Abstract

Francis Bacon’s stock, high in the nineteenth century, has perceptibly declined in the twentieth; modern historians of ideas tend either to condemn him as a diabolical influence—the sleek middle-man who bartered the ancient ideal of objective knowledge for the banausic ideal of power—or else simply to dismiss him as negligible. Professor Rossi’s admirable book makes it impossible to rest in such easy assumptions. That Bacon followed the Renascence magicians in identifying knowledge and power is true, but the power he desired was the power to improve the lot of man. He consistently opposed the hermetical notion that knowledge is properly the occult preserve of an elite and throughout his life stressed the importance of pooling scientific results; he preferred committees to covens. Rossi draws an effective contrast between the modest bearing of the philosopher in Redargutio Philosophiarum and the titanic self-assertion of the magician; Bacon, unlike Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, wanted to be not the master but the servant of nature. But here the sceptical reader may pause: is not the Baconmn humility at bottom merely strategic? It might be thought that his image of the scientist as the servant of nature distinguishes him from the magicians, but Bacon’s servant is one who works by stealth to subjugate his master; he is closer to Jonson’s Mosca than to Shakespeare’s Adam. Indeed the image of the servant derives, as Rossi himself says, from the magical tradition. Thus part of the original charge may perhaps be allowed to stand; Bacon’s designs upon nature were virtually identical with those of the magicians; his methods and, more importantly, his attitude to his fellow men were different.