Francis Bacon's Inductive Method: The Philosopher Behind the Novum Organum

Who Francis Bacon was

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates Francis Bacon’s birth to 22 January 1561, at York House in the Strand in London, and ranks him among the leading philosophers of the early modern age. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that his family was prominent and well connected, and that he would later hold the titles of Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans. In 1573, aged just twelve, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where the traditional curriculum stirred the lifelong opposition to Aristotelianism that stayed with him, that is, to the philosophy of Aristotle and to the tradition built on it.

His working life was that of a lawyer and a man of government. Bacon was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1576 and called to the bar in June 1582; elected to Parliament in January 1581, he kept a seat in every session until 1621, lists the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. June 1607 brought him the post of solicitor-general, October 1613 that of attorney-general, March 1617 that of lord keeper, and January 1618 that of lord chancellor: by that point, the entry notes, no lawyer in England stood higher and his political career had reached its summit. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ties the climb to the arrival of James I, who succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603, and knighted Bacon; between 1604 and 1618 Bacon filled a run of high-profile institutional appointments. In May 1606, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records, Bacon had married Alice Barnham: he was forty-five, she was barely fourteen.

In the spring of 1621 Parliament tried him on a charge of taking bribes, and rather than mount a defence Bacon confessed. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that he was handed a heavy fine and a term of imprisonment in the Tower of London.

The former lord chancellor died at Highgate on 9 April 1626. The tradition gathered by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts his death down to a cold or a pneumonia caught while he was testing the preserving and insulating properties of snow.

The Novum Organum of 1620

October 1620 saw the publication of the book that secured Bacon a place in the history of philosophy, the Instauratio magna: it contained the general preface to the work, its “Plan”, and the two books of the Novum Organum, lists the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Novum Organum, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature, is the second part of Bacon’s project to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up. The title deliberately echoes Aristotle’s Organon, the logic Bacon intended to replace; the Recap on Aristotle and Plato covers the Greek school that logic came out of. The Greek word organon means instrument, recalls the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which describes the book as a series of aphorisms rather than a systematic treatise.

From the syllogism to induction

The basic flaw Bacon finds in the Aristotelian syllogism, for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is that it departs from axioms already granted, racing from the senses and particular evidence to general axioms. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the same fault as a route that leaps straight from particulars to the most general propositions, then works back down by deduction to the middle ones. Should those general axioms prove false, the intermediate axioms drawn from them may be false as well: one contrary case is enough, in the image the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses, to bring the whole structure down.

The alternative method of the Novum Organum moves in a steady, graded fashion from one axiom to the next, and it arrives at the most general axioms only last. Aphorism XIX calls this the true path, the one that draws axioms from the senses and from particular evidence by a gradual, unbroken climb, and Bacon states that nobody had attempted it in his day. Aphorism XIII had already made the point that the syllogism does not reach the first principles of the sciences and is applied in vain to the middle axioms, since it cannot catch the subtlety of nature.

Bacon’s induction, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports, is often called “eliminative induction”. In book II, aphorism 16 of the Novum Organum, the first job of a genuine induction is to reject or rule out the individual properties that are not found constantly in the phenomenon under study.

Practical example: picture twenty cases in which some phenomenon shows up. The induction described in the Novum Organum runs through the observed properties and crosses off any that go missing in even one of those twenty cases. What is left are the properties that keep the phenomenon company every time, and the climb toward the axiom starts from those alone; a syllogism would have asked for the axiom up front.

Experiments, for Bacon, are to be built around a definite question: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up his position by saying that the senses judge only the experiment, while the experiment judges the thing itself. In the opening aphorism of the Novum Organum, man appears as the servant and interpreter of nature, and what he can do and grasp stops at what he has observed of the natural order, in fact as in thought.

Bacon himself points to three differences between his logic and the traditional kind: the end in view, the order of demonstration, and the starting point of the inquiry. The Recap on the scientific method follows the stages of inquiry as they are taught in schools.

The four idols of the mind

The “idols” Bacon describes in book I of the Novum Organum, across aphorisms 39-68, are the habitual errors, natural leanings, and flaws that lay siege to the mind and stop it from understanding nature fully and correctly, writes the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Aphorism XXXIX sorts them into four classes.

Idol	Where it comes from	What the sources say
Tribe	human nature itself	inborn, so they can be recognised and compensated for
Cave	the culture and schooling of one person	they vary from individual to individual
Marketplace	words and social dealings	the most damaging of the four, for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Theatre	the dogmas of the philosophical schools	culturally acquired, like the cave idols

The idols of the tribe are grounded in human nature itself, and Bacon treats it as an error to believe the senses mirror the world faithfully: aphorism XLI states that perceptions, of the senses and of the mind alike, stand in proportion to the measure of the individual and not to that of the universe. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that, being inborn weaknesses shared by all of humanity, these idols can only be recognised and compensated for. The cave idols, by contrast, vary from one individual to another, because they come out of personal culture and schooling: in aphorism XLII each person has a cave or den of his own that refracts and discolours the light of nature.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts the idols of the marketplace the most damaging of the four, since they grow out of the words people use to describe reality. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy names language as the chief culprit behind the obstacles that arise from social dealings between people, and in aphorism XLIII Bacon writes that words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd and end up forcing and ruling the intellect. The idols of the theatre consist in the dogmas of the philosophical schools and in faulty rules of demonstration taken on without question; like the cave idols, they are picked up by cultural route.

New Atlantis and Salomon’s House

New Atlantis tells of the utopian society of Bensalem, whose happiness flows from Salomon’s House, a scientific institution devoted to the study of the works and creatures of God. That is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises it, describing the community more than once as happy and its inhabitants as full of piety and humanity. Thirty-six separate offices appear inside Salomon’s House, among them the “Merchants of Light”, who travelled through foreign countries to find out the inventions newly made there. For the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy the plot is little more than a narrative wrapper around the detailed description of that institution. Salomon’s House is imagined as a centrally organised research facility, where teams of specially trained investigators gather data, run experiments, and apply what they learn to produce things useful to human life.

Both the Sylva sylvarum, a large collection of natural histories in English, and New Atlantis appeared posthumously in 1626, the year of Bacon’s death.

The legacy, from the Royal Society to the Enlightenment

Soon after his philosophical works came out in Latin in the early 1620s, Bacon’s writings were read and discussed widely on the European continent, writes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 marked the high point of his fame, read as the triumph of his programme of collaboration, usefulness, and scientific progress. His admirers in the Royal Society, which traced its own inspiration to his writings, regarded him as the bold founder of a new intellectual era, reports the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Bacon’s inductive theory, along with his “natural histories” and his experimentalism, contributed significantly to the birth of experimental philosophy and of empiricism in the late seventeenth century, for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His standing held up through the Enlightenment as well: Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, and d’Alembert all praised him. The central idea the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits to him is that knowledge is power and that, converted into new technical inventions and mechanical discoveries, it becomes the force that drives history.

New Atlantis, too, proved a revolutionary text in terms of its historical impact, writes the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: it inspired and supplied a model for the British Royal Society, and it stood as an early blueprint and foreshadowing of the modern research institute.