ABSTRACT
Scientia potestas est (‘knowledge is power’). Perhaps one of Francis Bacon’s most famous utterances. It seems inevitable that a man whose life is read as being dedicated to the domination of nature should include such words in one of his works of natural philosophy, and he almost did in his magnum opus, Novum Organum: ‘And so those twin objectives, human Knowledge and Power, do in fact come together, and lack of success with works stems mainly from ignorance of causes’ (OFB 11.45).1 Bacon’s entire project was predicated on the discovery of causes, as with these causes humanity could hope to positively affect nature and ameliorate its condition on earth. Bacon’s urge for the advancement of learning was, perhaps paradoxically, backwards-looking, as he explained in the unpublished Valerius Terminus (1603):
[Knowledge] is not the pleasure of curiosity [ . . . ] but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his fi rst state of creation. (SEH 3.222)2
Bacon not only wished humanity to return to this prior state of knowledge, but also found it necessary to look backwards in order to diagnose the ills of philosophy and create a method, although he utterly rejected the word, to allow the sciences to progress, and this process necessitated a personal rejection of previously held views.
