Justified True Belief

(●) The Lord Chancellor who argued that studying nature is a Christian duty, and then wrote the method for doing it. + Francis Bacon never discovered a law of nature, never built an instrument that worked, and got the shape of the solar system wrong. He is remembered anyway, because he did something stranger than a discovery: he talked a whole civilization into a new set of habits. Before him, a learned Englishman who wanted to know why iron rusts consulted Aristotle. After him, that man went and looked at some rusting iron, wrote down what he saw, and compared notes with somebody in Padua. He mattered to Christians for a particular reason. The century before Bacon had watched the church and the new astronomy collide, and a nervous believer could easily conclude that poking at creation was at best a distraction and at worst an impiety. Bacon answered that God had written two books, Scripture and the created world, and that a man who reads one and refuses the other has half obeyed. That formula, the two books, became the standard warrant for Protestant natural science for the next two centuries, and it is still the first thing a Christian reaches for when the supposed war between faith and science comes up. One fact about him sticks to every account of his life. He held the highest office in English law, Lord Chancellor to the King, and in 1621 the House of Lords sentenced him for taking gifts from men whose cases he was judging. He confessed. He lost the office, the seal, and the income in a single spring, went home, and in the five years left to him wrote more than he had managed in the previous thirty.

(●) 1561 AD: Born into the household that kept Elizabeth I’s Great Seal, and sent to Cambridge at twelve. + Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House on the Strand, a river frontage in London that came with his father’s job. Sir Nicholas Bacon was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, which made him the officer who physically held the wax stamp that turned the Queen’s wishes into law, and Francis was the younger son of his second marriage. His mother, Anne Cooke, was one of the best educated women in England and a convinced Puritan; her English version of Bishop Jewel’s Latin defence of the English church, printed in 1564, became the official one, and she wrote her grown sons letters about their souls that they mostly did not answer. In April 1573, at twelve, Francis went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, with his older brother Anthony. He stayed about two and a half years and left with a grudge that lasted the rest of his life. What Cambridge taught was scholasticism, which is philosophy conducted by disputing about the text of Aristotle, in Latin, according to strict rules of formal argument. Two students would take opposite sides of a proposition and argue it out by the rules, and the winner had won a debate rather than learned anything about the world. Francis came out of that with a verdict he never revised. His chaplain William Rawley, who wrote the first life of him in 1657, records what the verdict was. Bacon fell out with the philosophy of Aristotle while he was at the university, and not, Rawley is careful to say, for any fault in the author. The trouble was the unfruitfulness of the way. It was a philosophy, as his lordship used to say, "only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man." Rawley puts the moment at about sixteen, a year or two later than the Cambridge dates allow, and he was setting down an old man’s recollection long afterward. Even so, everything Bacon published for the next fifty years is consistent with it. He was admitted to Gray’s Inn, one of the London societies where Englishmen learned law by watching it done, and in September 1576 crossed to France in the train of the ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet. Nearly three years abroad taught him courts, ciphers, and the useful skill of noticing how other nations ran their affairs.

(●) 1579 AD: His father died before providing for him, and the cleverest man in England spent twenty years asking for work. + Sir Nicholas Bacon died suddenly on 20 February 1579. He had settled estates on his older sons and had been meaning to buy one for Francis; he had not got round to it. Francis came home from France at eighteen to find himself a gentleman with a famous name, expensive tastes, and no land, which in Elizabethan England was a precise recipe for debt. He was called to the bar in 1582, meaning licensed to plead cases as a barrister, and he had entered the House of Commons the year before that. There in the Commons he sat, session after session, for the better part of two decades. Preferment did not come. Preferment was the Elizabethan word for being given a post worth having, and getting it depended almost entirely on a great man deciding to speak for you. Bacon’s great man should have been his uncle by marriage, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief minister, and Bacon wrote to him repeatedly for a post. The letters survive and they are painful to read, alternating between pride and pleading. In one of them, at about thirty-one, he made a request that sounds like a young man showing off and turned out to be a life’s programme: he had taken all knowledge to be his province, and he wanted a modest place that would leave him time to work. Then in 1593 he did the one thing an ambitious Elizabethan must never do. The Crown asked Parliament for a large subsidy, a tax voted as a lump sum and then collected, and wanted it collected in three years. Bacon stood up and argued for six. His reason was that gentlemen would have to sell their plate, the household silver that served a family as its savings, and farmers their brass pots, if they were made to find the money in three. The tax passed anyway. The Queen took the speech as ingratitude and would not see him for months, and every senior legal office he wanted for the next decade went to somebody else. Chief among the somebodies was Edward Coke, who beat him to the Attorney-Generalship in 1594 and would be his rival for thirty years.

(●) 1601 AD: He helped prosecute for treason the Earl of Essex, the patron who had given him an estate. + Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was the Queen’s glamorous favourite, and for a decade he was also Bacon’s patron and friend. Essex campaigned hard to get Bacon the Attorney-Generalship and then the Solicitor-Generalship, failed at both, and in 1595 made him a present of an estate at Twickenham Park by way of apology. Bacon, for his part, gave Essex advice that Essex should have taken, warning him repeatedly that a soldier who wants to be loved by the people and trusted by the sovereign will end by having neither. In February 1601 Essex, disgraced after a botched command in Ireland, led a few hundred armed men through the streets of London in an attempt to seize the Queen’s person. It collapsed in an afternoon. Bacon was one of the Queen’s learned counsel, which meant that when the trial came he was one of the lawyers on his feet against his friend, and afterward he was told to write the government’s official account of the plot. Essex was beheaded on 25 February 1601. Bacon defended himself for the rest of his life, and the defence is not contemptible: he was the Queen’s servant before he was Essex’s, he had warned the man for years, and treason is treason. It is also true that he was a poor man who could not afford to refuse, and that he took the assignment rather than resign it. Nobody who has read the letters thinks he came out of that February with clean hands. Under the new king, James I, he began at last to rise. He was knighted in 1603. In 1606 he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a London alderman, a marriage that produced no children and ended badly. He was made Solicitor-General in 1607, and in 1613, at fifty-two, Attorney-General at last, the office he had been passed over for nineteen years before.

(●) 1605 AD: In The Advancement of Learning he told the King that God wrote two volumes and Christians were reading only one. + The book came out in two parts, and Bacon wrote it in English rather than Latin because he was aiming at his own country and at James I in particular, a king who liked to be thought learned. Its first half is a defence of study against its despisers. Bacon takes the objections seriously, and the religious one gets his most careful answer, because it was the objection with real teeth in it: does not knowledge puff a man up, and was not the first sin a reach for forbidden knowing? His answer is that the sin in Eden was not knowledge of nature but the wish to set up a law of good and evil apart from God, and that Solomon, whom no Christian would call impious, made it a king’s glory to search things out. The second half is a survey of everything then known, chapter by chapter, with the gaps marked. Bacon lists the subjects nobody was studying the way an auditor lists missing receipts: no proper history of the trades, no natural history worth the name, no science of the passions, nothing on the diseases of the mind. That is a strange and effective thing to put in a book. A catalogue of what is known can be admired and shelved; a catalogue of what is missing reads like a good map of a half-explored country, which is to say it makes you want to go there. It sold moderately and changed nothing immediately. Eighteen years later he had it translated and expanded into nine Latin books as De Augmentis Scientiarum, because he expected Latin to outlive English, and on that one point he was wrong.

(●) 1618 AD: He reached the Lord Chancellorship, and two years later published the Novum Organum, the book he had been rewriting for thirty years. + Bacon became Lord Keeper in 1617 and Lord Chancellor in January 1618, the office his father had held in all but name, and the peerages followed, which is to say the King made him a nobleman: Baron Verulam that summer, Viscount St Alban in January 1621. He turned fifty-seven that January, and he had finally arrived at the top of a ladder he had been climbing since he was eighteen. In October 1620 he published the Novum Organum, the "New Instrument," and presented it to the King. The title is a challenge thrown at a dead man: the collected logical works of Aristotle had been known for centuries as the Organon, the instrument of thought, and Bacon was announcing a replacement. He did not write it as a treatise. He wrote it as a string of numbered aphorisms, an aphorism being a short self-contained paragraph that makes one point and stops, a hundred and thirty of them in the first book and fifty-two in the second. A reader can take them one at a time, which was exactly the intention. Bacon believed that a finished system invites the reader to admire it, while a broken-off remark invites him to think. Around it he built a scaffolding called the Instauratio Magna, the Great Instauration or great restoration, a six-part plan for rebuilding human knowledge from the ground up. He finished the first part, published the second while it was still unfinished, made a serious start on the third, and left the last three as titles and prefaces. Its engraved title page shows a ship sailing out between the Pillars of Hercules, the rocks at Gibraltar that marked the end of the world the ancients dared to sail, under a line from Daniel 12:4 about many passing through and knowledge increasing. James I is supposed to have said the book was like the peace of God, in that it passed all understanding; the remark is reported rather than documented, and it may be a joke made up later by somebody who had also failed to finish it.

(●) 1621 AD: He confessed to taking bribes from men whose cases he was judging, and lost the office in a single spring. + In March 1621 a parliamentary committee began taking evidence from suitors in Chancery, meaning the people with cases running in the court the Lord Chancellor ran, and what came out was ugly: twenty-three counts of accepting money and gifts from parties with business before him. Bacon did not fight it. He sent the Lords a written submission admitting corruption and giving up all defence, and when a committee came to his sickbed to ask whether the confession was really his, he answered, "My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart; I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." The sentence, on 3 May 1621, was a fine of forty thousand pounds, imprisonment in the Tower at the King’s pleasure, permanent exclusion from office and from Parliament, and banishment from within twelve miles of the court. In practice the King let him out of the Tower after a few days and handed the fine to trustees of Bacon’s own choosing, which quietly cancelled it. What was not cancelled was the disgrace. His own account of it is worth having, because it is neither a denial nor a whine. He had taken the gifts, and so had every other man who had sat on that bench. He insisted to the end that they had never bought a judgment, and the record broadly bears him out, since no decree of his is on record as having been reversed for corruption. So he said afterwards that he had been the justest judge in England for fifty years, and that his had been the justest censure in Parliament for two hundred. A censure, in the language of the time, is the sentence a court or a house of Parliament hands down on a man, so the second half of that boast is a man calling his own punishment the most deserved in two centuries. Both halves can be true at once, and a man who understands why is close to understanding Bacon. He knew exactly what the custom was. He knew exactly what it was worth. He took the money anyway.

(●) 1626 AD: Five ruined years were his most productive, and he died testing whether snow would keep a chicken fresh. + Turned out of public life at sixty, deep in debt, Bacon went back to Gorhambury, his house near St Albans, and worked like a man with a deadline. The list from those five years would be respectable as a whole career. There was the Latin De Augmentis. There was the History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, often called the first modern classic of English history, built out of the old chronicles but reordered into a study of one king’s mind and one king’s laws, with the statutes checked against the records. There was a natural history of the winds and another of life and death, and a verse translation of seven psalms dedicated to the poet George Herbert. And there was the third and final edition of the Essays, which is the book of his that people still read for pleasure. He also left in a drawer an unfinished story called New Atlantis, about an island whose central institution is not a temple or a palace but a research laboratory. The end came in early April 1626. Driving toward Highgate in a coach with the King’s physician, with snow on the ground, it occurred to him that flesh might keep in snow as well as in salt. John Aubrey, who gathered the details a generation later, has them stopping at a poor woman’s house at the bottom of the hill, buying a hen, having her gut it, and stuffing the body with snow, Bacon helping to do it himself. He caught a chill on the spot. In his own last letter, written to the Earl of Arundel from a bed in Arundel’s house at Highgate, he says he was likely to have had the fortune of the elder Pliny, who died getting too close to an erupting Vesuvius, and adds, with evident satisfaction, that the experiment itself "succeeded excellently well." He died on 9 April 1626 and was buried at St Michael’s, St Albans, near his mother. His will contains one of the coolest sentences ever written by a disgraced man: for his name and memory, he left it to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages. The next ages obliged.

What He Taught

(T1) God has written two books, and a Christian who reads only one has half obeyed. + Think of a letter from a father who is also a builder. In the letter he tells his son who he is and what he wants of him. Around the son stands a house the father designed and put up, every joint and stair of it his work. You would think it strange for the son to read the letter over and over and never once look at the roof beam. That is roughly the picture Bacon put in front of a nervous Christian public. The two books doctrine did not begin with him. Augustine had used the image, and so had others; what Bacon did was turn it from a devotional metaphor into a piece of policy. Scripture, he says, teaches the will of God, and the creation teaches the power of God, and the two are not rivals for the same shelf. He then presses the point that his readers were actually worried about, which is whether curiosity was Adam’s sin. His answer is precise. The forbidden fruit was not natural knowledge but moral independence, a law of good and evil that a creature makes for himself; the knowledge of creatures is the thing Adam was given to do in the garden, and naming the animals was the first assignment. Bacon takes Solomon’s proverb as his warrant: "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out" (Proverbs 25:2). God hides; searching is not trespass but the honour God has arranged for us. He adds a warning in the same breath that later ages ignored. The two books are to be studied together and never blended: do not go to Genesis for physics, and do not go to physics for the will of God. Bacon thought the mingling of the two had ruined both. Out of the unwholesome mixture of things human and divine, he wrote in the Novum Organum (Book I, Aphorism 65), there arises "not only a fantastic philosophy but also an heretical religion."

(Q) "Let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works, divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both." + Source: Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I (1605). It closes his answer to the divines who thought study a danger to the soul, early in the First Book, and it is the sentence of his that has been quoted most often since. "A weak conceit of sobriety" means a small-minded idea of what counts as being sensible: the pious hesitation of a man who thinks it safer not to ask. Bacon’s "philosophy" here means the study of nature, what we would call science.

(T2) The human mind distorts whatever it looks at, in four predictable ways. + Pick up a cheap magnifying glass and look at a straight edge through the rim. The edge bends. The fault is not in the edge and not in your eye but in the lens, and knowing that the lens bends light is the first step toward correcting for it. Bacon’s claim is that the mind is that kind of lens, and he gave the distortions a name that has stuck: idols. He does not mean carved statues. He is using the word in the older sense of a false image that gets worshipped, and his point is that we all have four of them, whether or not we notice. - Idols of the Tribe are the distortions built into human nature as such, shared by everybody. Chief among them is our appetite for order: we see more regularity in things than is there, we prefer a tidy explanation to a true one, and once we have adopted an opinion we quietly recruit the evidence that fits and explain away the evidence that does not. Psychologists rediscovered this in the twentieth century and called it confirmation bias. - Idols of the Cave are the private distortions of one person, from temperament, education, the books he happened to read, the master he happened to admire. Everyone reasons from inside his own cave and mistakes its walls for the world. - Idols of the Market Place come from words. Because we trade in language the way traders trade in a market, we inherit terms that have no clear thing behind them, and then argue about the terms as though they were things. Bacon thought this the most troublesome of the four. - Idols of the Theatre are whole philosophical systems, received on authority and performed like plays. Every system, he says, is a stage world, plausible and self-consistent and not to be confused with the real one. A doctrine of built-in intellectual corruption did not have to be argued to Bacon’s Protestant readers. They already held that the Fall had reached the mind as well as the will, so a man telling them their own thinking was bent was telling them nothing they had not confessed on Sunday. What was new was the practical conclusion he drew from it. If the mind is crooked by nature, then no amount of individual brilliance will straighten it, and what you need instead is a procedure: written records, repeatable experiments, and other people checking your work. Those are the habits the scientific paper was later built to carry, and Bacon was asking for them before anyone had one to write.

(Q) "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it." + Source: Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism 46 (Spedding translation, 1858). The aphorism goes on to tell an old story that comes down from Cicero. A man is shown, in a temple, the painted tablets hung up by sailors who had prayed in a storm and survived. Does he now acknowledge the power of the gods? He asks where the pictures are of the men who prayed and drowned. That is the Idol of the Tribe in one line: we count the hits and forget to count the misses (T2).

(T3) Truth is climbed to from particular facts, not deduced downward from first principles. + Two men want to know why bread rises. The first settles on a general principle, that warmth draws out the airy element in moist bodies, and deduces from it what dough must do. The second bakes forty loaves, changing one thing at a time, and writes down what happened to each. Bacon says the first man will produce elegant conclusions all his life and never bake a decent loaf, and that European learning had been the first man for two thousand years. The formal name for what he wanted is induction: reasoning from many particular observations up to a general rule, as against deduction, which starts from a general rule and works down to particular cases. Induction was not new, and Bacon knew it. What he objected to was induction done in one hop, the sort where a man notices three cases and announces a law. His own method is a slow ladder, and the rungs are worth walking through. You begin by gathering a natural history, which for Bacon means an honest written record of instances, every case of the thing you are studying that you can lay hands on. Then you sort those instances into three tables. The first holds the cases where the quality is present. The second holds the cases where it is absent, in circumstances otherwise as much like the first set as you can arrange, which is the baker leaving out the yeast and changing nothing else. The third holds the cases where it comes in more or less, varying by degree. Then you eliminate. Any explanation still standing after the absences and the variations have knocked out its rivals is your next rung up, and only after a long climb do you arrive at the widest generalisations, which is where the old philosophy had insisted on starting. He worked the method through on heat, and the answer he reached is not bad for 1620: heat is a kind of expansive motion in the small parts of a body. He also insisted, against the whole temper of his age, on collecting the negative cases, the instances where the thing is missing. Everybody enjoys the confirming example. Bacon saw that the disconfirming one does more work, and in that he is the great-grandfather of every experiment designed to fail.

(Q) "There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immoveable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried." + Source: Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism 19 (Spedding translation, 1858). An "axiom" for Bacon is any general proposition, not a self-evident starting point in the geometer’s sense. "This way is now in fashion" is a swipe at the universities. "As yet untried" is his estimate of how much of his programme had actually been done by 1620, and it was honest (T3).

(T4) Nature is commanded only by being obeyed. + A man who wants his sailing boat to go north does not shout at the wind. He learns which way it is blowing and sets the sail so that the wind itself carries him where he wants. He gets his way precisely by submitting to something he did not make and cannot alter, and the more exactly he submits, the more he gets. That is the whole of Bacon’s most famous idea, and it is usually quoted with the submission left out. "Knowledge is power" is not quite his sentence. The nearest thing to it is a Latin phrase in an early devotional piece, the Meditationes Sacrae of 1597, where he writes that knowledge itself is power, and there he is saying it of God rather than of us. What he actually argued at length is tighter and better than the slogan. Knowing and doing are the same act seen from two sides, because the only way to make anything happen is to know the cause that makes it happen, and causes are not up to us. Wishing does not move matter. Neither does a clever syllogism. The magician with his charm and the schoolman with his formal argument, the university philosopher reasoning his way to conclusions without leaving the room, fail for the same reason: both expect nature to accommodate them. The theology under this is not decoration. A world that must be obeyed is a world with a fixed character not of our devising, which is what a created order is: real, orderly, and not ours. Bacon expected such a world because he believed a lawgiver had made it, and he expected it to be intelligible for the same reason. The bargain he describes is exactly the bargain a creature gets. Submit to how things are, and you may do astonishing things. Refuse, and you may only talk.

(Q) "Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule." + Source: Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism 3 (Spedding translation, 1858). The third aphorism of the book, and its thesis. "In contemplation" means when you are simply trying to understand; "in operation" means when you are trying to make something happen. The cause you identify in the first case is the instruction you follow in the second, which is why Bacon thought pure and applied knowledge could not be separated (T4).

(T5) Learning is for charity, and knowledge that does not relieve suffering has been misspent. + Bacon thought the deepest error in the world of learning was not a false doctrine but a wrong motive, and he set out the wrong motives one by one, in a list that reads like a survey of a university common room: some men study to have somewhere restful to put a restless mind, some to have a pleasant view, some to look impressive, some to win arguments, some to make money. Against all five he sets a storehouse, which is a building for keeping things that other people will need. The end he names has two halves and they are joined. The first is the glory of the Creator, so this is worship. The second is "the relief of man’s estate," meaning the improvement of the human condition: less hunger, less pain, longer lives, easier work. Bacon meant it concretely. His list of things worth inventing includes better medicines, better agriculture, the prolongation of life, and the making of new materials, and his fable New Atlantis imagines an institution funded by a Christian commonwealth for exactly that purpose. He is careful to say why the motive matters and not only that it does. Knowledge sought for display swells a man; knowledge sought for use feeds people. Paul had put it in half a sentence, that this kind of knowledge "puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1), and Bacon quotes the apostle to say that the cure for the pride of learning is not less learning but charity. Every Christian hospital, famine relief agency and mission clinic of the following centuries is downstream of somebody taking that seriously.

(Q) "As if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate." + Source: Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I (1605). He is diagnosing what he calls the greatest error of all, which is mistaking the final end of knowledge. A "terrace" is a raised walk laid out for the view; a "tower of state" is a tower built to be seen from. The last clause became the watchword of English science, and the Royal Society’s charter of 1663 took it up almost word for word, setting the fellows to work for the glory of God the Creator and the advantage of the human race (T5).

(Q) "It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion." + Source: Bacon, Essays, "Of Atheism" (1625 edition). The most quoted sentence he ever wrote about faith, and the reason later generations of Christian scientists claimed him as one of their own. The argument in the essay turns on what the older writers called second causes: the ordinary natural causes of things, one pushing the next, as distinct from God the first cause who stands behind the whole chain. A man who looks at a few scattered second causes, Bacon says, stops there and sees no need of God. A man who follows the chain far enough finds it confederated and linked, and is driven back to providence.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Royal Society adopted him as its founder and set out to do what he had only described. + Bacon died in 1626 having produced no discoveries. Thirty-four years later a group of English natural philosophers, most of them serious churchmen, began meeting in London to do experiments in company and write down the results, and in 1662 Charles II gave them a charter as the Royal Society. Natural philosopher was simply what such a man was called then; nobody had yet thought of the word scientist. And they knew perfectly well whose plan they were executing. When Thomas Sprat, later a bishop, wrote the Society’s official History in 1667, Bacon is the hero of it, and the poem Abraham Cowley wrote for the front of the book makes the comparison plain: "Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last, / The barren Wilderness he past, / Did on the very Border stand / Of the blest promis’d Land." Bacon is the lawgiver who saw the country and did not enter it; the fellows of the Society are the generation that crossed. What they took from him was not a theory but a set of working habits, and they are the habits science still keeps. Report the experiment so that another man can repeat it. Publish the failures. Prefer the plain word to the ornamental one, which is why Sprat lays down that members are to bring everything as near to mathematical plainness as they can, preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants to that of wits and scholars. Work in company rather than alone, because no single mind can be trusted against its own idols (T2). Robert Boyle, the most devout of them, described his own programme in Bacon’s terms. Robert Hooke opened the preface to Micrographia in 1665 by saying that the remedies for the failings of sense, memory and reason can come only from the real, the mechanical, the experimental philosophy. That is Bacon in one sentence, nearly forty years after his death, at the front of the book that showed Europe what a flea looks like under a lens. The Society’s early members were not embarrassed about the theology of this. Boyle left money in his will for an annual lecture course defending the Christian religion, and John Ray wrote The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation in 1691, a book of careful biology written as an act of praise. Bacon’s storehouse (T5) had been built, and the men who built it thought they were reading God’s second book.

(†) The two books became the standard Christian answer to the claim that faith and science are at war. + The doctrine Bacon put into circulation (T1) had the shape of a formula, and formulas travel. Paul had already told the Romans that God’s "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20), and the psalmist that the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). Theologians call this general revelation: what God makes known to everyone through the created order and the conscience, as distinct from special revelation, the particular things he has said in Scripture. Bacon gave that old doctrine a job to do in a laboratory. The line runs straight through the next two centuries of English-speaking Christianity. It is in the Boyle Lectures, in John Ray, and in the physico-theology of the eighteenth century, a whole shelf of books reasoning from the workmanship of an eye or a wing to the wisdom of whoever made it. It surfaces again in William Paley’s Natural Theology of 1802, where the argument from the watch found on a heath is Baconian in temper even where it is not Baconian in method. It is quoted in the nineteenth-century debates over geology and again in the twentieth over evolution, most often by Christians arguing that a believer has nothing to fear from a fact. Bacon’s second rule travelled less well, and it is worth recovering. He insisted that the two books be kept distinct as well as both read. Scripture is not a manual of physics and physics is not a source of doctrine, and forcing either to do the other’s work, he said, yields a fantastic philosophy and a heretical religion at once. That warning is aimed in both directions, at the believer who wants to settle a scientific question by citing a verse and at the naturalist who thinks a good account of a mechanism has disposed of a Maker.

(†) Where his own record goes wrong: the bribes he took, and the questions he ruled out of court. + Two entries belong on the other side of the ledger, and both come from Bacon himself rather than from anything later readers did with him. - The bench. He took money and plate, meaning coin and silver vessels, from suitors whose cases were before him, and he admitted it under his own hand: it was his act, his hand, and his heart. His defence, that the gifts never bought a verdict and that everyone at that court took them, is probably true as a matter of fact. It does not survive contact with the standard he himself preached. The man who wrote that learning must not be made "a shop for profit or sale" (T5) had made his court into one, and the writer who taught Europe to distrust its own motives (T2) never caught his own at work. It is the sharpest illustration his life provides of the difference between seeing a truth and being changed by it, which is a difference Scripture is blunt about (James 1:22). - Final causes. A final cause, in the old vocabulary Bacon inherited from Aristotle, is the end a thing is for: eyes are for seeing, an acorn is for becoming an oak. Bacon divided the study of nature from the study of purposes and pushed purpose out of the working scientist’s toolbox. Asking what a thing is for, he said, belongs in metaphysics, which is the study of what reality is like at bottom, and in divinity. In physics it stops the search for the real mechanism. The inquisition of final causes, he wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book III, Chapter 5, "is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to God produces nothing," and the words are Spedding’s translation of his Latin. He did not mean that creation has no purposes. He believed it had, and said so, which is precisely the difficulty. A man who holds that the world was made for ends, and then rules that the study of the world may not ask about ends, has drawn a line his own theology cannot support. Purpose is either a feature of the thing being studied or it is not, and if it is, a method that forbids the question has been built to miss something real. There is a milder third point that his admirers rarely mention. Bacon walled revelation off from reason so firmly that he could praise faith for believing what most offends the understanding. The ninth book of De Augmentis Scientiarum puts it without hedging, again in Spedding’s translation: "The more discordant therefore and incredible the Divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." That is close to fideism, the position that faith rests entirely on itself and that reason can neither support it nor examine it. A church that has read Anselm and Aquinas will not follow him there, and the strange thing is that he need not have gone. His own doctrine of the two books (T1) assumes the mind can read God’s handwriting in the world, and that is more than a pure fideist can grant.