reality as it ‘mingles its own nature with the nature of things’.Footnote 126
An examination of Bacon's views on the materiality of the higher faculties leads us to consider his doctrine of the soul. Space limitations preclude a full treatment of this topic here, and so the following will focus on only those aspects directly related to Bacon's doctrine of error. In his discussion of the human soul in Book IV of the De augmentis scientiarum (1623), Bacon states that the sensible soul (i.e. vital spirit) ‘must clearly be regarded as a corporeal substance’. It is ‘a breath (I say) compounded of the natures of flame and air, having the softness of air to receive impressions, and the vigour of fire to propagate its action’.Footnote 127 He writes that the sensible soul is ‘clothed with the body, and in perfect animals residing chiefly in the head, running along the nerves, and refreshed and repaired by the spirituous blood of the arteries; as Bernardinus Telesius and his pupil Augustinus Donius have in part not altogether unprofitably maintained’.Footnote 128 Bacon's decision to mention Doni as well as Telesio in his discussion of the soul is highly significant because while Telesio's account was more ambiguous, Doni clearly attributed all mental faculties, including reason, to the one material soul or spirit.Footnote 129 In his De natura hominis (1581) Doni plainly states that spiritus ‘not only moves and senses, but seems able to do other things too … clearly it imagines, recalls, understands, reasons and remembers’.Footnote 130 He was thus quite explicit that reason (along with memory and imagination) was a function of spiritus, not the incorporeal rational soul. This identification of the soul with spiritus was, as D.P. Walker points out, ‘not only revolutionary philosophy, but also highly unorthodox theology. The few thinkers who took this step were most of them wildly heretical’.Footnote 131 Doni's work is important because it shows that ‘the absorption of soul by spirit, was in fact possible and could be asserted in a religious context’.Footnote 132
In a striking passage in the De augmentis, Bacon presents his interpretation of the myth of Pan as an example of what he terms ‘Parabolical Poesy’ in natural philosophy. Here, he clearly indicates that he shares Doni's materialist position on the soul:
Pan delights in the Nymphs, that is, the souls; for the souls of the living are the delight of the world. And with good reason he is called their commander, for each of them follow their own nature as a guide, and around him dance and lead the round with infinite variety, each after the manner of its old-established custom, and with unceasing motion. And so one of the more recent thinkers has acutely reduced all the faculties of the soul to motion, and censured the pride and precipitancy of a number of the ancients who, looking upon and contemplating memory, imagination and reason with eyes too hastily fixed, have neglected the cogitative power which holds first place. For he who remembers, or even recalls, thinks; and he who imagines, similarly thinks; and he who reasons certainly thinks. Finally, the soul, whether admonished by sense or left to itself, whether in the functions of the intellect or the affections and will, leaps according to the modulations of its thoughts; and this is that dance of the Nymphs.Footnote 133
Commenting on this passage, Robert Ellis notes that the recent thinker to whom Bacon refers is Doni, who ‘is altogether a materialist’.Footnote 134 Given that Doni's views were widely considered heretical, Bacon's favourable reference to Doni's reduction of ‘all the faculties of the soul to motion’ is daring, to say the least.Footnote 135 Bacon, too, attributes the cogitative power to the concentration of spirit in the ventricles of the brain, for which he uses the Telesian term ‘university of spirit’ (universitas spiritus).Footnote 136 The mental faculties –memory, reason and imagination – are modulations of the one corporeal spirit. This view underpins Bacon's stated intention in the Novum organum to analyse ‘the mental motions of memory, composition and division, judgement, and the rest, just as much as I would of hot and cold, or light, or vegetation, or the like’.Footnote 137 Like Doni, he asserts the unity of the sensible soul as material substance or subtle spirit, subject to physical investigation.Footnote 138
Another major influence on Bacon was the physician Girolamo Fracastoro.Footnote 139 In his dialogue Turrius, sive de intellectione (published posthumously in the Opera omnia of 1555), Fracastoro takes a vigorously naturalistic approach to the intellect and, as Spencer Pearce argues, ‘To many of his contemporaries his view of cognition as a series of relatively simple processes applied to the material images of things that affect the soul by way of the senses, the spirits, and the brain, would have appeared highly reductive and materialistic’.Footnote 140 Of particular relevance to Bacon's doctrine of error, the Turrius contains a lengthy discussion of the ‘pathology’ of the intellect, in which Fracastoro argues that ‘the first deception occurs in the phantasia’.Footnote 141
With the above background we can begin to understand how Bacon conceived of a physical basis for the conflict between the faculties of imagination and reason. Building on his theory of matter, Bacon treats the mental faculties as functional modalities of the vital spirit. He rejects the Galenic view that ‘the intellectual faculties (imagination, reason, and memory)’ reside in the ‘respective ventricles of the brain’ and thus are spatially separated from one another.Footnote 142 Rather, his position is similar to that of Huarte: ‘that all the powers are united in euery severall ventricle [of the brain], and that the understanding is not solely in the one, nor the memory solely in the other, nor the imagination in the third … but that this union of powers is accustomably made in mans body’.Footnote 143 Bacon conceives of the cogitative power as a dynamic union of motions, and his interpretation of Pan's dancing nymphs conveys the ceaseless energetic motion of spirit. The ‘mental motions’, like all Bacon's motions of matter, compete with one another for ascendancy. In the Novum organum he likens this struggle among motions to a wrestling match, and Brian Vickers's reference to ‘a constant psychomachia’ within the mind is therefore entirely apt.Footnote 144 Bacon views the mind as at war with itself – the mental faculties wrestle for dominance, with devastating consequences for natural inquiry. What happens to the ‘immediate informations of the sense’ depends on whether they come under the dominion of reason or of imagination, but since these faculties are motions of the one spirit, they are in constant competition with one another. Bacon considers the imagination to be the most powerful faculty, and for this reason he is deeply suspicious of it in certain contexts.Footnote 145 He recognizes its potential for good and for harm. In his treatment of rhetoric, for example, he discusses the ‘beneficent role’ of the imagination, as Vickers argues.Footnote 146 But in the pursuit of knowledge Bacon is adamant that the imagination is the ‘the Roote of all error’ and entirely pernicious.Footnote 147 Errors and delusions arise because the power of the imagination is such that it gets the upper hand and overpowers reason, with the result that all our speculations are ‘mere madness’.
For Bacon, it is highly significant that the mental faculties are motions of spirit because it means that the mind's propensity for error has a material source in man's physical constitution and cannot simply be eliminated. The mind's tendency to leap from particulars to general axioms has its origins in the material spirit, which ‘leaps according to the modulations of its thoughts’. The imagination, conceived as a modulation of the one spirit, cannot be excluded in any straightforward manner since it is part and parcel of our mental apparatus. The innate idols ‘are rooted in the very nature of the intellect’ because they have their origins in the motions of spiritus. Bacon's theory of idols and his views on the materiality of the mind are thus intimately connected, and this in turn has serious implications for his method. There is a common misunderstanding that, as John Dewey puts it, Bacon thought it possible simply ‘to free the mind from these idols’.Footnote 148 Perez Zagorin, for example, holds that ‘Bacon was convinced that the idols in all four categories had to be renounced and eliminated as far as possible in order to free the human understanding’.Footnote 149 Certainly Bacon saw the elimination of the idols as desirable, but he did not believe that the mind could be freed from something inherent to its physical nature.Footnote 150 On the contrary, his method aims to bind and constrain the mind's free and spontaneous movements.Footnote 151 He was utterly convinced that the mind, left to its own devices, could never arrive at true knowledge of nature. In fact, he often warns that the more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to go astray.Footnote 152 When we understand the material source of the mind's tendency to error, we can appreciate the need for a radical solution, namely a new method of inquiry that leaves little to men's wits. The method was designed ‘to curb all jumping and flying up’; in other words, to keep the capricious imagination out of philosophy.Footnote 153
People ‘bewitched’
Having explained the ‘corrupt complexion of the mind’ in terms of the innate idols of the tribe and cave, Bacon goes on to consider how language and philosophical doctrine reinforce errors, thereby compounding the madness. In addition to the idols of the tribe and cave which are inherent in our physical constitution, he identifies idols of the market and theatre which enter from without. These ‘extrinsic’ idols are, however, just as devastating in their effects.Footnote 154 The idols of the market arise from the shared use of language. They are assimilated from infancy and become permanently lodged in the mind because they are the terms in which we think and reason. Like the idols of the tribe and cave, the idols of the market ‘absolutely take possession of the mind, and cannot be wholly removed’.Footnote 155 The extrinsic idols of the theatre, by contrast, ‘have migrated into the minds of men either from the dogmas and sects of the philosophers or from misguided laws of demonstration’.Footnote 156 This idol alone can be completely ‘rejected and got rid of’.
From Bacon's perspective, the whole cultural sphere, including language, is polluted. The idols of the market derive from ‘the tacit agreement of men concerning the imposition of words and names’.Footnote 157 They gradually steal into the mind from childhood on, because ‘infants, when they learn to speak, are compelled to drink in and imbibe an unfortunate cabala of errors’.Footnote 158 Words themselves are ‘another source of illusion’ which do ‘violence to the human understanding’.Footnote 159 He explains that they derive
from the mutual agreement and association of the human race … For men associate through conversation, but words are applied according to the capacity of ordinary people. Therefore shoddy and inept application of words lays siege to the intellect in wondrous ways. Nor do the definitions and explanations with which learned men have in some cases grown used to sheltering and defending themselves put things right in any way. Instead words clearly force themselves on the intellect, throw everything into turmoil, and side-track men into empty disputes, countless controversies and complete fictions.Footnote 160
At the heart of Bacon's analysis is his claim that our notions ‘are muddled, ill-defined, and rashly and roughly abstracted from things’.Footnote 161 Because the notions impulsively abstracted from things are confused, words bear no well-defined relation to reality. We have seen that the aim of inquiry is knowledge of ‘the real dividing lines of nature’, but the intellect, like ‘an uneven mirror bends the rays of things according to its own shape and section’.Footnote 162 These false and illusory dividing lines then become more deeply etched in the mind because words are ‘imposed according to common capacity, and divide things up on lines most obvious to the ordinary intellect’.Footnote 163 There is thus a close relation between the idols of the tribe and of the market. Words, Bacon says, ‘are a kind of currency, which reflect vulgar opinions and preferences, for they combine and divide all things according to popular notions and acceptations, which for the most part are erroneous and thoroughly confused’ owing to the meddling imagination.Footnote 164 We exchange this currency of words with our fellow human beings as if they signify something real in nature, when in fact the words merely signify conventional (faulty) notions. As he puts it in The Advancement of Learning (1605), they are nothing but ‘the Current Tokens or Markes of popular Notions of thinges’.Footnote 165 It follows that if the notions are vague and ill-defined, then so too are the words we assign to them.
Bacon says that the idols of the market ‘are the greatest nuisances of the lot’ because they are extremely difficult to dislodge once they have dug themselves in. We cannot simply move illusory dividing lines ‘the better to match them to nature’; words, according to Bacon, ‘turn and bend their power back upon the intellect’.Footnote 166 He likens the rebellion of words against reason to a Tartar's bow because the Tartar horsemen could fire their arrows behind them. ‘The juggleries and enchantments of words’, he writes, ‘will in many ways seduce and forcibly disturb the judgement, and (after the manner of the Tartar bowmen) shoot back at the understanding from which they proceeded’.Footnote 167 Like the Tartar arrows, words ‘cast their rays, or stamp their impressions, on the mind itself’.Footnote 168 The idols of the market further entrench existing errors and introduce new ones. Bacon therefore concludes that ‘this defect of language must be reckoned a serious and dangerous one’.Footnote 169
This leaves the idols of the theatre, which are ‘superinduced by corrupt theories or systems of philosophy, and false laws of demonstration’.Footnote 170 This is the only class of idol that can be entirely removed. In the Novum organum Bacon summarily dismisses all existing philosophies on the ground that since they are products of the imagination, they are all fictions:
the philosophies received and discovered are so many stories made up and acted out, stories which have created sham worlds worthy of the stage … Nor … do I mean this only of entire philosophies but also of the many principles and axioms of the sciences which have drawn their strength from tradition, credulity and carelessness.Footnote 171
The received philosophies are stories, not philosophy, because they result from the free play of the imagination rather than the work of reason. Under the influence of their imaginations, philosophers have created ‘sham worlds’ and shunned the real world. Hence Bacon approves of Heraclitus’ saying that men have ‘looked for the sciences in their own little worlds and not in the big wide world that is common to all’.Footnote 172 As things stand, people are unaware that their minds are ‘bewitched’ by all manner of fictions and illusions, as ‘ghosts’ and ‘phantasms’.Footnote 173 However, he insists that when minds are put in touch with reality, then that ‘subtlety of disputations and of words’ which has captivated men's thoughts will be revealed ‘as a thing of play and a kind of spectre and enchantment’.Footnote 174 Thus Rawley commented in his prefatory letter to the posthumous Sylva sylvarum that Bacon sought a way ‘to unloose men's minds, being bound, and, as it were, maleficiate, by the charms of deceiving notions and theories’.Footnote 175
In the context of discussing illusory philosophies, Bacon also highlights the deep-seated connection between imagination, pride and madness. He uses the term ‘idol’ in part because of its immediate association with cultic worship. With good reason, Michèle Le Doeuff urges us not to lose sight of the ‘cultic dimension’ of the idols whereby they are venerated and apotheosized.Footnote 176 They are neither straightforward fallacies nor the mere appearances of things; their referents have become the objects of worship and fanatical devotion. The allusion to idolatry indicates the superstitious worship of false gods and the demeaning and dishonouring of the true God. The Baconian idols divert attention from the truth, not about God but about nature. Bacon identifies a human tendency to self-deification, and he argues that pride ‘has brought men to such a pitch of madness [dementiae] that they prefer to commune with their own spirits rather than with the spirit of nature’.Footnote 177 He observes that ‘in inquisition of nature they have ever left the oracles of God's works, and adored the deceiving and deformed imagery which the unequal mirrors of their own minds have represented unto them’.Footnote 178
Plato is subjected to scathing criticism on the ground that his philosophy displays the worst excesses of contemplative thinking. Platonism is an imaginary system that inflates self-importance and induces pride. Behind the pride that refuses to grapple with natural phenomena ‘stands another exalted but deceitful view, from which it draws its force, to wit, the doctrine that truth is the native inhabitant of the human mind, not something that comes into it from outside’. According to Bacon, the ‘true name’ of this error is the ‘alienation of the mind’ (alienatio mentis); it is ‘an aberration of mind, loss of reason, delirium’.Footnote 179 When Plato ‘lyingly said that truth dwelt in the human mind as a native and not a migrant from elsewhere’, and taught men ‘in the name of contemplation to wallow in their own blind and most confused idols’, he ‘committed a capital fraud’.Footnote 180 This ‘divorce from particulars’ is the ruination of philosophy, and Bacon describes it as among ‘the darkest idols of the mind’.Footnote 181 More dangerous still, Plato fortified his philosophy with religion, ‘For the worst thing is the Apotheosis of error; and, when reverence sides with rubbish, we should regard it as a plague on the intellect’.Footnote 182 Human pride in the inherent divinity of the intellect has ‘ruined all by conferring the title sacred on certain fleeting meditations instead of reserving it for the divine signature on things’.Footnote 183 Platonic contemplation is nothing but a communing with one's own spirits; it is a form of primitive divination based on an unreal sense of our innate divinity. So, despite his induction and concern for forms, Plato is more a poet than a philosopher, and he contaminates philosophy with theology.Footnote 184 No wonder that in the preface to the Novum organum, Bacon castigates those who ‘have done terrible damage to philosophy and the sciences’ through excessive pride or overconfidence.Footnote 185 The intersection of philosophical nonsense and hubristic pride is the height of folly. He describes in highly uncomplimentary terms how ‘men flatter themselves and fall over each other in their admiration, or adoration almost, for the human mind’.Footnote 186 Although the root cause of error is the hyperactive imagination, ‘the real truth’, he declares, ‘is that the obstacle to the course I propose lies not in its obscurity or its difficulty, but in human pride’.Footnote 187
It remains to consider Bacon's refutation of syllogistic demonstration, a form of reasoning which, he argues, can only manipulate what is already known and thus serves merely to reinforce existing errors. The ‘evil’ disposition of the intellect to leap ‘is made worse by dialectic used for the sake of ostentatious disputations’.Footnote 188 He describes ‘depraved demonstrations’ as ‘like the castles and strongholds of the Idols’ and maintains that ‘those which we have in dialectic work so as virtually to enslave and surrender the world to human thought, and human thought to words’.Footnote 189 Bacon's dislike of syllogistic reasoning derives from his belief that men's notions are confused because they are rashly abstracted from sense impressions. He exposes syllogistic demonstration as a ‘sleight of hand’, pointing out that
the syllogism is made up of propositions, propositions of words, and words are the tokens and signs of notions. Thus, if the very notions of the mind (which are as the soul of words and the basis of this whole fabric and structure) are ineptly and recklessly abstracted from things, and vague, insufficiently delimited and circumscribed, and indeed rotten in many ways, everything collapses.Footnote 190
Syllogistic demonstration can only lead to knowledge if the notions are true, since notions are the foundation of all syllogizing. If the notions themselves are confused abstractions, then the words are ill-defined and misleading with regard to reality, and the propositions which are made out of words are faulty and illusory. The maxim ‘garbage in, garbage out’ encapsulates Bacon's critique of the syllogism. Because syllogistic demonstrations build on popular notions, they lack a solid foundation and construct nothing but castles in the air. Hence Bacon says of dialectic that
this remedy comes too late to a cause already lost once the mind has been invaded by the habits, hearsay and depraved doctrines of daily life, and beset by the emptiest of Idols. Thus … the art of dialectic bolts the stable door too late and cannot recapture the horse, and does more to entrench errors than to reveal the truth.Footnote 191
‘The deliberations of a syllogism are’, as Stanley Fish points out, ‘defensive rather than exploratory; it is committed from the beginning to something that is assumed to be true … and will admit evidence only in support of it’.Footnote 192 Given that our notions are confused, and given that everything which follows the arrival at a notion is therefore wrong, syllogism cannot put things right. In Bacon's view, the syllogism ‘has done more to establish and shore up errors than open the way to truth’ since it relies on notions which are themselves a product of the mind's erratic sallies.Footnote 193 This is the thinking behind Bacon's bold claim in his introductory address to the Novum organum that ‘there never was the slightest hope that the errors which have flourished and will forever flourish would (if the mind were left to itself) put themselves right one after another either by native force of intellect or the help and support of dialectic’.Footnote 194 It is also the reason why he says that Aristotle ‘composed a kind of art of madness and enslaved us to words’.Footnote 195 In the case of the syllogism, ‘the medicine just cannot cope with the disease, and is not even free of disease itself’.Footnote 196 Bacon sees that words, theories, pride and syllogistic reasoning exacerbate errors arising from the interference of the imagination. Hence he proclaims that the Instauration ‘is really a lawful end and termination of limitless error’.Footnote 197
The ‘machine of the intellect’
In the Novum organum, Bacon uses a striking analogy to convey the present condition of universal madness:
let us stop briefly and look at this example as in a mirror: let us suppose (if you will) that some gigantic obelisk had to be moved to grace a triumph or some such splendid occasion, and men set about the task with their bare hands, would not a disinterested bystander regard that as an act of complete madness? And madder still if they upped the number of workers, and expected that to do the trick? And would he not declare that they were yet more insane if they went on to sort the weak from the strong and vigorous, and only use the latter, and expected to achieve their aim in that way? And would he not exclaim that they were only labouring to show that there was method in their madness if, not content with their progress, they appealed last of all to the art of gymnastics and called up men with their hands, arms and sinews well oiled and medicated as that art prescribed? Yet in intellectual matters men are driven by much the same mad impulse and uselessly concerted efforts when they hope for great things from the massed ranks and concurrence of minds or from their excellence and acuity, or when they strengthen the sinews of the mind with dialectic (which may be seen as a type of mental gymnastics). But meanwhile (if you reckon it right) they do not leave off using the naked intellect however much attention and effort they expend.Footnote 198
Since the mad are oblivious to their pathological condition, the obelisk image invites the reader to take a step back and observe the current situation from the perspective of a spectator. In Bacon's view, ‘the frail and crippled faculty of human intellect’ is simply not up to the task of inquiry, and to attempt to solve this problem by collaborative efforts, superior intellects or ‘mental gymnastics’ in the form of dialectic only adds to the madness.Footnote 199 Having pointed out the prevailing madness in the preface to the Novum organum, he proceeds in Book 1 to present the theory of idols, which explains how and why this situation has come about. His doctrine of error reveals that ‘the naked intellect’ lacks the capacity to penetrate nature's hidden depths, and the current antics of philosophers only compound the problem.
One might expect that Bacon's doctrine of error would lead to pessimism and despair, but he regards it as a source of optimism and hope. Although ‘the intellect left to itself and running free’ can never provide a true reflection of reality, his new method of inquiry offers an alternative to the free and spontaneous mind.Footnote 200 His diagnosis of the causes of madness leads him to conclude that, as he puts it, ‘There remains but one way to health and sanity: to do the whole work of the mind all over again, and from the very outset the mind should not be left to itself but be constantly controlled, and the business done as though by machines’.Footnote 201 When we understand Bacon's doctrine of error, we can understand the thinking behind his new method or ‘machine of the intellect’.Footnote 202 He is committed to the notion that mental functioning can be indefinitely improved by a kind of methodological segregation of the faculties. Although the idols of the tribe and cave are innate and cannot be eliminated, they can be circumvented. He achieves this by outsourcing aspects of sense, memory and reason, the first in the natural and experimental history, the second in the tabularizing of instances, and the third in the process which he calls ‘legitimate Induction’. These constitute his ‘three ministrations: the ministration to sense, the ministration to memory, and the ministration to mind or reason’, which he conceives as an alternative to the unaided intellect.Footnote 203
Briefly, the method entails that sense data from the natural and experimental history are registered in ordered tables of discovery. Whereas the unassisted mind is bewildered and distracted by a dizzying array of phenomenal experiences, the tables present sense data ‘marshalled in such a way that the intellect can get to work on them’.Footnote 204 The mind is prevented from ‘running free’ and forced to ‘buckle down to the organised assistance made ready by these tables’.Footnote 205 Thus the tables keep the mind bound to reality so that it cannot ‘bounce and fly up from particulars to remote and almost the most general axioms’.Footnote 206 During the inductive phase of inquiry, the tables of presence, absence and degree deal with abstract impressions (themselves derived from sense impressions immediately received from individual objects of sense). What remains is the judgement of presence or absence of the targeted quality and the subsequent cautious exercise of the intellect in devising encompassing axioms – immediately put to the test by experiment. Bacon's eliminative induction performs the work of reason: composition and division take place ‘according to the very evidence of things, and according as they truly reveal themselves in nature’. Hence while the Novum organum aims ‘to expound the doctrine of improving and perfecting the use of reason in the investigation of things’, it does so by exteriorizing the function of reason in the form of tables of comparison, thus excluding definitively any interference by imagination in the processing of the relevant data.Footnote 207
We can now see what Bacon means when he says, ‘Men are very far from realising how strict and disciplined a thing is research into truth and nature, and how little it leaves to the judgment of men’.Footnote 208 Bacon's intellectual machine effectively takes over the work of the mind.Footnote 209 As he writes in the Novum organum, his plan is ‘to reject for the most part the work of the mind that follows upon sense; in fact I mean to open up and lay down a new and certain pathway from the perceptions of the senses themselves to the mind’.Footnote 210 The Baconian method provides an alternative external pathway from sense perceptions to the mind so that the intellect can be ‘governed and guarded’ at all times.Footnote 211 Henceforth philosophy will not depend ‘only or mainly on the powers of the mind’.Footnote 212 Bacon knew, however, that this was hardly an enticing prospect since it required people to surrender their freedom to speculate.Footnote 213 People would only be willing to subject their minds to ‘harsh laws and severe discipline’ if they understood the causes of error and its devastating consequences. His diagnosis of universal madness, which he traced to the unbridled imagination, was to act as a wake-up call. He hoped that men would cease to ‘mistakenly admire and magnify the powers of the human mind’ and instead accept ‘true helps’ in the form of his new method.Footnote 214 Only then, when the mind's contact with reality was restored, would madness finally give way to sanity.
John Locke on universal madness
Understanding Bacon's diagnosis of madness and its causes is important both because he conceived of his method as an antidote to insanity and because this feature of his thinking seems to have made a considerable impact on later philosophers. Neil Wood and Peter Anstey argue that Bacon had a significant influence on Locke's thinking.Footnote 215 Anstey notes that ‘after Boyle, Bacon was the best represented writer in natural philosophy in Locke's library’, and Locke ranked Bacon among the ‘great discoverers of truth, and advancers of knowledge’.Footnote 216 Locke's views on the subject of madness were extremely influential, but his debt to Bacon deserves further investigation.Footnote 217 Such an inquiry promises to advance our understanding of the relationship between Locke's doctrine of error and what Roy Porter terms ‘a massively influential theory of madness’, which he suggests Locke may possibly have formulated ‘by way of afterthought’.Footnote 218 However, when viewed in the light of Bacon's diagnosis of universal madness, the essential connection between Locke's theory of error and his ideas on madness can be clearly discerned. Like Bacon, Locke sought to ‘trace this sort of Madness to the root it springs from, and so explain it, as to shew whence this flaw has its Original in very sober and rational Minds, and wherein it consists’.Footnote 219 He regards madness as a condition that ‘universally infects Mankind’, and while he acknowledges that it may seem ‘harsh’ to use the term ‘Madness’, he insists that ‘opposition to Reason deserves that Name, and is really Madness’.Footnote 220 Locke, as Louis Charland observes, maintains that ‘we must be forthright about the universal presence of, and propensity for, madness in the general population, if we are to arrive at a true account of its nature and fully understand its “Roots”’.Footnote 221
In a well-known passage in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke describes madness in terms that echo Bacon:
mad Men … do not appear to me to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning: but having joined together some Ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths; and they err as Men do, that argue right from wrong Principles. For by the violence of their Imaginations, having taken their Fancies for Realities, they make right deductions from them.Footnote 222
Locke considered the imagination to be the most powerful mental faculty and he identified it as the source of madness, writing in his journal years earlier that ‘Madnesse seemes to be noething but a disorder in the imagination, and not in the discursive faculty’.Footnote 223 Locke notes that when the imagination works on ideas stored in the memory, it ‘joyne[s] severall Ideas togeather which we never observed to exist togeather’. Thus he recognizes the power of the imagination to alter ideas in the memory: ‘the imagination, not being tied to any pattern’, has the freedom to add ‘what colours, what Ideas it pleases’. Madness results because the mind mistakes those ideas ‘supplied only by the phansy’ for ‘those Ideas which come immediately by the senses from externall objects soe that the minde takes one for tother[,] its own imaginations for realitys’.Footnote 224 This bears a striking resemblance to Bacon's view that the root cause of madness and error is the deceptive power of the imagination that ‘intermixes its own nature with the nature of things’. People mistakenly think that the mind provides a true reflection of reality, when in fact the image is distorted because the imagination ‘exceeds the measure of nature, joining at pleasure things which in nature would never have come together’. Furthermore, scholars have drawn attention to the fact that Locke was a physician as well as a philosopher and was therefore interested in the physiology of the brain and the functions of animal spirits. Jess Keiser argues that, for Locke, ‘the root of madness could be located in the body and brain. More specifically, Locke contended that madness's propensity to both blind and confuse the understanding was a result of animal spirits carving smooth pathways into the corporeal mind’.Footnote 225
Nor do the similarities end here. Locke also says that the mad ‘argue right from wrong Principles’; that is, they reason correctly from false premises, ‘having taken their Fancies for Realities’. To illustrate this point, he invites us to consider the following case: ‘you shall find a distracted Man fancying himself a King, with a right inference, require suitable Attendance, Respect, and Obedience’.Footnote 226 In other words, a man who falsely believes he is a king may reason correctly from that false premise that he ought to be treated as a king, and thus arrive at a false conclusion. We have seen that Bacon makes a similar point when he discusses how syllogistic reasoning serves only to entrench error. He rejects syllogistic demonstrations not on the ground that they do not work, but rather on the ground that since our notions are confused, everything that follows the arrival at a notion is wrong, and so syllogism cannot put things right. In Bacon's terms, dialectic ‘comes too late to a cause already lost’ because the syllogism merely builds on faulty notions, but cannot challenge them nor discover anything new. In Of the Conduct of the Understanding (published posthumously in 1706) Locke praises Bacon for recognizing that traditional logic ‘has done more to establish and shore up errors than open the way to truth’.Footnote 227 He too argues that ‘Syllogism, at best, is but the Art of fencing with the little Knowledge we have, without making any Addition to it’.Footnote 228 Like Bacon, he points out that it is perfectly possible to reason correctly from false beliefs, but that all that follows will also be false. Consequently, as Charland puts it, ‘the delusions – wrong, or false beliefs – of the mad often have a fixed, permanent, character, and are not easily dislodged by reasoning or other means’.Footnote 229 For this reason, Locke says it is important ‘to take care that the first impressions we setle upon our minds be conformable to the truth and to the nature of things, or else all our meditations and discourse there upon will be noe thing but perfect raveing’.Footnote 230 The solution for Locke, as for Bacon, is not syllogism but ‘haveing often recourse to ones memory and tieing downe the minde strictly to the recollecting things past precisely as they were’, which ‘may be a meanes to check those extravagant or turning flights of the imagination’.Footnote 231 Furthermore, just as Bacon says that the idols of the cave ‘originate from the peculiar nature of the individual, both body and soul, as well as from education, custom and accident’, Locke holds that the ‘wrong Connexion in our Minds of Ideas’ becomes ‘cemented’ through ‘Education’, ‘Custom’ and ‘Chance’.Footnote 232 And in the same way that Bacon's idols of the market highlight the deceptive power of words that merely reflect ‘popular Notions of thinges’, Locke argues, ‘If we consider, in the Fallacies, Men put upon themselves, as well as others, and the Mistakes in Men's Disputes and Notions, how great a part is owing to Words, and their uncertain or mistaken Significations, we shall have reason to think this is no small obstacle in the way to Knowledge’.Footnote 233
In short, Locke appears to have been heavily influenced by Bacon's ideas about madness and error. The analysis presented here supports Wood's claim that ‘much of Locke's account of the sources of error of the human understanding seems to have been inspired by Bacon's doctrine of the idols’.Footnote 234 Locke embraced key features of Bacon's doctrine of error, including his view that universal madness was an immediate consequence of the unruly imagination. Moreover, like Bacon, he understood that calling attention to madness was a necessary step towards finding a remedy. In Locke's terms, ‘if this [madness] be a Taint which so universally infects Mankind, the greater care should be taken to lay it open under its due Name, thereby to excite the greater care in its Prevention and Cure’.Footnote 235
A focus on Bacon's diagnosis of universal cultural insanity allows us to appreciate the ruthless, radical daring of his doctrine of the four idols. His comprehensively destructive critique of contemporary learning is a razing of the ground preparatory to a new beginning. Understanding the disabling impact of the idols in the inner and outer worlds allowed Bacon to devise a method to countermand or outflank the effect of the idols as much as possible and remove the taint of imaginative contagion from experimentally based natural inquiry. This new edifice of learning and culture would rest securely on the foundations of a dynamic indestructible matter matched with a materialist psychology. This would be the Great Instauration.
