clue to the labyrinth: Francis Bacon and the decryption of nature, The

Cryptologia, Jul 2000 by Pesic, Peter

The labyrinth is also an image of the artifices which men make to subdue Nature to their use; the delusive turns of the maze are like the intricate variety, subtlety, and apparent likeness of one part to another which characterize "the more ingenious and exact mechanical inventions." Were it not for the clue which the artificer found, the machine would not work. When Theseus finds that clue he gains the power to "dissolve the spell." Bacon, the author of the fragmentary work The Clue to the Maze (Filium Labyrinthii) (ca. 1607; 3.503), presents himself as a new Theseus. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates emerged as a new Theseus who delivers men from the fear of the Minotaur, of Death.28 In contrast, Bacon proposes to postpone and alleviate death though scientific means, not by teaching about the immortality of the soul but by scientific miracles that depend on secrets wrested from the labyrinth.

As their ancestor Daedalus built the labyrinth, Bacon calls on the new breed of scientist to breach that inmost sanctuary. In complex images, he calls them to pierce the veil of the temple of nature through their penetrating interpretations, "preparing a way into her inner chambers" (4.124), into the very center of the labyrinth. In Mark's gospel, the veil of the temple was rent by the death of the Savior; Bacon's metaphor draws more on the solemn entrance of the High Priest into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. The select priesthood of Salomon's House also is properly prepared so that it can penetrate the veil over nature through gaining a certain clue, a certain kind of interpretation. "We must use induction, true and legitimate induction, which is the very key of interpretation" (4.127). If these scientific priests can reach the center of the maze, they will find the "summary laws of nature" and can use them to grasp immense power for the benefit of humankind.

THE CLUE TO THE LABYRINTH

To find the guiding thread, Bacon envisaged a symbolic and schematic "alphabet of Nature" that would help flawed human understanding reach the "inner courts" of Nature.29 The key needed for interpretation is not a fixed structure like a skeleton key, but rather a "key" in the cryptographic sense: a flexible indicator that guides decryption by delineating the emergent structure of the cipher. The essential preparation for induction is the exhaustive preparation of "tables and arrangements of instances, in such a method and order that the understanding may be able to deal with them"; Bacon also organizes his "alphabet of Nature" in similar tables (5.210). He cannot give full examples without having essentially completed investigations to a degree he knows is far beyond his capacity, or perhaps beyond that of any solitary seeker; only the whole "machine" is adequate. However, in the Novum organism he does give an extended attempt at tables regarding the nature of heat, leading to results strikingly like the view of modern kinetic theory, in which heat is a form of atomic motion. What is important here are the tables themselves, manifold and detailed, going through many possible permutations of the instances in which are enumerated instances of "essence and presence" or "proximity where the nature of heat is absent" or "exclusion" or "degrees" of heat.