Bacon: Footnotes

BACON

FOOTNOTES

Bacon uses the phrase prisca sapientia, which could carry the much stronger meaning of an occult wisdom, which God gave directly to Moses, and which was handed down by word of mouth through a succession of sages, including Plato (but not including Aristotle). One of the distinctive characteristics of Renaissance humanism was the attempt to recover this ancient wisdom, and there is no reason to suppose that Bacon was immune to it. Even Newton believed that the essentials of his physics could be found in the writings of the ancients.

I do not know the source of the quotation. Presumably Bacon means that he will accompany antiquity except when it comes to matters of religion.

Probably an allusion to Mehmet III, sultan from 1595 to 1603, who on his succession put to death nineteen of his brothers, and a number of women who might have been made pregnant by his father.

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Genesis 2.7 (as in the Vulgate). Bacon doesn’t want to be accused of denying that the human soul is the ‘substantial form’ of the body, directly and miraculously created by God.

This is not to be found in either Parmenides or Plato, but the ‘ladder of perfection’ was a commonplace among Neoplatonists.

It is probably because of the pejorative connotations of the word ‘magician’ that they are traditionally known as the three ‘wise men’, or the ‘magi’ (which is simply the Latin for ‘magician’).

Magnalia naturae, a favourite expression of Paracelsus, which also occurs in the Bible (Psalms 106.22).

It was believed that reproduction took place through a mixture of the seed (semen) and menstrual discharge (menstruum), and that the various species of metals were generated by an analogous process under the earth. So if you can identify the right seed and the right menstruum, you should be able to generate metals in the laboratory.

That is, given that gold is the perfect metal, another metal would become gold if all its imperfections were eliminated.

Actually ‘dragons’ in the text — a term used for some of the apparently spiralling motions of heavenly bodies as observed from the earth. Remember that Bacon denies the rotation of the earth.

Bacon seems slightly confused, since fire is, of course, capable of being sensed. What he is referring to here was usually called the ‘quintessence’ or fifth element, which surrounded the firmament, and could be seen through the holes in it, which were the stars.

This passage is remarkable in more than one respect. First, it is the earliest occurrence of the now commonplace distinction between Rationalists and Empiricists, or at least the first occasion on which something close to the modern terminology is used, and with its modern meaning. I have cheated slightly, since a literal translation of the Latin would give the words ‘empiric’ and ‘rational’. But a Dr. Tenison published some of Bacon’s ‘apophthegms’ in his Baconiana of 1679, and translated the above passage as follows (or he could have been using an English version written by Bacon himself): "21. He likewise often used this comparison; ‘The Empirical philosophers are like to pismires; they only lay up and use their store. The Rationalists are like to spiders; they spin all out of their own bowels. But give me a philosopher, who like the bee, hath a middle faculty, gathering from abroad, but digesting that which is gathered by his own virtue.’" [Spedding et al., VII.177.] The second remarkable feature is that, although Bacon is traditionally reckoned an empiricist, this passage is a clear anticipation of Kant, whose basic project was to arrange a marriage between empiricism and rationalism. Even more remarkably, Kant heads the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason with a quotation from Bacon — but not this one.

Natura naturans, or nature considered as active. It is a key expression in Spinoza’ philosophy.

I.51: ‘The human understanding is led to abstraction by its own nature, and it imagines that things which change are unchanging. But it is better to dissect nature than to abstract it — as was done by the school of Democritus, which penetrated more deeply into nature than the other schools. Instead, one ought to consider matter, and its schematisms and metaschematisms, and pure action, and the law of action or change. Forms are figments of the human mind, except in so far as one might give the name of ‘forms’ to these laws of action.’