Bacon’s Induction

Bacon’s Induction September 5, 2006

Stanley Fish, in a renowned essay on Bacon’s Essays , concludes that the essays are “unfinished with a purposefulness that makes the bestowing of the adjective less a criticism than a compliment.” He insists on the provisionality of knowledge, and “communicates that provisionality [in the Essays ] by letting the information he has collected spill out of an organizational scheme that remains visible and compelling despite its obvious failure.” Yet, “the style of the essays, their manner or presentation, simultaneously gestures toward Bacon’s goal – the orderly disposition of everything in the universe – while acknowledging his (and our) distance from it. In their incompleteness and unresolved complication, the Essays reflect the genuine, if paradoxical, humility of a man who could hope that what he began would end someday in ‘the discovery of all operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice.”


Commenting on Bacon’s similarity and distance from Plato, Augustine, and all ancient and modern advocates of dialectic, Fish notes that “The Truth to which the understanding will be made ‘fit and proportionable’ is for Plato, Augustine, and Donne a truth above the phenomenal world, while for Bacon it is a truth about the phenomenal world.”

This one crucial point of difference radically separates Bacon and his program from his predecessors: Bacon seeks rigor and makes finer and finer distinctions in order to provide a comprehensive theoretical portrait of the world, while for Plato and Donne making distinctions is “a preliminary stage, a clearing away of the ground before the mind prepares to transcend the empirical.” Both Bacon’s induction and Plato’s dialectic proceeds by fits and starts, for Bacon “this is merely a condition of a present imperfection in our knowledge.” Eventually, the procedure of induction will “establish a succession of related certainties, and when the big picture is complete, the entire body of knowledge will be capable of tabular representation which will, at a glance, specify temporal and spatial relationships of cause and effect.” Right method will provide an “unbroken route through the woods of experience to the open ground of axioms,” while for Plato and Donne the “moment of insight is a moment of revelation.”

Bacon’s cautions about the progress of knowledge, evident in the structure and style of his Essays , is not, as in Anglican sermons, a reminder that “the job can never be done, at least not by rational means or rational beings,” but only a “‘caution’ against assuming too easily that the job is done.” Someday, Bacon is sure, the job will be done.

As Fish summarizes, both dialectic and induction aim to change the mind, but the latter does it superficially: “Method provides ‘helps’ to the mind, protects it from itself, neutralizes its distorting tendencies, prevents it from concluding prematurely, and makes of it an unprejudiced reporter or mirror of the way (earthly) things are. The effects of method, however, are negative and temporary, for while it fits the mind to perform certain mechanical operations, it does so at the expense of a personal point of view (the first person is, after all, one of the idols that method filters out) and therefore at the expense of a personal commitment. Method, in short, bypasses the soul, instituting controls rather than demanding a reorientation.” Dialectic centers on the soul, asking not “for reform or restraint, but for revolution; it does not polish, but purges; it does not delay, but extirpates self-satisfaction; it does not make the mind capable, but unmakes the mind.”


Browse Our Archives