Bacon, Brought Home

Natural History, June, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

Bacon emphasized two tribal idols in his examples: our tendency to explain all phenomena in the spatial and temporal vastness of the universe by familiar patterns in the only realm we know from the direct experience of our own bodies--that is, the domain of objects that live for a few decades and stand a few feet tall--and our propensity to make universal inferences from bruited and biased observations, ignoring evident sources of data that do not impact our senses. (Bacon cites the lovely example of a culture convinced that the Sea God saves shipwrecked men who pray for his aid, because rescued sailors so testify. A skeptic, presented with this evidence, was asked "whether he did not now confess the divinity of Neptune and returned this counterquestion by way of answer: `Yea, but where are they painted, that are drowned?' And there is the same reason of all suchlike superstitions, as in astrology, dreams, divinations, and the rest.")

In the Great Instauration (written by Bacon in Latin and translated by Gilbert Wats in 1694), Bacon defines the idols in his characteristically pungent prose:

   Idols are the profoundest fallacies of the mind of man. Nor do they deceive
   in particulars [that is, objects in the external world] ... but from a
   corrupt and crookedly-set predisposition of the mind; which doth, as it
   were, wrest and inject all the anticipations of the understanding. For the
   mind of man ... is so far from being like a smooth, equal, and clear glass,
   which might sincerely take and reflect the beams of things, according to
   their true incidence; that it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of
   superstitions, apparitions, and impostures.

(Wats, Bacon's translator, called his subject "a learned man, happily the learned'st that ever lived since the decay of the Grecian and Roman empires, when learning was at a high pitch." Wats also appreciated Bacon's distinctive approach to defining the embryonic field of modern science as accumulating knowledge about the empirical world, obtained by passing sensory data through the biased processing machinery of the brain. Wats described Bacon as "the first that ever joyn'd rational and experimental philosophy in a regular correspondence, which before was either a subtilty of words, or a confusion of matter." He then epitomized Bacon's view in a striking image: "For Truth, as it reflects on us, is a congruent conformity of the intellect to the object ... when the intellectual globe, and the globe of the world, intermix their beams and irradiations, in a direct line of projection, to the generation of sciences.")

If our primary tribal idol resides in the ancient Greek proverb that "man [meaning all of us] is the measure of all things," then we should not be surprised to find our bodily fingerprints in nearly every assessment, even (or especially) in our words for abstractions--as in the strength of virility (from the Latin vir, an adult male), the immaturity of puerility (from puer, a boy), or the madness of hysteria (originally defined as an inherently feminine disease, from the Greek word for womb). However, in our proper objection to such sexual stereotyping, we may at least take wry comfort in a general rule of most Indo-European languages (not including English) that assign genders to nouns naming inanimate objects. Abstract concepts usually receive feminine designations--so the nobility of (manly) virtue presents herself as la vertu in France, while an even more distinctively manly virility also cross-dresses as la virilite.