1. Introduction

The origins of this essay lie in a form of perplexity: in the two best and most authoritative English editions of Francis Bacon’s Novum organum (1620), the Latin term ingenium is translated in a bewilderingly large number of ways. For the nineteenth-century doyen of Bacon studies, James Spedding (and the anonymous translator with whom he worked), it could be rendered as “disposition,” “wit,” “mind,” “spirit,” “reason,” and the capacity for producing “contrivances.”Footnote ¹ Meanwhile, for the recent scholar who has done most to enhance the knowledge and appreciation of Bacon’s philosophy, Graham Rees, the term comprehends “wit,” “mind,” “judgment,” “intellect,” “mettle,” “talent,” “brains,” “ingenuity,” “reason,” and “skill.”Footnote ² Further, a similar variety obtains in the Spedding and Rees translations of Bacon’s other Latin writings, which, as Marta Fattori’s compendious labors have confirmed, are shot through with the discourse of ingenium in its various forms.Footnote ³ While translating early modern Latin into present-day English is an undertaking that can never answer to the principles of Occamite simplicity, one could be forgiven for concluding that Bacon’s use of ingenium has been interpreted with a little too much license.

And yet to those who have had occasion to use their editions, it would be supererogatory to insist that Spedding and Rees worked with due care and attention: both were flexible and exact Latinists who attempted to illuminate the sense of Bacon’s prose as they understood it. Furthermore, their conviction that ingenium occupies an unusually elastic semantic field is lexicographically sound. It originally signified any “innate or natural quality, nature” — that is, the quality in virtue of which a given object or entity is what it is. But in time, its principal sense became more specialized, denoting the qualities that distinguished particular human beings, or groups of human beings: “natural disposition, temper, mode of thinking, character, bent, inclination,” along with “natural capacity, talents, parts, abilities, genius.” The adjectival form ingeniosus tends to reinforce the second of these usages, and is defined as “intellectual, superior in intellect, endowed with a good capacity, gifted with genius, of good natural talents or abilities, clever, ingenious.”Footnote ⁴ As the Oxford schoolmaster and eventual bishop of Winchester Thomas Cooper (ca. 1517–94) summarized in his Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), although ingenium is “the nature, inclination, disposition, or propertie of a thyng: also witte,” ingeniosus suggests the condition of being “wittie” alone.Footnote ⁵ It would be easy to adduce other examples of this sort from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: the equation of ingenium with wit was widespread and entirely standard in early modern English. Indeed, toward the end of the 1590s, Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was able to poke fun at the inkhorn term ingenuity, having it do duty for wit in the mouth of a courtier who is as pretentious as he is undiscerning.Footnote ⁶

Such considerations make it imperative to address at the outset a problem of terminology, translation, and style that no attempt to assess Bacon’s engagement with the Latin ingenium can reasonably evade: like almost all his contemporaries, Bacon habitually made do with wit for ingenium when working in English.Footnote ⁷ Writing in the twenty-first century, the temptation to follow suit is considerable, on grounds both of convenience and historical responsibility. Unfortunately, linguistic evolution means that this option is only available at prohibitive cost: wit has long been resonant with eighteenth-century understandings of the term relating to unexpectedness, humor, and verbal brilliance, and there is no ready way to prevent these from suffocating earlier definitions of what C. S. Lewis accurately but inelegantly labeled “wit-ingenium.”Footnote ⁸ Instead, and self-consciously faute de mieux, this essay begins by using ingenium and ingenuity interchangeably.

Putting to one side the group of meanings clustered around character, disposition, temper, and so forth, the immediate question must be whether ingenium, ingenuity, or the early modern English wit can legitimately be said to have signified talent, ability, intellect, intelligence, cleverness, judgment, imagination, reason, mind, understanding, and spirit. Whatever other claims are made in the following pages, their paramount concern is to demonstrate that although ingenium certainly connoted some of these things, it did not connote others. In particular, it will become clear that in Bacon’s hands, ingenuity represented a range of psychological attributes that demanded sustained attention and cultivation, but that were crucially distinct from those that empowered logical, philosophical, or otherwise discursive analysis.

That said, any attempt to pin down Bacon’s vocabulary might justly seem fraught with danger. In the first place, Bacon was notable for the way in which he appropriated and then redefined conventional philosophical vocabulary. A good case in point is philosophia prima (first philosophy), a Scholastic locution for metaphysics that Bacon radically redefined as a summary branch of philosophy, something that aided the discovery of connections between areas of study that had become separated by the overrigid boundaries of the academic disciplines.Footnote ⁹ A second difficulty is that Bacon was seldom wholly consistent in his usage, and over time could change the sense of his vocabulary and the field of reference in which he employed it. Take the Advancement of Learning (1605), in which Bacon describes imagination, memory, and reason as the three “partes” of the human “vnderstanding.” By the time this passage came to be reworked for the Latin De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), Bacon’s emphasis had changed: imagination, memory, and reason are now treated as the three “faculties” of the “rational soul.”Footnote ¹⁰ In a word, Bacon’s philosophical writings are conceptually and terminologically dynamic; although the lines of Bacon’s intellectual evolution from the early 1600s to the 1620s are relatively easy to discern, they should not obscure an awareness of just how much his writings can differ from themselves.

In exploring Bacon’s use of ingenium it is vital to keep these two caveats in mind, but they need not impede an appreciation of the topic that is at once simpler and more revealing than has hitherto been the case; Bacon’s approach to the set of overlapping semantic spheres that comprised early modern ingenium remained consistent, even as the contexts of his usage changed.

This essay falls into four discrete but interconnected sections. The first reconstructs the broader field of ingenium as treated in sixteenth-century humanist philosophy, rhetoric, poetics, and mechanical-architectural theory; the second examines Bacon’s uses of the term; the third assesses how Bacon’s uses of the term can enhance an understanding of the new philosophical methodology by which he set such store; the fourth builds on the versions of ingenium discussed in the previous three sections, and uses them to reconsider the appropriation of Bacon’s methodological ideas in the fifty or so years after his death. Discussing Bacon’s use of ingenium in this manner has claims to historical and conceptual sensitivity. It also provides for better-informed, and occasionally corrective, readings of some key passages in the Baconian corpus. More fundamentally, it enables us to discern that while Bacon’s reformed system for acquiring knowledge of the world has an important role within it for ingenious thinking, it cleaves to the approach of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics in ranking the products of intellect and philosophy far above those of ingenium and inventiveness, and in so doing rejects the writings of many sixteenth-century humanist dialecticians. Furthermore, an awareness of how little Bacon’s methodology had to do with ingenuity suggests that many self-identifying Baconians of the mid-seventeenth century — including those in and around the early Royal Society — seldom paid attention to the details of what Bacon’s writing entailed. Disregarding Bacon’s carefully parsed distinction between the role of ingenium and that of the intellect, they flattened out Bacon’s philosophical program into something concerned with usefulness and the undertheorized accumulation of particulars. Attending to the nuances of ingenium as employed by Bacon not only lays the foundations for more discriminating interpretations of the Baconian method, but realigns the prism through which the historical phenomenon of Baconianism should be viewed, in both the seventeenth century and beyond.

2. Varieties of Ingenium in the Long Sixteenth Century

A good place to begin any exploration of early modern philosophical vocabulary is the lucidly eclectic Lexicon philosophicum (1613) compiled by the Marburg professor Rudolph Goclenius (1547–1628).Footnote ¹¹ Under the heading of “ingenium,” Goclenius began with the general definition that it is the “innate force and nature of each and every thing,” and the specific definition that it is the “power of effectively and easily discovering and making in humankind, and the power of memory.” As a supplement to the specific definition, Goclenius gave two examples of its improper usage (both of which, one may surmise, must have been fairly commonplace for him to have felt the need): analogically, in being attributed to animals like parrots or elephants, and metonymically, in describing those arts that have been learned or discovered through ingenious activity. Each of Goclenius’s specific uses is important to understanding Bacon’s use of ingenium, and so is what he wrote next: “Ingenium, spoken of most properly, is a disposition of the rational faculty of the rational soul, [and is] for perceiving something, or discovering it, or teaching it. Or ingenium is the natural ability or faculty, by which we teach, and through [which] we ourselves think, or discover something.”Footnote ¹²

His account proceeds to align ingenium with the Aristotelian euphuïa (good natural parts) and eumátheia (teachability), terms that are not elucidated in the logical works of the Organon.Footnote ¹³ With this in mind, Goclenius suggested that ingenium was comparable with agchinoia, or native quick-wittedness in arriving at the middle term of a syllogism, introduced at the end of book 1 of the Posterior Analytics in contradistinction to the noûs-based understanding on which demonstrative knowledge must depend. (In Latin, this shrewd mental dexterity would usually be rendered as sollertia.)Footnote ¹⁴ The final point to emphasize from Goclenius’s account is the variability of each individual’s ingenium: “The diversity of ingenium hangs sometimes on the disposition of the body, sometimes on the different dispositions of the mind, and the constitution of the organs, and the complementary faculties, as of the fantasy (or imagination). The distinctions of ingenium are various. For instance, the ingenium can be subtle, or somewhat coarse, acute or blunt. Perspicacious or less perspicacious, fast or slow, sharp or less sharp.”Footnote ¹⁵ As his authority on diversity of ingenium, Goclenius cited the Universa philosophia de moribus (1583) of the Paduan professor Francesco Piccolomini (1520–1604), but he might also have turned to the medical tradition.Footnote ¹⁶ For instance, in 1575 the Spanish physician Juan Huarte (1529–88) had published his Examen de ingenios, in which he undertook to codify differing human ingenia with a view to determining each individual’s vocational aptitude, and to educating him accordingly.Footnote ¹⁷ The novelty and power of Huarte’s work on ingenium made an immediate impact throughout early modern Europe, but, as Huarte himself avowed, it grew out of foundations laid in Galenic medicine: specifically, in Galen’s Quod animi mores corporis temperatura sequantur, which uses the theory of the temperaments to explore the ways in which human mental and physical behaviors are interrelated.Footnote ¹⁸

Much more could be said about Goclenius’s overview of ingenium, but for this essay’s purposes three of its dimensions stand out. Ingenium was a cognitive power of human beings (occasionally attributed to animals), something that enabled an individual to make connections between different areas of his knowledge, but that operated at a lower level than the faculties that enabled logical thinking, i.e., the noûs-based understanding; it was a cognitive power that depended, somehow, on the “complementary faculties” (or internal senses) like imagination and memory; and it was something that was often associated with innate quick-wittedness, but that more properly encompassed many different types of cognitive disposition, including those of the fox, hedgehog, parachutist, truffle hunter, and dolt.

Moving beyond the scope of Goclenius’s account, there are several other Renaissance and early modern traditions in which ingenium was an important term of art. The most pertinent of these can be examined under the headings of rhetoric, poetry and visual aesthetics, and mechanics and architecture.Footnote ¹⁹ All have attracted large scholarly literatures in the course of the past half century or so, and all have some bearing on Baconian ingenuity.

The most important of these three traditions is Roman rhetoric, the lynchpin of humanist education throughout the long sixteenth century. Here, particularly for Quintilian, a student’s ingenium is presented as the basis of all rhetorical proficiency, principally as the natural predisposition for hunting out arguments, without which effective rhetorical inventio could not hope to proceed. Although inventio is the etymon of the modern English invention, it is more accurately thought of as the “discovery” — or, rather, the creative rediscovery — of prearranged arguments within the imaginary space of the orator’s loci, or places. Ingenium was also envisaged as a gift for making connections between apparently different things or ideas, thereby providing an orator with the wherewithal to generate metaphors, something as important to inventio as it was to elocutio.Footnote ²⁰ Erasmus (ca. 1467–1536) thus framed the two books of his enduringly popular De copia (1512–34) explicitly to develop the ingenium of the embryonic rhetorician.Footnote ²¹ Elsewhere, and to the dismay of partisan Ciceronians, Erasmus followed Quintilian in insisting that each individual should adopt a rhetorical style consonant with his own ingenium, rather than unthinkingly imitating the manner of Cicero or any other authority.Footnote ²²

Furthermore, in the hands of many sixteenth-century humanists, inventio was redefined as a province of both rhetoric and dialectic, thereby extending the range of ingenium beyond the ken of even the most dexterous orator. For Erasmus’s sometime protégé Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), ingenuity comprised the “universal power of our mind,” and warranted a form of philosophizing that was far more acute than those dependent on syllogistic rationality — one that would do away with the specious certainty of the Schoolmen, and offer in its place a dialectical art framed with clear moral purpose.Footnote ²³ Given that ingenium was the universal power of the mind, syllogistic was itself a product of ingenious thinking. The problem was that Scholastic logic was ugly, useless, and unintelligible: its proponents abused their often-abundant reserves of ingenuity in remaining attached to it.Footnote ²⁴ A treatise on dialectical invention first published in 1534 by Joannes Visorius (d. 1568) was titled simply Ingeniosa, and an emphasis on harnessing ingenuity was commonplace within the topical logics developed by Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407–57), Rudolph Agricola (1444–85), Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), and many others working in their wake.Footnote ²⁵ In his Dialecticae institutiones (1543), Petrus Ramus (1515–72) would amplify this intellectual reconfiguration in studiously provocative terms. One seeking to understand the native human facility for disserendi (discoursing) should not consider the self-professed rationality of a Scholastic logician, but should instead consult laborers at work in the vineyards: “from their ingenium, as in a mirror, the image of nature will be reflected.”Footnote ²⁶ Even for those otherwise unsympathetic to Ramism, such as the Oxford scholar John Rainolds (1549–1607), ingenium was a power that transcended, even dissolved, the boundary between logical and rhetorical thinking, confirming the true nature of dialectic as a tool for teaching.Footnote ²⁷

Moving on to poetics and the visual arts, ingenium was the imaginative talent through which the poet, painter, or sculptor was able to imitate, and even to surpass, the created world in his works. Again, in most accounts this talent was taken as something that needed to be perfected by the disciplines of the relevant artes, a view canonically affirmed in Horace’s Ars poetica. Furthermore, as the Renaissance progressed, creative ingenium came more and more to be infused with a semidivine version of the furor derived from Plato’s Ion.Footnote ²⁸ To take an unexceptional example from the later sixteenth century in England, the De re poetica (1573) of Richard Wills (1546–79?) maintains that poetry is none other than the suitable “ordering of the ingenium” (“conformatio ingenii”): poetic ingenium is thus a quality of mind that finds expression and validation in the very act of making a poem, rather than an instrument with which to fashion a poem with claims to mimetic value.Footnote ²⁹ The point is reaffirmed by Henry Dethick (1547–ca. 1613), whose Oratio in laudem poëseos (1572–76?) holds that ingenium is a form of inspiration that transports the poet’s creative qualities far above the realm of mundane historicity.Footnote ³⁰

A particularly arresting example of what is at stake here is found in the edition of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander published in 1598, in “completed” form, by George Chapman (1559–1634). The epigram on its title page reads “Vt Nectar, Ingenium,” or “as nectar, so ingenium.”Footnote ³¹ At one level, this is just a flattering conceit, in which those who buy and read the book are compared to gods enjoying the nectar of Marlowe’s ingenuity. But the witticism goes further than this, and distorts the famous lines that begin Seneca’s eighty-fourth Epistle. Here, just as the bees’ natural qualities enable them to transform their industriously gathered nectar into honey, so the thoughtful reader and writer should use his ingenium to refine the fruits of his reading. In the poet, artist, or rhetorician, it was the power of such ingenuity that enabled the transformation of observed reality (qua nectar) into illuminating and intellectually nutritious new mimetic forms (qua honey).Footnote ³² In contrast, Marlowe’s ingenium is not presented as something that converts his reading and observations into poetry; instead, it serves as poetic agent and its own subject matter. It transforms itself into poetic honey in the very act of composition, and has such potency that it needs no externally gathered materials in order to create poetry of the highest order.Footnote ³³ Bacon owes something to this strand of poetic-artistic ingenium, particularly when discussing the potential uses of allegory, but despite the learned and supple arguments advanced by Fattori, it has very little to do with his philosophical and methodological uses of the term.Footnote ³⁴

Turning finally to architecture and mechanics, ingenium stands both for inventive ability, that is, the ability to conceive of new architectural layouts, or mechanical designs, and for the skill in practical mathematics required to realize such aptitude. The common etymology of engine and ingenuity gives some idea of the vitality of this tradition, but also gestures toward some of the difficulties that ingenium of this sort could engender, particularly when engineers sought to replicate the motions (rather than just the likenesses) of the natural world. For the early moderns, the most ingenious of mechanical inventions could be considered adulterate, which, after the Latin adulterinus, connoted deceit and deliberately hybrid misrepresentation. Moreover, it was only a short step from here to the accusation that technical innovators were deliberately courting monstrosity, and thereby contriving to undermine the natural order of things. The mechanically minded therefore had to impart their ideas and their inventions with a suitable measure of piety.Footnote ³⁵

Different though these three humanist traditions may be in various particulars, they have one important thing in common, at least as they were articulated in the long sixteenth century: all privilege the display of ingenium above the claims of reason, philosophy, judgment, moderation, or externally determined ends of almost any kind. Instead, the manifestation of inventive ingenuity becomes an end in itself, advertising the orator, poet, artist, architect, or engineer’s power of mind, and flattering his audience that they too have some share in it. Erasmus’s De copia is good on the dynamics at work here, and describes how to set about the kind of rhetorical performance that is “handled precisely for the purpose of exercising and demonstrating one’s ingenuity.”Footnote ³⁶ Bacon himself could describe poetry as the “play” of imaginative ingenium, and as many studies have by now established, the mode of exhibiting one’s ingenuity for its own sake was a common one in later humanist writing and practice, illuminated quite distinctly by the emergence of mannerism.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, the prominence of this cultural mode was reinforced by the courtly mores associated with the notion of sprezzatura, most notably codified by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529): the graceful simulation and dissimulation that this comprised depended on the acuity of one’s ingegno, and on the ability to make one’s ingegno seem effortlessly acute.Footnote ³⁸

Placed within this milieu, the most salient feature of Bacon’s attitude to ingenium is his disregard for the culture of elaborate or ostentatious display. As he put it in the preliminary material to the Instauratio magna, knowledge was not to be sought “arrogantly within the cells of human ingenium,” but with humility and in the world itself.Footnote ³⁹ Bacon is thus much closer than many of his humanist contemporaries and immediate forbears to Quintilian, who championed ingenuity, but who regulated its role with reference to the demands of judgment, decorum, and perspicuity: the possession of an ingenium appropriate to one’s ends is essential to their accomplishment, but in itself offers no guarantee that one’s accomplishments will be either useful or praiseworthy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Be this as it may, to offer such observations is to risk jumping the gun. Before attempting to determine the import of Baconian ingenium, Bacon’s engagement with the term must be reconstructed in more detail. Having sketched in the outlines of the discursive and literary background, it is to Bacon’s own writings that this essay now turns.

3. Ingenium and Its Abuses

There are two predominant senses in which Bacon employed ingenium, the second of which is of much-greater magnitude than the first. A good example of the first sense is found midway through the second book of the Novum organum, where Bacon explores instances of alliance or union. In so doing, he turns to the “discourse of ingenuity” (“discursus ingenii”). After drawing attention to the distinction between “human reason” (“ratio humana”) and “animal dexterity” (“solertia brutorum”), he calls it into question with the activities of animals like ravens: their behavior is so advanced that it might cause one erroneously to infer their ability to “syllogize.” Whatever ingenium might signify here, it is present in both animals and human beings, and can be seen to resemble the powers of discursive rationality.Footnote ⁴¹ Likewise, when discussing the “idols of the cave” (“idola specûs”) in aphorism 55 of the Novum organum’s first book, Bacon presents ingenium as something that underpins different cognitive dispositions and abilities. In perhaps the earliest explicit foreshadowing of Darwin’s celebrated division between lumpers and splitters, Bacon maintains that in philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge the most fundamental distinction between different forms of human ingenuity was that they enable some people to be “better at spotting the differences between things, others at spotting their resemblances.” The first kind of ingenium is “tenacious and sharp,” while the second is “sublime and discursive.” Whichever way one’s ingenium tended, Bacon insists on keeping such natural inclinations in check.Footnote ⁴²

On this evidence, Baconian ingenium can look very much like what many Renaissance and early modern thinkers envisaged as the organic soul, or the interlocking arrangement of internal and external senses through which most cognitive activity took place: of the internal senses, the imagination, judgment, memory, and common sense were the most frequently invoked. The organic soul was further defined in contradistinction to the intellective soul, the immaterial and immortal entity that was central to the higher operations of discursive logic in Scholastic Aristotelianism, and that for the purposes of this essay can be seen as closely related to Aristotle’s noûs-based understanding.Footnote ⁴³ This comparison reveals a lot about Baconian ingenium, but encounters a sizeable difficulty in that Bacon repudiated the model of the organic and intellective souls. Book 4 of the De augmentis provides the fullest extant account of Bacon’s psychology, and in it Bacon instead proposed a twofold division between the sensible and rational souls: the imagination, memory, and reason — traditionally faculties of the organic soul — are here reconfigured within the rational soul. The foundations of this doctrine are complex — Bacon was keen to stress that the difference between human and animal cogitation is one of kind rather than degree, and was perhaps following the example of Bernadino Telesio (1509–88) — but its import is clear: although there is a definite correlation between ingenium and the natural condition of the human mind or soul within Bacon’s writings, they do not support an unproblematic equivalence between ingenium and the organic soul.Footnote ⁴⁴

The second chief sense of ingenium within Bacon’s writings is not only more significant than the first, but also helps to resolve some of the ambiguities around the status of ingenium in connection with the rational soul. In the Advancement, Bacon outlines an attitude to the study of the human mind that he would maintain throughout his later works, and that he seems to have borrowed from Vives: “For HVMANE KNOWLEDGE, WHICH CONCERNES THE MIND, it hath two parts, the one that enquireth of THE SVBSTANCE, OR NATURE OF THE SOVLE OR MIND; The other, that enquireth of the FACVLTIES OR FVNCTIONS THEREOF.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As the first of these was “bounded by Religion,” Bacon does not propose to treat it in any detail. Instead, he was concerned to explore the operations that the nature of the soul empowered: what the soul does, rather than what it is. By the same token, in using the term ingenium Bacon for the most part does not refer to anatomical or physiological aspects of the human mind, but to the cognitive powers that human beings possess by virtue of their rational souls. Bacon follows standard early modern usage in describing this sort of ingenuity as the driving force behind poetic and rhetorical invention, historical writing, political maneuvering, and artisanal activities of various kinds. Furthermore, and as the enumeration of differing mental characteristics in the Historia vitae et mortis (1623) makes apparent, he believed that such ingenuity varied from individual to individual. Consequently, the De augmentis proposes that educational practice should reflect this by teaching pupils according to “the nature of their ingenium” (“pro natura ingeniorum quae erudiuntur”).Footnote ⁴⁶

This sense of ingenium has two subdefinitions, both of which are metaphorical. First, it came to do duty for the entire character or disposition of an individual or, in some cases, group: the way people behave is the result of, and can be identified with, their abilities and proclivities. As Bacon explains at several points in books 7 and 8 of the De augmentis, this matters because the politician, counselor, or orator could not hope to persuade either a prince or the populace at large without understanding the variety and characteristics of their ingenium.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the second subdefinition, which Bacon only occasionally deploys, the cognates of ingenium are used to describe any work that could be seen to be the product of its author’s innately dexterous wit, be it literary, mechanical, artistic, or otherwise creative.Footnote ⁴⁸

Broadly interpreted, Bacon’s use of ingenium to denote a power or function of the mind serves as the focus for the remainder of this essay, especially in connection with his repeated calls that ingenuity of any sort had to be actively harnessed or cultivated in order to realize its purpose. With such considerations in mind, the list of those whom Bacon took to have abused their ingenium becomes as revealing as it is lengthy.Footnote ⁴⁹ For instance, although the extempore rhetorical performances of Protagoras, Gorgias, Callisthenes, Posidonius, and Carneades speak highly of “the powers of human ingenuity,” since the codification of the rhetorical arts by Cicero and his Roman peers — a process that had unintentionally exacerbated the isolation of rhetoric from logical, moral, and philosophical rigor — eloquence had come to be seen as an end in itself.Footnote ⁵⁰ A good example of the threat posed by this state of affairs is offered by the ars memoriae. It was a potentially useful component in the mental toolkit of the rhetorician and philosopher, but had fallen into disrepute over the course of the sixteenth century; rather than being used to aid rhetorical invention, its exercise had become an ostentatious sort of party trick, on account of which its exponents sought praise and personal advancement. “Ingenium and habit” were thereby being abused to induce “wonder” alone, and Bacon accordingly gives such performances no more weight than those of “clowns and jugglers”: one wasted the “powers of the body,” the other the “powers of the mind.”Footnote ⁵¹

If rhetoric was to be saved from such essential frivolity, discursive integrity had to take precedence over the urge to make a show of one’s ingenuity.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, Bacon believed that historians were too willing to indulge their ingenuity. Civil historians were particularly culpable in this respect, and frequently, “by too much indulging their ingenium, produce many shameless fabrications.” Even worse than this, they sometimes neglected their ingenium altogether, and impressed instead the inventions of their “emotional attachments” (whether personal or factional) on the historical record.Footnote ⁵³ A little later in the De augmentis, Bacon reworks the fable of Dionysus from his De sapientia veterum, and elaborates on just how “ingenious” the emotions could be in seeking to attain their goals: to permit the “indulgence and impudence” of our ingenium was to make the Muses follow the cupidity of our desires, thereby preventing them from guiding us to the profounder pleasures of learning.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the second book of the De augmentis, Bacon identifies three kinds of poetry: narrative, dramatic, and parabolic, or allegorical. He takes the last of these to be of most importance: it was the literary form in which parts of sacred scripture were written, and was also the medium in which the mythological works of Hesiod and Homer had survived. And yet the subject had fallen into disrepair after being corrupted by “levity and indulgence of ingenium” in connection with allegory and its interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁵

Other than what appear to be some ill-defined blows at mythographic handbooks like the Mythologiae (1567) of Natale Conti (1520–82), the De augmentis does not provide many more clues as to who the corrupters of allegory might have been. In the preface to his De sapientia veterum, Bacon had been more forthcoming: after condemning the general “levity and indulgence of ingenium” with which allegory had been treated, he specified that the transgressors included ancients like Chrysippus (whose Stoic interpretations of Homeric myth had been mocked by Cicero and Seneca), and moderns like the alchemists (who attempted to find precedents for transmutation in the writings of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid).Footnote ⁵⁶ Their ingenuity was not in question, but had been given free rein to impose readings that the texts themselves could not support, thereby traducing responsible mythographic practice. In the Advancement (though not in the corresponding portion of the De augmentis), Bacon identifies Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) as another such culprit. Much though Bacon admired Machiavelli’s keen political intelligence and determined self-inoculation against muddleheadedness and fanaticism, in this case he finds him guilty of debasing mythography with calculated rationality. The eighteenth chapter of Il principe (1532) dwells on the example of Achilles when exploding the civic pieties of Cicero’s De officiis: in Bacon’s estimation, Achilles was “Expounded Ingeniously, but corruptly by Machiauell… . I doe rather think that the fable was first, and the exposition deuised, then that the Morall was first, & thereupon the fable framed.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Machiavelli had consciously bent mythology to his own ends, and although this indicated the fertility and muscularity of his ingenium, it also meant that Machiavelli had compromised his critical integrity.

In their turn, however, these condemnations lead Bacon to presentational difficulties of his own, ones that he faces down with characteristic boldness and art. As Bacon believed that allegorical interpretation was a heuristic exercise that demanded “sharpness and subtlety of ingenium,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and as the De sapientia makes much of Bacon’s conviction that he was himself a worthy interpreter of allegory, he needed to find a way in which to reassure his readers that his own ingenium was appropriately tempered. His solution was to enmesh it within the modesty topos that shapes his dedicatory epistle. This epistle was addressed to Robert Cecil (1563–1612), Earl of Salisbury and chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and in it Bacon affects to be anxious that the expositions of his De sapientia are unworthy of Cecil’s attention. However, given that Cecil had otherwise been favorably disposed toward Bacon’s cast of mind, Bacon makes bold to hope that Cecil might go as far as to excuse the least valuable aspect of his work, “the ingenium of the author.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Of course, although this passage goes through the motions of displaying conspicuous humility, Bacon’s wink is almost audible. And yet the implications of his playfulness were as serious as they were rhetorically necessary. Just as his ingenuity could acquiesce in the performance of courtly convention, so he implies that he had made it subservient to the scrupulosity of true mythographic inquiry.

Despite the excesses of rhetoricians, historians, alchemists, and poets, it was the mythological figure Daedalus who best illustrated the dangers of failing to cultivate one’s ingenium for the good. In the De sapientia veterum, Bacon describes him as the embodiment of “mechanical wisdom and industry.” Yet although he was “the most ingenious of men,” the complete license he gave his ingenium meant that he was also an abomination.Footnote ⁶⁰ His inventive skill was measured by its willing complicity in the satisfaction of Pasiphaë’s taurean lusts; his “perverted industry and pernicious ingenium” were responsible for the Minotaur and its infamous crimes in devouring “noble youths” (“pubes ingenua”) within the labyrinth. For Bacon, Daedalus’s ingenium is thus twofold, connoting his inventions and the mental talents that gave rise to them. It is also linked inextricably to the discourse of inventive monstrosity. Yet for the purposes of this essay, Bacon’s half-punning juxtaposition of Daedalus’s ingenium with the nobly ingenuous dispositions of the Minotaur’s victims is of equal moment. By the end of the seventeenth century, the senses of these lexical neighbors would often be conflated within the imprecise but pervasive usage of the English term ingenuity, but for Bacon the distinction between ingeniosus and ingenuus was at once plain and a further confirmation of Daedalus’s reprehensibility: his willingness to pander to his ingenuity meant that he had no claims to ingenuousness, to the nobility, morality, or freedom of spirit displayed by those who sacrificed themselves to assuage the Minotaur’s destructively anthropophagic hunger.Footnote ⁶¹ At the same time, Bacon seems to have felt no hesitation in associating himself with Daedalus’s positive accomplishments, going as far as to name three manuscript works some variation of Filum labyrinthi, or the “clue to the labyrinth.” Bacon’s ingenious reform of learning would enable philosophical discovery to penetrate the most inscrutable byways of nature, but unlike the father of Icarus, he would not allow his ambitions to corrupt either his ingenium or his philosophical goals.Footnote ⁶² This slightly uneasy duality is reflected in the De sapientia itself: the mechanical arts, Bacon intones, were instrumental and therefore of “ambiguous use, serving as well for injury as for cure.”Footnote ⁶³ For one’s ingenium to attain either usefulness or virtue, it was imperative that one should direct it to some higher end.

Although Daedalus most vividly indexes Bacon’s fears about the dangers of granting one’s ingenium too much liberty, Bacon was most frequently exercised by another target when discussing this subject. In the preliminary materials to the Instauratio magna, Bacon outlines how, after knowledge had been subject to incremental advancement in the distant past, one of “bold ingenium” had sought to subsume things within a superficial order of his own devising, an order that betrayed both the natural world and the learning of his predecessors. This was Aristotle.Footnote ⁶⁴ Likewise, in the De augmentis, Bacon describes him as the possessor of a “wonderfully acute ingenium,”Footnote ⁶⁵ and commends the ingeniousness with which he investigated immobile bodies.Footnote ⁶⁶ The rub was that Aristotle was so gratified by the quality of his own ingenium that he had arrested his natural-philosophical inquiries far short of their proper ends; instead, he had abused his ingenuity to establish and maintain a posture of dominant philosophical authority. Bacon’s fullest exploration of Aristotle’s ingenious errors is found in a less-guarded work than the De augmentis, the Redargutio philosophiarum (1607–08). Here he begins by positing that anyone who does not credit the ingenuity of Plato and Aristotle is either stupid or unbalanced: their differing ingenia were “capacious, acute, [and] elevated.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Aristotle’s “rapid and impatient ingenium” was particularly worthy of note: he would not have been able to realize his universal philosophy without it, but its ungoverned precipitancy prevented him from doing justice either to his own ideas, or to those of others. It followed that his discursive manner was “magistral,” and comparable to that of a teacher instructing schoolchildren; this was as inappropriate for a seeker after truth as it was for one attempting to encourage such a pursuit in others.Footnote ⁶⁸ As valuable as Aristotle’s works were, they were therefore to be distrusted. In writing them, Aristotle had allowed his ingenium to serve his worldly ambitions, not his love of learning.

Even those admired by Bacon, such as the staunchly anti-Scholastic Telesio, could be indicted on related grounds: in seeking to impose their ingenium on the nature of things, they traduced the natural world and their cognitive abilities alike.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the complementary formulation of the Advancement, Telesio and his follower, Agostino Doni (fl. 1577–83), were patronized for espousing “a Pastorall Philosophy, full of sense, but of no great depth.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Elaborating on the poetic theme in the Cogitata et visa (ca. 1607), Bacon compares Telesio to an ambitious but inept playwright, offering his audience fare that is superficially attractive but that ultimately fails to satisfy.Footnote ⁷¹ By contrast, in the Advancement Bacon presents his own plans to reform learning as a “Georgickes of the mind concerning the husbandry & tillage thereof.” Just as georgic agriculture had proved itself more profitable than pastoral roaming, so he would push philosophical endeavor toward an enlightened future, in which the natural abilities of humankind would be cultivated for the common good.Footnote ⁷² This statement of georgic self-identification is the culmination of a passage in which Bacon laments that the most-gifted people had often “dispised to be conuersant in ordinary and common matters.”Footnote ⁷³

In the De augmentis, he expands on this sentiment to revealing effect. On account of the “innate pride and vaingloriousness” that they had inherited from Aristotle, philosophers, scholars, and teachers had chosen topics — and means of treating them — that “show off their ingenium to best advantage, rather than serve to profit the reader.”Footnote ⁷⁴ (Pride, for Bacon, was a foremost philosophical vice: just as moral pride had occasioned the original sin, so philosophical pride, particularly that evinced by the post-Socratic professoriate, had helped to bring about the decay of Adam’s perfect knowledge in the ages after the expulsion from Eden.)Footnote ⁷⁵ Addressing himself directly to King James, Bacon avowed that his reformation of learning would correct this unsatisfactory state of affairs, and that it would actively embrace the humble and the quotidian, however lacking in glamor these might be: in the De augmentis and the remainder of the Instauratio magna, he would not stand on the misplaced dignity of his “ingenium or name (if such a thing exists).”Footnote ⁷⁶ Given that moral philosophers had generally been content to glorify themselves on account of their “acuity of ingenium, and vigor of eloquence,” Bacon had sought a model for his undertaking elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁷ He found one in the Virgil of the Georgics, who “arrived at as much glory of eloquence, ingenium, and learning in discussing agricultural observations as in narrating the heroic acts of Aeneas.”Footnote ⁷⁸

While considerably more might be said about Bacon’s self-identification with Virgil through his “Georgics of the soul” (“Georgica animi”), three points bear particular emphasis here. First, Bacon’s insistence that nothing should be beneath the dignity of human ingenium (itself putting further distance between himself and the traditions of the Neoplatonic furor). Second, his belief that one should train one’s ingenium to be as versatile as possible: that it should be able to treat both husbandry and the epic heroism of Aeneas, to pitch a rhetorical performance according to the tenor of different audiences, to make war or peace, or to produce responsibly works as dissimilar as a history of the reign of King Henry VII or a history of life and death.Footnote ⁷⁹ Third, his supervening conviction that while the quality of its untutored form could differ radically from individual to individual, ingenium was something that could be cultivated in pursuit of the good — and that the advancement of learning as he conceived it depended on just such a deliberate cultivation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bacon’s disapproval of the ends to which human ingenium had too often been abused, and his confidence that he was in a position to remedy such abuses, is thus plain to behold.

Nonetheless, and despite the well-defined role that Bacon accorded ingenium within rhetoric, poetry, history, and mechanics, whether and to what extent it had a role within his reformed philosophical methodology is unclear. As Guido Giglioni has recently reminded us, viewed within the methodological context, Bacon’s chief understanding of history and poetry was as a propaedeutic to the rigors of philosophical analysis.Footnote ⁸¹ Memory and imagination are squarely within the orbit of the ingenious, but it remains to be determined how ingenium interacts with Bacon’s more-advanced stages of inquiry.

4. Ingenium, Intellect, and the Art of Discovery

In book 5 of the De augmentis, Bacon specifies three modes through which knowledge might be discovered. In the first place, revealing “accidents” or “chances” (“casus potius”); in the second, “literate experience” (“experientia literata”); and in the third, the “new organon” or “interpretation of nature” (“novum organum” or “interpretatio naturae”).Footnote ⁸²

Bacon took a dim view of the first mode, asserting that even at their most effective, chance discoveries offered little to differentiate human investigative competence from that of the animals.Footnote ⁸³ More frequently, “ingenious chances” (“casuum ingenia,” or those occurrences that by virtue of their very irregularity engage our ingenuity) did not provoke further investigation.Footnote ⁸⁴ Instead, they were employed to amuse the “curious and vain” ingenium of those who read humanist natural histories, just as early modern cabinets of curiosity provoked little sustained inquiry into nature, despite being stuffed full of wonders and prodigies.Footnote ⁸⁵ In place of such inanity, Bacon reaffirms a version of the Aristotelian topos that wonder should be the beginning of philosophical inquiry: casuum ingenia should give the student of nature occasion to acknowledge the inadequacy of received philosophical opinions, and to embrace the power and potential of natural philosophy. If the natural philosopher could but “follow nature’s trail with [his] keen sense of smell,” he would be able to “lead or force her to the same place again” at his pleasure.Footnote 86 Bacon’s “with keen sense of smell” (“sagaciter”) is not just colorful phraseology: for instance, the Advancement speaks of “following, and as it were, hounding Nature in her wandrings.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Since antiquity, dogs had been credited with sagacity (qua both practical wisdom and an acute sense of smell), and a standard Latin appellation for hunting dogs, most often for the bloodhound, was canis sagax.Footnote ⁸⁸ The language of the hunt was commonplace within descriptions of rhetorical invention, and in emphasizing the utility of one’s sagacity and ingenuity in discovering knowledge of nature, Bacon effectively translated the vocabulary and assumptions of rhetoric to the sphere of natural philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁹ It thus comes as little surprise that when Bacon came to describe the second means through which natural knowledge might be discovered, experientia literata, he did so in explicitly venatorial terms.

Literate experience, Bacon maintains, should not be seen as “a part of philosophy,” but rather as “a kind of sagacity,” something comparable with the “hunt of Pan” (“venatio Panis”).Footnote ⁹⁰ In writing thus, Bacon harks back to his exposition of Pan in the De sapientia veterum (and in book 2 of the De augmentis), where the faun-like god’s ability to locate the missing Ceres gave Bacon occasion to commend the “sagacious experience, and universal knowledge of things in the world, through which even by chance (and as it were going hunting) such discoveries are made.”Footnote ⁹¹ Just as hunting dogs must be trained fully to exploit their talent for following the trail — lest they should start following a different scent because it is stronger or more appealing — so experientia literata provides a set of practices with which to make the most of human sagacity in exploring natural phenomena: “as a man may proceed in one of three ways — either when he feels his own way in the dark for himself, or is led by the hand of another without seeing anything himself, or else when he guides his footsteps with a light. So it is a mere feeling by hand when a man attempts all kind of experiments without sequence or method. But when he proceeds by direction and order in experiments, it is as if he were led by the hand; and it is this which we understand by literate experience. For the light itself, which is the third way, is to be obtained from the interpretation of nature, or the new organon.”Footnote ⁹² Dismissing accidental or otherwise undertheorized discoveries as methodologically worthless, Bacon presents an art of discovery consisting of two complementary, but hierarchically arranged, parts: experientia literata and novum organum. Though novum organum is able to generate the light with which the natural philosopher can possess the agency to explore where he wishes, experientia literata can only lead him by the hand along paths whose course and location must remain hidden in darkness; novum organum proceeds from “experiments to axioms,” whereas experientia literata can only proceed from “experiments to experiments.”Footnote ⁹³

A digression in book 3 of the De augmentis further indicates what Bacon had in mind. Observing that all philosophical discoveries have come about through chance or deliberate inquiry, Bacon focuses his attention on the latter category. One of its two forms works through the light of “axioms and causes,” i.e., the novum organum, while the other is more properly conceived as an “extending, translating, or bringing together [of] previous discoveries — which is a matter more ingenious and sagacious than philosophical.” Perhaps because they were the province of ingenuity rather than intellect, this second set of practices had been neglected and insufficiently esteemed: accordingly, Bacon undertakes to consider it more fully under the heading of experientia literata.Footnote ⁹⁴

When making good this promise in book 5, Bacon maintains that experientia literata has three uses, two of which have significantly more importance than the third. First, it generates what the Novum organum deems the “experiments of light” (“experimenta lucifera”), which though of no immediate utility in themselves, illuminate causes and thus are of vital preparative value to the interpretation of nature.Footnote ⁹⁵ They achieve this by systematically juxtaposing diffusely gathered data, and interrogating it through a process of analogy and comparison, thereby extending the body of natural-historical learning on which the natural-philosopher could set to work.Footnote ⁹⁶ The second chief purpose of experientia literata is “ministration to the memory”: just as “unguided experience” is “groping in the dark,” so the intellect is “quite incapable” of analyzing natural-historical data “unprompted and by memory.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Such assertions are reinforced later in the Novum organum, where Bacon observes that “Natural and Experimental History is so various and scattered that it will bewilder and distract the intellect” unless reduced to suitably ordered heads. It was therefore necessary to “fashion Tables, and Structured Sets of Instances, marshaled in such a way that the intellect can get to work on them.” Literate experience provides for exactly this, offers assistance to the natural operations of the ingenium in collecting, retaining, and collating data about the natural world, and lays the groundwork without which the interpretation of nature could not reliably proceed.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finally, literate experience also generates what Bacon calls “fruitful experiments” (“experimenta fructifera”): while these are useful and of immediate potential profit, they are incidental to the epistemic goals of philosophical inquiry, and should not be allowed to distract from or otherwise impede its progress.Footnote ⁹⁹

The status of experientia literata becomes more distinct when it is contrasted with Bacon’s second means of regulating philosophical discovery, the novum organum. This is not discussed in the De augmentis, but in the Novum organum itself, the subtitle of which advertises “true directions for the interpretation of nature” (“indicia vera de interpretatione naturae”).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rather than “experiments of light,” the goal of this process was to pass through physics to nothing less than a demonstrative knowledge of the metaphysical laws through which nature operates. For Bacon, these laws were the determinate physical properties, or forms, considered to be so basic that all things could be articulated in terms of them: they comprised the apex of the pyramid of natural knowledge, while the primary natural history comprised its broad base. In the Novum organum and elsewhere, Bacon often describes these forms as “simple natures,” or as the “cardinal virtues.” (Suggesting Bacon’s ease with the heritage of Lucretian thought, these “simple natures” are characterized as a kind of natural “alphabet”: all natural bodies are compound substances made up of them, in the same way that words were compounds made up of elementary letters.)Footnote ¹⁰¹ It was, however, difficult to abstract these simple natures from material reality, and in the first part of the second book of the Novum organum, Bacon describes the painstaking series of experiments required to investigate just one: heat.

For the purposes of this essay, the most significant feature of the interpretatio naturae is its association with the intellect. When outlining the component practices of experientia literata in the De augmentis, Bacon draws a line between “sagacity through literate experience” and “the rational way of the organon,” and this distinction is emphatically borne out in the Novum organum.Footnote ¹⁰² In the intellective work of interrogating the natural world, trusting to the “naked force of the mind” is like attempting to erect an obelisk with one’s bare hands, without the aid of ropes and pulleys.Footnote ¹⁰³ Traditional logic attempted to supply the requisite mental technology, but as it was born of (and could not proceed beyond) the ingenium, it was unequal to the task. Conversely, Bacon’s Novum organum would equip the intellect to journey beyond the long-established discursive arts. In the words of the Distributio operis, it would represent “the doctrine concerning the better and more perfect use of reason in the investigation of things, and the true helps of the intellect, so that (as far as the condition of mortality and humanity permits) the intellect may be elevated in its ability to surmount the difficulty and obscurity of nature.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Although it must be granted that Bacon’s two investigative modes can occasionally stand in overlapping, if not interpenetrative, relation to one another, Bacon took care to exclude ingenuity from the higher portion of his art of discovery.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In explaining this omission, the doctrine of the idols provides the best place to look.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The status of ingenium within the “idols of the cave” has been noted above. This set of philosophical shortcomings arose from each individual’s “peculiar nature,” the disposition of his “body and soul,” and from “education, habit, and accident.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When an individual allows his peculiar nature to occlude and impede his intellect, his intellect is prevented from discerning the true nature of things: one might, for instance, favor certain specialist topics or modes of study, and come to view all of one’s considerations through their lens. Once again, Bacon’s preferred example is Aristotle: though the energy and range of the Stagyrite’s natural histories are praiseworthy, they end up martyred to the false god of his logical-categorical idées maîtresses. But Aristotle was exceptional, and a more general threat to the progress of philosophy is posed by the variety of ingenia: natural philosophers had too often been the slaves of their predispositions. Lumpers lumped and splitters split, all the while paying no heed to the truth that an understanding of nature demands every kind of mental dexterity. Likewise, some kinds of ingenium had been drawn toward antiquity and others toward novelty and the modern, with very few able to steer a judicious middle course between the two.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ And yet Bacon, the theorist of natural-philosophical inquiry, was at pains to stress that none of this should matter: the intellect must never be bound by ingenuity, predispositions, bad habits, or passions of any kind. Rather, it was incumbent on the natural philosopher to keep his intellect “balanced and clear” (“aequus & purus”).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In much the same vein, Bacon’s “idols of the tribe” (“idola tribûs,” the impediments to learning that are the fault of human nature) enumerate the imperfections of the intellect itself. It frequently reduces things to an ordered system where in reality no recognizable order exists, but is also susceptible to the sudden or vivid impressions “with which the imagination is accustomed to being filled and puffed up.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This is because the intellect is not “a dry light,” and is instead “infused by the will and the emotions.” When the intellect allows itself to be governed by such non-intellective impulses, it produces explanations that are philosophically worthless, however ingenious these impulses might be, and however agreeable such explanations might seem to their authors.Footnote ¹¹¹ The “dry light” was a favorite trope of Bacon’s, taken from the Heraclitean maxim that “a dry light is the best soul” (“lumen siccum optima anima”). Bacon turns to it again in book 5 of the De augmentis, when exploring the assertion that the “logic is less pleasing to the taste and palate of most ingenuity” than poetry, history, and moral philosophy. Although the “rational knowledges” gained through logic are the “key to all other arts,” they had been neglected because their “dry light” offended most people’s “soft and watery ingenium.”Footnote ¹¹²

Misplaced ingenuity is one of the charges with which the Novum organum frequently taxes the established philosophical schools, particularly that of Scholastic Aristotelianism. Even to comprehend its doctrines depended on the fruitless exertion of one’s ingenium, and, rather than drawing their conclusions from the rigorous study of nature, its proponents rested their theories on “meditation and ingenious agitation” alone.Footnote ¹¹³ Worse even than such Scholastic sophistry were the “superstitious” doctrines of alchemical and otherwise occult philosophers. While Scholasticism only “ensnares” the intellect (“illaqueat Intellectum”), these superstitious doctrines — despite being “fanciful, swollen, and almost poetic” — flatter and fawn upon it, exploiting that in those of “high and elevated ingenium” the intellect could be as “ambitious” as the will.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Bacon’s “almost poetic” is a clue that these comments appear within his discussion of the “idols of the theater” (“idola theatri”). The various forms of philosophy had become so willfully theoretical that they were comparable to the “drama of the poets.” Like drama, such quasi-philosophical productions confirmed that “stories made up for the stage are more pleasing and elegant, and more as one would wish, than true stories from history.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Furthermore, and again like drama, such productions were the product of ingenium, not intellect: Bacon speculates that there would be many more philosophical sects had not so much ingenuity been expended on the controversies of religion and theology in the centuries immediately preceding his own.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While this might just seem like the statement of a potentially controversial historiographical opinion, Bacon’s point is that although ingenuity can be used to measure the success of the labors undertaken by poets, historians, artists, and artisans, it is inappropriate to the office of one seeking to interpret nature.

One of the least adulterated expressions of Bacon’s animus against the incursions of ingenuity into philosophical thinking is found in the Redargutio philosophiarum. Here Bacon asserts that the more ingenious one is, the less likely one is to arrive at true knowledge of things: a strong ingenium will more often than not cause one to desert the light of nature for the dark caverns of the imagination.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Book 3 of the De augmentis offers a less bilious variation on the theme. Although exerting oneself ingeniously to maintain doubt is perfectly licit for a lawyer pleading a case or for a student involved in a university disputation, the natural philosopher should apply as much ingenuity to resolving doubt as he does to identifying it.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Ingenuity, then, is given short shrift within Bacon’s new logic, which is driven by the capacity for intellective thinking, vulnerable though this is to the pull of the ingenium and emotions. Instead, Bacon claims that his twofold systematization of philosophical discovery will move beyond the reliance on the acuity of ingenium, and would “almost make equal” all forms of ingenium and intellect: ingenuity would be harnessed by the practices of experientia literata, and the intellect by those of the novum organum.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Even so, the aids to the intellect carried far more weight than those to the ingenium, and were what distinguished Bacon’s reformed philosophy from its ancient antecedents. The ancients were the equals or superiors of the moderns in terms of their ingenium — some of the prudential wisdom, sapientia or sagacitas, this conferred could be recovered from the heuristic study of their mythology — but their systems of logical inquiry left them philosophically all at sea.Footnote ¹²⁰

Bacon’s resolve to make use of both the ingenium and the intellect within his art of discovery comprises a powerful intervention in early modern debates on the place and nature of philosophical inquiry. It reflects the ambition and breadth of his methodological vision, and testifies to his determination to synthesize what was best within the Scholastic and humanist traditions of thought. To cast Bacon’s promises in the Aristotelian terms that he intended them to supplant, his new mental technology would maximize the potential of one’s agchinoia, ingenium, or innate quick-wittedness in making connections lower down the logical scale, and exploit the powers of the noûs-based understanding more effectively than the form of syllogistic canonized in the Organon and the centuries of paratextual doctrine that had accrued around it. The regulated version of ingenuity embodied in experientia literata would do vital work in preparation for the interpretatio naturae, but the ultimate arrival at scientia would depend on the intellect, and the novum organum, alone. Although experientia literata shows Bacon following his sixteenth-century humanist forbears in giving ingenium a role in the art of discovery, he fundamentally rejects the dialectic centrality with which ingenuity had been invested by a Vives or a Ramus, dismissing such an approach as apt only for rhetorical or pedagogical ends, not the pursuit of demonstrative knowledge.Footnote ¹²¹ Instead, and despite a view of Aristotelian syllogistic that was no less hostile than those articulated by Vives and Ramus, Bacon cleaved to a version of the hierarchy asserted in the Posterior Analytics and affirmed by Goclenius: the interpretatio naturae was a matter of intellective rather than ingenious thinking.Footnote ¹²²

Before continuing, it might be helpful to address two potential objections to this reading of Baconian discovery. The first of these, in Lisa Jardine’s words, is that experientia literata and the novum organum are “conflicting strategies,” one designed to produce knowledge that was observational, tentative, and contingent, the other to produce knowledge that was rational, metaphysical, and universal.Footnote ¹²³ In reality, there is no conflict between Bacon’s two stages of inquiry in either the De augmentis or Novum organum: they are radically different modes of investigation, to be sure, but they are described in terms of explicitly mutual complementarity.

The second potential sticking point emerges from Bacon’s insistence on the “rational soul,” and his repudiation of the model of organic and intellective souls that was commonplace in early modern psychology: the distinction between ingenium–experientia literata and intellect–novum organum might seem to require exactly this sort of psychological paradigm. Possibly so, but despite Bacon’s inability to complete a systematic account of his psychological theories, there is no need to intrude any such model into his thinking. As discussed above, he took only the slightest interest in the anatomy and physiology of the human mind, and was preoccupied instead with discovering how best to exploit its activities: what the mind does, rather than what it is. Viewed from this perspective, intellect emerges as the rational soul — the principal aspects of which are imagination, memory, and reason — engaged in higher philosophical inquiries. By contrast, ingenium is the rational soul engaged in activities — investigative, inventive, and otherwise — lower down the cognitive-philosophical food chain.

5. Ingenuity and the Origins of Baconianism

While Bacon’s two-stage art of philosophical discovery has irrefutable claims to coherence, more can be learned about it by examining its reception among Bacon’s earliest readers. For all the prominence that Bacon’s plans for the reformation of learning would attain in the decades after his death — in the celebratory metaphor of Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society” (1667), he was a second Moses, leading the novatores toward the philosophical promised land — this story is not a straightforward one.Footnote ¹²⁴

Most crucially, the new philosophical logic in which Bacon invested so much significance attracted little or no favorable attention. A good example is provided by La vérité des sciences, published in 1625 by the Minim friar Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Mersenne praised Bacon’s call for better-informed natural histories — and defended him against the accusation that his “idols” were skeptically motivated — but condemned his new logic for unwarrantedly doing away with syllogistic and not offering anything better in its place.Footnote ¹²⁵ Likewise, the Ephemerides of that most ardent and influential of early Baconians, the émigré Prussian intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–62), registers a singular lack of regard for Bacon’s logical endeavors. For instance, in mid-1639 Bacon’s literary executor, Sir William Boswell (d. 1650), informed Hartlib that Bacon should have studied the De methodo (1558) of the Italian religious exile Jacobus Acontius (ca. 1520–ca. 1566); had he done so, his “Induction would have beene far more compendious and rational.” As Stephen Clucas has shown, when Hartlib’s extensive circle of educational, philosophical, and social reformers did turn to consider logic, Bacon’s new method for the interpretatio naturae was not high on their agenda. In addition to Acontius, they concentrated instead on the works of Herbert of Cherbury (ca. 1582–1648), Joachim Jungius (1587–1657), and Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld (1605–55).Footnote ¹²⁶

In the course of his logical deliberations, Hartlib frequently sought advice from his younger associate, the Oxford-based scholar Joachim Hübner (1611–66).Footnote ¹²⁷ An entry from Hartlib’s Ephemerides for 1640 shows Hübner — clear-sighted, direct, and habitually unimpressed — intimating something of why Bacon’s new logic had failed to catch on: “Wee shall never come to know proprietates Essentiales or y^e formas Rerum w^ch Verul[am] aimes so much at, doe wee w^t wee can by any humane meanes till G[od] himselfe reveale those principia rerum out of which every thing was made vp, vnto vs. Till then all our subtiltys and deepest speculations and abstractions will bee vaine and to no purpose at all. Ergo there remaines nothing to doe good in the State of Learning but 2. things. 1. to improove all the Historical or Natural Works of G[od] from their bare out sides to make more vses of them for the benefit and comfort of humane life. 2. to discover more et more the Mysterie of Iniquity falshood Vanity. &c. w^ch are in all parts of Learning in w^ch men vse to pride thems[elves].”Footnote ¹²⁸ Hübner understood well the emphasis that Bacon — Baron Verulam from 1618, Viscount St. Alban from 1621, and almost universally known as “Verulam” to his successor generations — placed on his novum organum, and the elevated position that the novum organum had within Bacon’s philosophical project. Nonetheless, after a number of years on his own quest for the “true logick,” he had come to believe that Bacon’s logical plans were doomed to fail. The fallen condition of the human mind meant that it simply was not fitted out to know the true natures of things, and Hübner believed that the reformist energies of the Hartlibians should therefore be directed elsewhere. One might surmise from this that Hübner did not share the millenarian urgency of others within Hartlib’s orbit, but what makes Hübner’s comments most pertinent is that they map so closely onto the reality of the Baconianism espoused by the Hartlib circle and the English seventeenth century more generally. Taking little or no interest in the methodological innovations of the novum organum, they occupied themselves with natural histories and experientia literata — not to discover the “experiments of light” that Bacon hoped would facilitate further philosophical discovery, but because its “fruitful experiments” provided them with the practical means with which to ameliorate the immediate difficulties of farmers, doctors, printers, soldiers, engineers, and civic planners.Footnote ¹²⁹

In other words, Bacon’s corpus became a medium through which the Hartlibians sought to tap hitherto underexploited reservoirs of individual and collective ingenuity, not through which to maximize the interpretative powers of the intellect. As William Petty (1623–87) put it in his Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib (1648), the Hartlibians’ aim was to bring together those “Wittes and Ingenuities lying scattered up and downe the world.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Accordingly, Hartlib and his associates planned to set up an “Office of Address” that would provide for a “Correspondencie and Agencie … for the Advancement of Universal Learning and all manner of Arts and Ingenuities.”Footnote ¹³¹ These plans never came to fruition, but by the end of the 1640s the discourse of ingenuity had come to dominate discussions of educational and philosophical reform. Preaching to the House of Commons in March 1647, the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) deftly spliced the two senses of English ingenuity in championing the claims of “Ingenuous Learning”: if the members of Parliament were to support it, they would ensure “the Noble and Generous Improvement of our Understanding Faculty.”Footnote ¹³² Cudworth’s younger colleague, the literary prodigy John Hall (1627–56), drew from the same well in agitating for an “Academy of Ingenuitys for Humane Learning,” and his proposals caught Hartlib’s sustained interest.Footnote ¹³³ Moreover, such sentiments were not limited to Cambridge, as is made clear by a newly elected fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, Thomas Gilson (1630–80). In October 1649, he wrote to Hartlib detailing proposals to reform the statutes of the University of Oxford, bringing them into accord with the Hartlibian spirit of the age: in particular, he sought to replace the lecturers’ emphasis on the canons of tradition and authority with attention to either Baconian ingenuity or the ingenious doctrines of other moderns.Footnote ¹³⁴ Given the nature of institutional politics, it comes as no surprise that Gilson’s proposals did not get very far. But Gilson’s equation of ingenuity and Baconianism is telling, and takes us to the very nub of the Hartlib circle’s selective appropriation of Bacon. As Hartlib himself put it on first meeting John Aubrey (1626–97) in December 1652, Aubrey “seemed to be a very witty man and a mighty favorer and promoter of all Ingen[ious] and Verulamian Designes.”Footnote ¹³⁵ For Hartlib, the adjectives Ingenious and Verulamian were essentially coterminous.

Ingenuity provided a flag of the utmost convenience under which to sail the ship of Baconian reform, and one finds repeated references to it throughout the natural-philosophical writing of the 1640s, ’50s, and ’60s. It suggested the cultivation of natural talent and the discoveries that would emerge from so doing, but also implied that these discoveries would be practically useful, and that cultivating them would be a gentlemanly, free, and disinterested process.Footnote ¹³⁶ Which is to say that it would disavow the enthusiasm, dogmatism, and careless theorizing on which the internecine trauma of the 1640s was commonly blamed. The claim to transcend faction and to be pulling together for the common good of the British nations was a powerful one in the years around 1650, as it would be again in the decade after the Restoration. Furthermore, and as Joanna Picciotto has observed, for many champions of philosophical and religious renewal in the mid-seventeenth century, ingenuity also connoted the pristine innocence of the knowledge that had been lost at, or at some point after, the Fall — and the virtuousness of those who were now attempting to recover it.Footnote ¹³⁷

From the perspective of Bacon studies, the problem nonetheless remains. Namely, to advance an explanation as to how the first Baconians felt so radically able to depart from what Bacon himself insisted on as the path to true knowledge and dominion over the created world. And to determine how, moreover, they could have devoted so much energy to the ingenious business of experientia literata, while neglecting the intellectual rigors of the novum organum. Part of this difficulty can no doubt be written off to difficulties of Bacon’s philosophical methodology: in 1634, Hartlib’s Ephemerides record that the Oxford mathematician William Gilbert (fl. 1623–38) had spent a great deal of time with “Verulamian Philosophi[e] for the Natural part,” and that Gilbert was perhaps the only person alive who understood what Bacon had intended.Footnote ¹³⁸ In this reckoning, Bacon could resemble a sort of Vives redux — a sharp-eyed critic of Aristotelity and unthinking reverence for the old ways, but not the author of an attempt to supplant syllogistic with a logic of his own. As the diplomat and civil servant Sir William Becher (1580–1651) put it to Hartlib in early 1640, “Verulam is for the most part but a refined Lud[ovicus] Vives.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Furthermore, many students of nature shared Hübner’s opinion that no system of logic could deliver what Bacon claimed for his novum organum.

However, neither of these explanations is able to account for the degree to which Bacon’s higher logic was overlooked or discarded by those who were otherwise so keen to wrap themselves in the totality of his reformist mantle. Yet more perplexing is that the De augmentis shows Bacon anticipating exactly this course of events. Toward the end of the chapter on experientia literata, he observes that: “Although in the long run the rational way of the organon promises greater things, in the short term, this sagacity by means of experientia literata nevertheless produces more things closer to human experience, like the gifts that were thrown and scattered among the masses in antiquity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As Bacon takes pains to repeat in the concluding paragraph of the chapter, the natural philosopher therefore has to be patient, to remind himself that a failed experiment was often more illuminating than one that succeeded in producing something of immediate utility, and to pursue true scientia through the disciplines of the novum organum.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Be this as it may, the limited scope of seventeenth-century Baconianism was largely a problem of Bacon’s own making. Bacon well knew that the democratic and collaborative appeal of his philosophical reforms was one of their most winning characteristics: everyone from manual laborers to the aristocratic cognoscenti could and should contribute to the advancement of learning. However, looked at more closely, this collaboration was intended to be decidedly unequal. As early as the De interpretatione naturae prooemium, Bacon’s aim was to ensure a “mutual exchange of ingenuity” (“ingeniorum correspondentiae”), and at no point did he outline plans to encourage a similar correspondency of the intellect.Footnote ¹⁴² The reasons for this are laid out plainly at the beginning of the Parasceve. As far as “the work of the intellect,” that is, the interpretatio naturae, was concerned, Bacon thought that he might be able to complete it by himself. By contrast, the “materials for the intellect” were so widely and diffusely dispersed that they demanded the assistance of “agents and merchants” to seek them out and collect them. Besides, Bacon concludes, it was beneath his dignity and a waste of his time to engage in pursuits that were “open to virtually everybody’s industry.”Footnote ¹⁴³ The natural histories make similar claims, and specifically align the work of preparing materials for the intellect with ingenuity.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The fullest illumination of Bacon’s designedly hierarchical philosophical community comes from his unfinished utopian fiction, the New Atlantis (1627). Here the core of Salomon’s House comprises thirty-six fellows, thirty-three of whom variously collect, arrange, and experiment upon natural data for consideration by the remaining three. These three are the “Interpreters of Nature,” who “raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms.” They are at the head of Salomon’s House, just as the interpretatio naturae comprises the most elevated stage of Bacon’s art of philosophical discovery.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Although Bacon made much of the profession that his new methodology would eliminate the disparity between different qualities of ingenium and intellect — thereby involving as many people as possible in his project for the renewal of learning — the reality of his proposals is that they only offered a common remedy for ingenious activity and thought. Intellective thinking was to remain the responsibility of the few. The novum organum would enable one’s intellect to comprehend nature much more effectively than Aristotelian syllogistic, but it was no part of Bacon’s plan to supply the want of intellectual aptitude in those who did not already possess it.

Ironically, it was the cognitively elect of seventeenth-century England and Continental Europe who were unmoved by the logical dimensions of Bacon’s work: the remainder of Bacon’s readers, as he perhaps intended, simply ignored them. In Hugh Trevor-Roper’s penetrative phrase, a “vulgar Baconianism” prevailed, one concerned with the prominence that Bacon accorded versions of experientia literata and fruitful experimentation, but not with the interpretatio naturae or the methods through which this could be brought about.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Even Robert Boyle (1627–91), wealthy nobleman and Baconian experimentalist par excellence, felt no need to move beyond experientia literata. Anything but a naïve empiricist, Boyle choreographed his experiments expertly, wrote up his results with exemplary care and attention, arranged them innovatively in tables and under heads of inquiry, and attempted to resolve the claims of speculative and experimental philosophy. Yet he had little more than modestly framed hypotheses with which to draw conclusions from his experimental labors.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In Barbara Shapiro’s estimation, this form of experimentalism marks the point at which “the Baconian research program was severed from Baconian method and philosophy of science and anchored to an empirical, but essentially probabilistic conception of natural science.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Her view carries a good deal of explanatory force, but when tracing the history of ingenuity alongside that of seventeenth-century Baconianism, it becomes clear that to speak of a severance is in error: since Mersenne’s La vérité des sciences at the latest, Bacon’s program of collective natural-historical research (qua literate experience) was often if not always detached from his philosophical logic (qua new organon).

Indeed, the only seventeenth-century natural philosopher to advance a form of methodological Baconianism that Bacon himself might have owned did not do so until the mid- to late 1660s. This was Robert Hooke (1635–1703), whose lectures on the “General Scheme of Natural Philosophy” maintain that the “incomparable Verulam” had gone further than anyone in devising an “art of inquiry,” but that Bacon had died before he could perfect it. Hooke proposed to remedy this with a two-stage “philosophical algebra.” Stage one would comprise “the manner of Preparing the Mind, and Furnishing it with Materials to Work on”; stage two “the Rules and Methods of proceeding or operating” on these materials. Unfortunately, the “General Scheme” as it survives only details the first of these: glancing at the second of them, Hooke’s posthumous editor explains, “This I think Dr. Hook never wrote.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ His statement is the last word on the subject, and its bathos reveals much about the unhappy fate of Bacon’s novum organum.

6. Conclusion: Hobbes contra Boyle

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) offers both a coda and a conclusion to this account of Baconian ingenium. In 1661, he published the Dialogus physicus, an attack on Boyle and the emergent Royal Society’s avowedly Baconian philosophy of experiment. Its prefatory epistle debunks the carefully nurtured “ingenuity” with which many of those in and around the early Royal Society tried to legitimate their philosophical undertakings, and does so by realigning the discourse of ingenium with Bacon’s own thoughts on the topic: “If ingenuity were sufficient for the sciences, for a long time now no science would have been lacking to us. For this new Academy [the Royal Society] abounds with most excellent ingenious men. But ingenuity is one thing and method [ars] is another. Here method is needed… . For those living for ingenuity vie with each other.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In their discussion of this passage, Shapin and Schaffer assert that it shows Hobbes insinuating that the artisanal character of Boyle’s experimentalism was “making philosophy ignoble.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Certainly Hobbes was trying to get under Boyle’s skin, but the thrust of his argument was not troubled by the social status of their discipline: instead, he was concerned to suggest a distinctively methodological battleground. In what must have seemed like an act of perverse effrontery to Boyle and his associates, Hobbes — who had once served Bacon as amanuensis, and who had no time for what he took to be the fad of pseudo-Baconian experimentalism — used the epistle implicitly to identify himself as a better Baconian than they.Footnote ¹⁵²

In chapter 8 of his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes defines “wit” (ingenium in the 1668 Latin text) as a mental virtue “which is gotten by Use onely, and Experience; without Method, Culture, or Instruction.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Though it was valuable in writing poetry and history, its unsystematic and highly personal nature meant that it was unable to establish truth or to demonstrate knowledge: these belonged to rational discourse alone. This circumscribed view of ingenium is one that Bacon could have assented to without any difficulty, and in attributing misplaced ingenuity to those with whom he disagreed, Hobbes had something else in common with his former employer.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Returning to the Dialogus physicus, it is now possible to arrive at some better-informed conclusions as to what Hobbes was trying to do in his prefatory epistle. By emphasizing Boyle’s ingenuity and the inadequacy of ingenious thinking in pursuit of natural-philosophical knowledge, Hobbes deployed the discourse of ingenuity to mockingly ironic effect, and reasserted the Baconian claim that a version of experientia literata on its own would never be enough.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Even for the most ingenuous and socially elevated philosophers, there had to be some higher art of logic that enabled the discovery of scientia, or demonstrable knowledge. In insisting otherwise, Boyle may well have been industrious, assiduous, committed, and reverentially humble; but he also suggested that he was neither properly educated nor very bright, perhaps fit only for the lowly task of compiling natural histories.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Hobbes concluded with the reflection that without an ars equivalent to Bacon’s novum organum, it would be impossible to venture beyond the realm of opinion. That being the case, natural philosophers could not aspire to truth, but only to personal victory. Rather than forming a gentlemanly society of sober-minded, unbending, and impartial students of nature, Boyle and his peers were bound to end up scrambling to display the fruits of their ingenium as prominently as possible.

Unfortunately for Hobbes, Bacon had been dead for thirty-five years and could not appreciate his brilliantly provocative deflation of what ingenuity had become. But the Dialogus physicus is not only of value as an index of how much philosophical discourse had changed in the decades after Bacon’s death: despite the manifest differences between the philosophical logics proposed by Bacon and Hobbes, Hobbes’s polemic encapsulates most of what Bacon took to be valuable and threatening about human ingenium. Properly regulated, it had a vital role to play in activities of rhetoricians, artists, poets, historians, courtier-politicians, practical mathematicians, and artisans of all sorts. It even had a useful preliminary function in Bacon’s proposals for a reformed means of discovering the unknown continents of the natural world. However, unlike his variously humanist forbears, Bacon never viewed the exercise of ingenium as an end in itself or believed that it had a role to play in logical inquiry. As the goal of Bacon’s logic was demonstrative knowledge of the forms of nature, its province was ultimately that of the intellect alone. This was lost on Bacon’s readers in the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society, who enforced a partial comprehension of Bacon’s methodological works — long on ingenuity, empiricism, and lists; short on ideas and analysis — that would remain current for centuries.

Having said all that, it remains to think again about the problem with which this essay began, and to offer a view on how exactly Bacon’s use of ingenium should be translated into present-day English. Even so, and although such a conclusion might seem anticlimactic or woolly headed to some readers, it is unclear that any such translation is either possible or desirable. Renaissance and early modern ingenium is so much of its own time that translation virtually guarantees misrepresentation, sometimes of the most radical kind: on no account should ingenium be taken to mean “intellect,” “mind,” “understanding,” or “reason.” On the more positive side of the ledger, returning to the Latin in which Bacon wrote his philosophical works has reconfigured the Baconian method as commonly understood, and brought its historical significance into far sharper focus. It has also underscored the absolute centrality of attending to the original languages in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts were written and read. In their introduction to volume 6 of the Oxford Francis Bacon, Graham Rees and Michael Edwards offer a prudent note on which to end. Describing their practice as translators, they remark that “in the case of polysemic specialist terms for which no modern English word seems to be available, we have often chosen to Anglicize the Latin.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ It would be a stretch to describe ingenium as specialist vocabulary, but its polysemic qualities are not open to question. For the most part, ingenuity it is.