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Unit 11: Of Revenge by Francis Bacon

scientific knowledge) began with Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning and became fully Notes
articulated in his later works.
Knowledge is power, and when embodied in the form of new technical inventions and mechanical
discoveries it is the force that drives history – this was Bacon’s key insight. In many respects
this idea was his single greatest invention, and it is all the more remarkable for its having been
conceived and promoted at a time when most English and European intellectuals were either
reverencing the literary and philosophical achievements of the past or deploring the numerous
signs of modern degradation and decline. Indeed, while Bacon was preaching progress and
declaring a brave new dawn of scientific advance, many of his colleagues were persuaded that
the world was at best creaking along towards a state of senile immobility and eventual darkness.
“Our age is iron, and rusty too,” wrote John Donne, contemplating the signs of universal
decay in a poem published six years after Bacon’s The Advancement.
That history might in fact be progressive, i.e., an onward and upward ascent – and not, as
Aristotle had taught, merely cyclical or, as cultural pessimists from Hesiod to Spengler have
supposed, a descending or retrograde movement, became for Bacon an article of secular faith
which he propounded with evangelical force and a sense of mission. In the Advancement, the
idea is offered tentatively, as a kind of hopeful hypothesis. But in later works such as the New
Organon, it becomes almost a promised destiny: Enlightenment and a better world, Bacon
insists, lie within our power; they require only the cooperation of learned citizens and the
active development of the arts and sciences.

The Reclassification of Knowledge

In Book II of De Dignitate (his expanded version of The Advancement) Bacon outlines his scheme
for a new division of human knowledge into three primary categories: History, Poesy, and
Philosophy (which he associates respectively with the three fundamental “faculties” of mind
– memory, imagination, and reason). Although the exact motive behind this reclassification
remains unclear, one of its main consequences seems unmistakable: it effectively promotes
philosophy – and especially Baconian science – above the other two branches of knowledge,
in essence defining history as the mere accumulation of brute facts, while reducing art and
imaginative literature to the even more marginal status of “feigned history.”
Evidently Bacon believed that in order for a genuine advancement of learning to occur, the
prestige of philosophy (and particularly natural philosophy) had to be elevated, while that of
history and literature (in a word, humanism) needed to be reduced. Bacon’s scheme effectively
accomplishes this by making history (the domain of fact, i.e., of everything that has happened)
a virtual sub-species of philosophy (the domain of realistic possibility, i.e., of everything that
can theoretically or actually occur). Meanwhile, poesy (the domain of everything that is imaginable
or conceivable) is set off to the side as a mere illustrative vehicle. In essence, it becomes simply
a means of recreating actual scenes or events from the past (as in history plays or heroic
poetry) or of allegorizing or dramatizing new ideas or future possibilities (as in Bacon’s own
interesting example of “parabolic poesy,” the New Atlantis.)

The New Organon

To the second part of his Great Instauration Bacon gave the title New Organon (or “True
Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature”). The Greek word organon means “instrument”
or “tool,” and Bacon clearly felt he was supplying a new instrument for guiding and correcting
the mind in its quest for a true understanding of nature. The title also glances at Aristotle’s
Organon (a collection that includes his Categories and his Prior and Posterior Analytics) and
thus suggests a “new instrument” destined to transcend or replace the older, no longer serviceable

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