Abstract
In The Advancement of Learning Francis Bacon wrote ‘it is not good to stay too long in the theatr.’1 Where for Reformed thinkers the spectacle of the theatre displaced judgement and watching was a dangerous thing, and for Jonson the humanist looking was not a threat to the human but was the thing which actually proved the human an animal, Bacon also viewed the theatre with suspicion. But for him the theatre was a threat for a very different reason: because of its fictitiousness. The visual nature of the theatre which so disturbed the human in Reformed and humanist ideas was, in fact, vital to the development of the new science and to the expansion of the power of humanity which the new science proclaimed. The truths of science were only enacted through the sight: Bacon wrote ‘For I admit nothing but on the faith of eyes, or at least of careful and severe examination; so that nothing is exaggerated for wonder’s sake, but what I state is sound and without mixture of fables or vanity.’2 The visual is at the heart of the new science: to see is to believe.
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Notes
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, ed., The Works of Francis Bacon (1859; reprinted Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), Volume III, p. 346.
T. H. White, ed., The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (1954; reprinted Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1992), pp. 45–6.
Thomas Wright, ‘Preface’, in Wright, ed., Alexandři Neckám: De Naturiš Rerum (London: Longman, 1863), p. Hi;
Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman, ed., The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus (1550 edition), (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), pp. 86 and 94.
This categorising of animals in terms of their use to humans continued into the eighteenth century. Harriet Ritvo records the response to the kangaroo in 1770: ‘[Joseph] Banks and [Captain James] Cook concurred in proclaiming the otherwise unclassifiable new discovery “excellent food.”’ Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 1.
John Henry has characterised a popular understanding of empiricism (which he does not share) as ‘ideologically neutral, unbiased and objective’. Henry, ‘The Scientific Revolution in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich ed., The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 199.
Charles E. Raven, English Naturalists Trom Neckám to Ray: A Study in the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), pp. 2–3.
For another interpretation of Bacon’s language and modern historiography see Ronald Levao, ‘Francis Bacon and the Mobility of Science’, Representations, 40 (1992), 2.
Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought at the End of the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 341 and 391–2.
See also Brunsdon Yapp, ‘Introduction’ in Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural history in the medieval bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991), p. 1.
On this issue see Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 112–17. According to Allen Debus, the naturalists Conrad Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi, both writing in the mid-sixteenth century, pushed aside the bestiaries and began a scientific study of animals based on observation and experience.
quan Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 52.
For the importance of humanism on the development of natural philosophy, see Antonia McLean, Humanism and the Rise of Science in Tudor England (London: Heinemann, 1972).
Richard D. French, ‘Animal Experimentation: Historical Aspects’, in Warren T. Reich ed., Encyclopedia of Bioethics (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 76. For a useful historical overview of the development of vivisection,
see Andreas Holger Maehle and Ulrich Tröhler, ‘Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the end of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments’, in N. A. Rupke, ed., Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 14–47.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980; reprinted London: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 169.
Bacon, ‘The Plan’ of The Great Instauration, Volume IV, p. 30. The idea of the formative role of the nurse is touched on in a different way in Edmund Spenser’s A viewe of the présente state of Irelande where he warns that children ‘sucke even the nature and disposicion of their nurses’. In Valentine and Orson Orson is fed by the she-bear, and ‘This Child, by reason of the nutriment it received from the Beare, became rough all over like a beast’. Spenser, A viewe of the présente state of Irelande (1596), in Rudolf Gottfried ed,, Spenser’s Prose Works (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), p. 119; Valentine and Orson. The Two Sonnes of the Emperour of Greece (1637), p. 26.
Bacon, Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature or a Science of Productive Works (1604), in Benjamin Farrington, ed., The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), p. 74. This emphasis on the role of childhood in the formation of the human mind is repeated in many of Bacon’s works: see, for instance, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature (1603), in Spedding et al, ed., Works, Volume III, p. 231.
Leah Sinanoglou Marcus has noted that ‘many intellectuals viewed the new science with alarm: to follow it they were obliged to undergo the painful process of cutting off their own mental roots, of wrenching apart a continuum from childhood belief to its adult elaboration.’ Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1978), pp. 92–3. For a discussion of the problematic place of the child and childhood in Bacon’s ideas see my ‘Calling Creatures by their True Names: Francis Bacon, The New Science and the Beast in Man’, in
Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, ed., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
The emphasis on materiality, as well as the notion of progress is surely at the heart of Christopher Hill’s alignment of Bacon and Marx. See Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), (reprinted London: Granada, 1972), pp. 89–90.
Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968), pp. 127–8.
Timothy H. Paterson, ‘Bacon’s Myth of Orpheus: Power as a Goal of Science in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients’, Interpretation, 16: 3 (1989), 429.
Maurice Slawinski has shown how the new scientific endeavour also used some of the ideas of rhetoric — the ‘unscientific’ — in its creation, something which ‘remindfs] us that the new philosophy itself was built on metaphysical foundations outside the bounds of proof. Slawinski, ‘Rhetoric and science/rhetoric of science/science of rhetoric’, in Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi and Maurice Slawinski, ed., Science, culture and popular belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 88.
David Hawkes has argued that in Novum Organum can be traced ‘a fully secular theory of false consciousness.’ I want to argue that there is nothing secular at all in Bacon’s natural philosophy. Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 31.
A link might be made here to Bacon’s understanding of the centrality of the monarch in the law which was one source of difference between Bacon and Coke. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 73–4.
Calvin, Commentarie, p. 75. Matthew Senior, calls this a moment of linguistic perfection’. Senior, ‘“When the Beasts Spoke”: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine’, in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, ed., Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 66.
Alister E. McGrath has noted how ‘Calvin gave a new religious motivation to the scientific investigation of nature’. Charles Webster has noted that the anti-authoritarian (anti-Aristotelean) nature of the new science sat comfortably with the Reformed belief in ‘personal revelation’. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 231;
quan Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 189; see also p. 506.
The term is Margarita Bowen’s. She also notes that the term ‘empiricism’ come from the Greek term empeiria, which means experience. Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 4 and 3.
On the issue of the classifying of flora, and the renaming of plants, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 51–91.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 106.
Bacon, New Atlantis, Volume III, p. 159. Bacon died as a result of a chill caught after freezing a chicken to see if ‘flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt/ John Aubrey, Brief Lives, cited in Anthony Quinton, Francis Bacon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 6–7.
William Harvey, An Anatomical Disputation Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures (1628), Gweneth Whitteridge, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), p. 7.
See F. J. Cole, ‘Harvey’s Animals’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 12 (1957), pp. 106–7.
Bacon, Masculine Birth of Time, p. 69; and Bacon, Novum Organum, Volume IV, p. 93. For a discussion of the changing place of the scientist in the early modern period see Jonathan Sawday, ‘The Fate of Marsy as: Dissecting the Renaissance Body’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn ed., Renaissance Bodies (London: Reaktion, 1990), pp. 111–35; and Mario Biagioli, ‘Scientific Revolution, social bricolage, and etiquette’, in Porter and Teich, ed., Scientific Revolution in National Context, especially p. 18.
William Prynne was writing five years after the publication of Harvey’s discovery. For a discussion of the impact of science on Prynne’s ideas see my ‘Temples of God: William Prynne and the New Science’, in Tracey Hill and Jeffrey Rodman, ed., The Body of Truth: Corporeality and Power in Early Modern Culture (Bath: Sulis Press, 1999).
Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (London: Scolar Press, 1982), p. 25.
Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, The State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 165.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 33.
Louis Marin, ‘The “Aesop” Fable-Animal’, in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 335.
Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (London: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 74.
Carla Mazzio has called this, in a wonderfully embodied image, the ‘slipperiness’ of the tongue. Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue’, in David Hiilman and Carla Mazzio, ed., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 54.
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Fudge, E. (2000). Seeing All Their Insides: Science, Animal Experimentation and Aesop. In: Perceiving Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62415-7_5
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