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Elective English–II

Notes simply open their eyes and minds to the world around them. This at any rate was the basic
argument of his seminal 1605 treatise The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, arguably
the first important philosophical work to be published in English.
It is in this work that Bacon sketched out the main themes and ideas that he continued to
refine and develop throughout his career, beginning with the notion that there are clear obstacles
to or diseases of learning that must be avoided or purged before further progress is possible.

The “Distempers” of Learning

“There be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced.”
Thus Bacon, in the first book of the Advancement said. He had referred to these vanities as
the three “distempers” of learning and identified them (in his characteristically memorable
fashion) as “fantastical learning,” “contentious learning,” and “delicate learning” (alternatively
identified as “vain imaginations,” “vain altercations,” and “vain affectations”).

By fantastical learning (“vain imaginations”) Bacon had in mind what we would today call
pseudo-science: i.e., a collection of ideas that lack any real or substantial foundation, that are
professed mainly by occultists and charlatans, that are carefully shielded from outside criticism,
and that are offered largely to an audience of credulous true believers. In Bacon’s day such
“imaginative science” was familiar in the form of astrology, natural magic, and alchemy.
By contentious learning (“vain altercations”) Bacon was referring mainly to Aristotelian philosophy
and theology and especially to the Scholastic tradition of logical hair-splitting and metaphysical
quibbling. But the phrase applies to any intellectual endeavour in which the principal aim is
not new knowledge or deeper understanding but endless debate cherished for its own sake.
Delicate learning (“vain affectations”) was Bacon’s label for the new humanism insofar as (in
his view) it seemed concerned not with the actual recovery of ancient texts or the retrieval of
past knowledge but merely with the revival of Ciceronian rhetorical embellishments and the
reproduction of classical prose style. Such preoccupation with “words more than matter,”
with “choiceness of phrase” and the “sweet falling of clauses” – in short, with style over
substance – seemed to Bacon (a careful stylist in his own right) the most seductive and decadent
literary vice of his age.

Here we may note that from Bacon’s point of view the “distempers” of learning share two
main faults:
1. Prodigal ingenuity—i.e., each distemper represents a lavish and regrettable waste of
talent, as inventive minds that might be employed in more productive pursuits exhaust
their energy on trivial or puerile enterprises instead.
2. Sterile results—i.e., instead of contributing to the discovery of new knowledge (and thus
to a practical “advancement of learning” and eventually to a better life for all), the
distempers of learning are essentially exercises in personal vainglory that aim at little
more than idle theorizing or the preservation of older forms of knowledge.

In short, in Bacon’s view the distempers impede genuine intellectual progress by beguiling
talented thinkers into fruitless, illusory or purely self-serving ventures. What is needed—and
this is a theme reiterated in all his later writings on learning and human progress—is a
program to re-channel that same creative energy into socially useful new discoveries.

The Idea of Progress
Though it is hard to pinpoint the birth of an idea, for all intents and purposes the modern idea
of technological “progress” (in the sense of a steady, cumulative, historical advance in applied

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