‘Memorable Advancers of Philosophical Knowledg’
(Tenison, Baconiana)
At the forefront of the search for new beginnings in British philosophy, the names of three Elizabethans resound through the philosophical conversations of the seventeenth century: Francis Bacon, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Thomas Hobbes. This chapter discusses the first two. Hobbes will be the subject of a separate chapter (Chapter 6). Of the three of them, Herbert is today very much in the shadows of the other two. But in the eighteenth century he was regarded, along with Bacon, as one of the pillars of the Enlightenment. In the annals of the Age of Reason Herbert figures as an anti-religious philosopher, and Bacon as the father of empirical science, of which the supreme exponent was Isaac Newton. Their reputations rest on partial aspects of their legacy, which distort their contribution to philosophy. In their own day, both received recognition as forward-thinking philosophers, which was rather closer to how each of them saw his philosophical enterprise. Although their philosophical interests diverged, they shared a good deal as philosophers who moved in court circles. Both were ennobled for their services to the crown. And, in different ways, the career of each was blighted by his fortunes in royal service. Bacon had to resign his post as Lord Chancellor when he was impeached for taking bribes. Since the duties of office left him little time to pursue his programme for the advancement of learning, his forced retirement from public life allowed him to devote more time to his philosophical projects. Herbert, who served James I as ambassador in France between 1619 and 1624, also fell from favour, though in his case in the more honourable circumstances of a disagreement with his government’s policies in France. Having failed to secure compensation for the debts incurred during his embassy, he retired from public life to his estates in Wales, until the outbreak of Civil War destroyed his tranquillity. In 1644, faced with a choice between surrendering Montgomery Castle to Parliamentary forces and thereby salvaging his means of intellectual life, or resisting attack and thereby risking the destruction of everything he owned, he negotiated safe passage for himself and his library as the price of capitulation. Thereafter, Herbert spent his last years in straitened circumstances in London, preparing his writings for publication. He made a last trip to France, where he met Gassendi and Mersenne. The printed books from his library are preserved at Jesus College, Oxford, to this day.
Although Bacon and Herbert were very different as thinkers, they shared the common aim of seeking new foundations for philosophical enquiry. To this end Bacon developed an empirical epistemology for the furtherance of the knowledge of nature, while Herbert’s epistemology is founded on innate principles within the mind, with a view to demonstrating the grounds of certainty against scepticism. Where Bacon separated philosophy from religion, Herbert sought to clarify the fundamental principles of religious belief as the basis for religious eirenicism. Bacon targeted philosophical tradition, especially Aristotelianism, while Herbert was more concerned about the threat from contemporary scepticism. Whether Herbert and Bacon recognized any parallels in their interests is not known. However, they both had strong links to French intellectual circles, both held high offices of state, and there was a family link through Lord Herbert’s brother, the poet George Herbert, whom Bacon counted as a friend.
In 1679, Thomas Tenison, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, declared that among the ‘many memorable Advancers of Philosophical Knowledg’ of recent times, Francis Bacon ‘if all his Circumstances be duly weigh’d, may seem to excel them all’.1 In so saying, he was voicing a view that was fast becoming commonplace. Whatever the merits of Tenison’s judgement, it was not uncommon in the latter half of the seventeenth century to view Bacon as a major modern philosopher. Today he is remembered chiefly for his methodological contribution to the development of empirical science and as a modernizer, a judgement anticipated by the founders of the Royal Society who hailed him as one of the society’s greatest inspirations at its inception in 1660. However, Bacon was a philosopher in his own right, and his philosophical interests were integral to his overarching lifetime project: the reform of all branches of human knowledge and its philosophical foundations. Bacon sought to end the sterility of so much intellectual endeavour and the unproductiveness of philosophical enquiry, by proposing new approaches to replace traditional modes of thinking. In particular he sought to institute a natural philosophy which would lead to new discoveries of material benefit to human life. And he aspired to raise the profile of this new natural philosophy by making it central to intellectual and civic life. The aspects of this programme most relevant to the history of philosophy are his radical proposals for reforming epistemology and method, his reorganization and revision of the subdivisions of philosophy, and his own contribution to natural and moral philosophy.2
As a senior lawyer, MP, and member of the Privy Council, Bacon was supremely well connected with the most influential people in the land. However, constructing his intellectual formation and his subsequent intellectual milieu is difficult, because there is both too much and too little direct evidence to go on. Bacon’s formal education commenced at the University of Cambridge, where he studied at St John’s College from 1573 to 1575. But like so many sons of gentlemen, he left without taking a degree. Since he was only 12 years old when he enrolled, it is hard to believe that Cambridge had much formative influence, though it was very likely that he was exposed to the Ramist critique of Aristotelianism then gathering strength in that university. His penchant for classification has been linked to the Ramist emphasis on method, and the Ramist practice of organizing knowledge in dichotomous tables. But his classificatory genius could equally well have been fostered in his legal studies—the physician William Harvey quipped that he philosophized like a lord chancellor. After Cambridge, Bacon spent a couple of years studying in France. Little is known about his activities during this period beyond the fact he seems to have started his legal studies there. Bacon does not reveal much about the scientific and philosophical circles with which he was associated. But enough is known to suggest that, contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, he was not an insular or isolated thinker. He certainly was aware of contemporary intellectual developments. He knew of the work of William Gilbert, and was a patient of William Harvey. Bacon apparently witnessed Cornelis Drebbel’s demonstration of a ‘submarine’, and knew of the work of both Galileo and Kepler: he sent Kepler a copy of Novum organum via Sir Henry Wotton, the English Ambassador in Vienna, who was a conduit for information about intellectual developments in Europe, including accounts of experiments. Herbert of Cherbury is another possible line of connection between Bacon and European intellectual life. Bacon was personally acquainted with Constantijn Huygens and had links to the libertins erudits in France, through Fortin de la Hoguette, who visited him in England and to whom Bacon gave a copy of his recently published De augmentis scientiarum. Fortin may have been responsible for French translations of his Essays, which circulated in libertine circles in France. Other European contacts with an interest in science and philosophy included the Swiss jurist Élie Diodati (1576–1661), who had facilitated the publication of Galileo’s Discorsi…intorno a due nuove scienze [Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences] (1638), and who visited Bacon in 1619. Bacon was also well versed in the Renaissance natural philosophy, on which he drew liberally and eclectically in his own theories, chiefly from anti-Aristotelian systems of Telesio, Doni, and Gilbert (despite criticizing aspects of their systems).3 Bacon had clearly performed many of the experiments which he describes in his writings, presumably with the help of assistants like his secretary, William Rawley, and the young Thomas Hobbes, who spent some time with him.
Exactly when Bacon conceived the idea of a reformation of philosophy is unknown. During his early career he was preoccupied with establishing himself as a lawyer, and winning the patronage of high-placed persons. Having been left unprovided for when his father died, securing financial independence was a priority and remained a major preoccupation throughout his life. One of the first hints we have of his interest in philosophy, and his grand design for its reform, is a letter to his uncle, Lord Burghley, in 1592 in which he told him of his ‘vast contemplative ends’ in which, taking ‘all knowledge to be my province…I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries’.4 He called this ambitious project his Instauratio magna or Great Instauration. Every one of his works from his earliest Praise of Knowledge (1593) and the unpublished ‘Temporis partus maximus’, to his later Novum organum (1620) and Sylva sylvarum (1627), were part of his endeavour to rethink intellectual foundations and to replace old systems of thought with a new kind of philosophy. In fact Bacon never completed the great project which he envisaged, largely because his political and legal career absorbed most of his time. The parts of the programme which he did accomplish were his critique of existing systems of thought, his new method (Novum organum) and materials for a new natural history (the posthumously published Sylva sylvarum). His published works, therefore, constitute only a part of what he originally planned. Nevertheless, the grand design of his Great Instauration was fully conceived by 1611, and a large proportion of the detail filled out by the time of his death.
Bacon’s ‘Great Instauration’ was to consist of a new organon or instrument of enquiry and a new natural history. He also planned to supply the rules for putting the new method into practice and a repository of provisional theories resulting from his own enquiries employing his new method. This would also contain examples of the kind of investigations he envisaged. Taken together, these would constitute the true philosophy of nature. However, the last part of this programme was never carried out. The only example of investigations which he completed was the Abecedarium naturae. And a good deal of the rest remained in manuscript form.
Bacon’s programme required, first, a radical and comprehensive reappraisal of customary patterns of thought and received systems of philosophy, which he undertook in the first work that he published as part of the Instauratio magna, his Of the Proficiencie and Advancement of Learning (1605), the only philosophical work which he published in English. Addressed to King James I, this amounts to a prospectus for his entire programme. The first book is an eloquent defence of all aspects of learning. The second book surveys the current state of human knowledge and identifies those areas most in need of reform and reinvestigation, as well as analysing the reasons for the failure of progress by existing methods of enquiry. Among these, he identified natural philosophy (which includes what would now be called ‘science’) as the most neglected branch of learning. His analysis of the ills of the state of knowledge and his recommendations for reform extended beyond natural philosophy, to all aspects of human knowledge, politics, ethics, and history. This section of Advancement of Learning was considerably expanded in the later Latin version, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623). Bacon restated his proposed programme in other works in the Novum organum (1620). In the Distributio operis of the Novum organum he sets out a six-part plan of the Instauratio magna as follows:
First, The Divisions of the Sciences.
Second, The New Organon; or Directions for the Interpretation of Nature.
Third, The Phenomena of the Universe; or a Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of Philosophy.
Fourth, The Ladder of the Intellect.
Fifth, Forerunners, or Anticipations of Second Philosophy.
Sixth, Second Philosophy; or Practical Science.5
Of the incomplete part of his programme, the ‘Ladder of the Intellect’ was intended to illustrate the order of discovery. ‘Forerunners of Second Philosophy’ would contain some of Bacon’s findings using traditional methods of investigation. ‘Second Philosophy’ was to be the results of his new ‘correct’ mode of enquiry.
Most of Bacon’s philosophical work was produced in two periods of intense activity, when circumstances permitted him some respite from the demands of his legal and political career. In the first of these, the years 1603–13, he conceived his project and commenced work on it. In fact the first mention of the great instauration comes from an unpublished work from this period, Temporis partus maximus (1603) which is subtitled, ‘Instauratio magna imperii humani in universum’. His most important publication from these years was The Advancement of Learning, but he also wrote many pieces which were intended as part of the scheme, though they were never actually published. ‘Cogitata et visa’ (1607) and ‘Redargutio philosophiarum’ (1608) continued the critique of earlier philosophy which he published in Advancement of Learning. ‘De interpretatione naturae proemium’ (1603) and ‘Scala intellectus, sive, Filum labyrinthi’ (1607) sketch plans for broadening the horizons of knowledge. ‘Valerius terminus of the interpretation of nature’ (1603) contains the earliest account of his doctrine of ‘idols’, or the forms of error to which human beings are prone. He was already formulating his conception of a new natural philosophy, in which natural and experimental histories would be central. ‘Redargutio philosophiarum’ (1608) argues that this should be based on observed experience while in ‘Cogitationes de scientia humana’ (c.1604) he discusses a theory of body, and defends Democritean atomism. Another period of intense activity was 1620–1, during which he produced and published his major philosophical work, the Novum organum, together with the outline of the Instauratio magna project. After his fall from political grace in 1621, Bacon had more leisure to devote to philosophical pursuits. During this time he produced an expanded Latin version of The Advancement of Learning (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum) and an expanded edition of his most enduringly popular work The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall.6 He also wrote Sylva sylvarum which was published posthumously, along with New Atlantis. Although he worked on further parts of his grand project, this remained incomplete when he died in 1626.
Although Bacon clearly failed to complete as much as he had planned of his project, there is a technical sense in which it was never designed for completion (though this is not the reason for his failure to accomplish what he intended). One of Bacon’s major innovations was the idea that philosophical enquiry should be a collective enterprise. This is born partly of his recognition of the limitations of human knowledge generally, and of the weak capacity of individual human reason. But it was also intended as a corrective to what he had identified as one of the great defects of the past philosophy—a preoccupation with authority and systems. He complained of ‘the overmuch credite that hath beene given unto Authors in Sciences,’ which had the effect of stultifying further enquiry. One of Bacon’s chief criticisms of his predecessors, both ancient (like Plato and Aristotle) and modern (like Telesio and Gilbert), was that they were too preoccupied with making their mark by developing complete systems of thought, which had become ends in themselves, without discovering anything new. By contrast, he noted a different pattern of development in ‘the arts mechanical’ (such as navigation and printing) where rough and ready beginnings had been improved by successive refinements across time:
in arts Mechanicall, the first deviser coms shortest, and time addeth and perfecteth: but in Sciences the first Author goeth furthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth. So we see, Artillerie, sayling, printing, and the like, were grossely managed at the first and by time accommodated and refined: but contrary wise the Philosophies and Sciences of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Hypocrates, Euclides, Archimedes, of most vigor at the first, and by time degenerate and imbased.7
Bacon eschewed system-building, favouring, instead, collective enquiry which would combine the endeavours of many researchers, without being confined to the investigations and theories of particular individuals. His aim was not just to inspire and involve others to continue his endeavours, but to transform the nature of philosophical investigation into open-ended enquiry, the conclusions of which are provisional. Natural philosophy as envisaged by Bacon is necessarily incomplete.
The foundational premises of Instauratio magna were, first (in contradiction of contemporary assumptions), that knowledge is neither fixed nor already highly advanced, but can be vastly increased. Secondly, Bacon stressed the importance of experience as the foundation of knowledge. A major theme of his critique of existing philosophies was that they were insufficiently grounded in experience:
In general…philosophy is built upon an excessively narrow basis of experience and natural history, and bases its statements on fewer instances than is proper. Philosophers of the rational type are diverted from experience by the variety of common phenomena, which have not been certainly understood or carefully examined and considered; they depend for the rest on reflection and intellectual exercise.8
Bacon’s idea of natural history is fundamental to his new methodology: compiling a natural history involves gathering particulars or observations from actual experience in order to supply the pool of data which forms the basis of induction: ‘For knowledges are as PYRAMIDES, whereof HISTORY is the BASIS: So of NATURAL PHILOSOPHY the BASIS is NATURAL HISTORY’.9 Furthermore, for Bacon, the value of all knowledge was ultimately practical. It is not enough to have knowledge, but it is necessary to transmit it and put it to use. New discoveries therefore hold out the prospect of bringing social benefits, very much as the technological advances of the recent past like navigation and printing had done. Bacon also departed from tradition by making a clear separation between religious and secular philosophy. For Bacon, the worst philosophers were those like Robert Fludd and Paracelsus who mixed philosophy and theology. He did, however, retain a place for natural theology. This is enshrined in his reorganization of the branches of philosophy which is set out in The Advancement of Learning.
Bacon’s classificatory scheme of knowledge treats philosophy as one of three branches of human knowledge, each one of which corresponds to a faculty of the human mind: history to memory, poetry or fiction to imagination, and philosophy to reason. There are, in turn, three branches of philosophy, which he calls Divine (natural theology), Natural (physics), and Human (ethics). This kind of subdivision of knowledge, and the correlation between knowledge and human faculties, was not unusual in the Renaissance. What is unusual is the realignments which Bacon’s classificatory scheme entailed. Bacon was well aware of the fact that he conceived the branches of philosophy in a different way, although he retained the old nomenclature.10
The first philosophy (prima philosophiae) in Bacon’s system of the sciences is not metaphysics but natural philosophy, of which metaphysics is a subdivision.11 The operative distinction between physics and metaphysics is that physics deals with variable causes that obtain in the infinity of individual experience, while metaphysics deals with fixed, unchanging, general principles. Physics draws on natural history, and supplies the data for general, conceptual conclusions or axioms of metaphysics.
Bacon’s fullest account of his new method for interpreting nature is contained in Novum organum, which was intended as a new logic to replace the Aristotelian logic of the university curriculum. It opens with a set of axioms which summarize his grand project. The rest is divided into two sections: first the pars destruens or critique of existing systems and their defective epistemologies. This is followed by the pars informans which sets out proposals for a new way forward. The first part contains Bacon’s criticism of existing logic, especially syllogistic logic. The second part sets out his novel inductive method of arriving at truth in contrast to the generally received method:
There are and can be only two ways to investigate and discover truth. The one leaps from sense and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles and their settled truth, determines and discovers intermediate axioms; this is the current way. The other elicits axioms from sense and particulars, rising in a gradual and unbroken ascent, to arrive at the most general axioms; this is the true way, but it has not been tried.12
This last, as yet untried, gradualist method of enquiry is his inductive method. Unlike the induction of scholastic logic, Baconian induction is not a simple matter of enumeration of instances. Rather ‘induction’ is a systematic procedure for arriving at general conclusions about the nature of things. He is not concerned with discovering truth per se but with the operative value of the conclusions drawn. The procedure aims to yield information about the ‘form’ or essence of things, which for Bacon, is explanatory of its workings. The knowledge of ‘forms’ which we achieve in this way being the knowledge of how things work, will enable us to apply that knowledge to the production of effects. The procedure for acquiring this knowledge requires the accumulation of a store of examples derived from observation (the ‘natural and experimental history’), which include not just phenomena observed in nature, but the results of experimental investigations. These observations are tabulated in a way designed to make it possible to recognize likenesses and differences, so as to form a more refined sense of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation. Key features of Bacon’s method are his inclusion of negative instances (parallel examples where the phenomenon under investigation is absent) and his use of eliminative induction so as to isolate the essential features of the phenomenon being investigated. The process of drawing conclusions entails a combination of inductive, deductive, and analogical reasoning. Baconian induction was intended to penetrate surface appearances to reveal the real essences of phenomena. To the extent that he held that the aim of natural philosophy is to discover the essences or forms of things, he shared an epistemological assumption with the Aristotelians. However, he disagreed on method, and he accepted the principle (shared by other experimentalists) that the observable properties of bodies are to be explained by their internal constitution of their parts.
Of particular importance for the appeal to experience as the basis of knowledge are the capacities of the mind to assimilate that experience. Bacon was not occupied by the problem of scepticism, but he was acutely conscious of the limitations of human understanding. In Novum organum Bacon addresses the problem of error in psycho-social terms, by analysing the characteristic weaknesses to which human beings are prone, and which therefore distort how we make sense of the world. With an eye to the mnemonic power of images, he adopts the metaphor of false gods, or ‘idols’ to frame his analysis, as he had also done in The Advancement of Learning. Bacon identifies four types of error. First the ‘idols of the tribe’ are distortions arising from the structure of the human understanding, so that it operates like a crooked mirror: for example being prone to interference from a strong imagination. Secondly, ‘idols of the cave’ are errors which result from custom, education, and pet prejudices. Thirdly, ‘idols of the market place’ are false conceptions arising from the inappropriate use of language. The fourth class of idols are ‘idols of the theatre’, a term he uses for received philosophical systems, which, like stage plays, offer different scenarios, but, never having been tested by the touchstone of experience, are no better than fictions.
Moral philosophy is one of the branches of human knowledge included in Bacon’s survey of the state of human learning in Advancement of Learning, where he classifies moral knowledge as ‘philosophy of humanity’.13 The main shortcomings which he identifies in existing moral philosophy are first that it has distracted attention from natural philosophy, and secondly that it has itself been misdirected to fruitless discussions of the nature of the good. The reforms Bacon sought involved a more empirically based ethics, with a shift in focus to practice rather than theory. He observes that there is no shortage of ‘examplars’ of virtue and duty, but what is lacking is knowledge of the means to achieve these. He thought that ethical knowledge requires an understanding of human nature based on the study of human psychology through observing human behaviour. Bacon underlines that moral knowledge requires an understanding of how our appetites and affections affect our behaviour. The end of moral knowledge is to harness them to direct our actions: to ‘procure the affections to fight on the side of reason, and not to invade it’. Since ‘morall vertues are in the Minde of man by habite & not by nature’,14 he recommends habit formation through education as the most practical means of achieving virtuous ends. Just as natural history provides the basis of a new natural philosophy, so human history, including poetry, provides the concrete particulars about human nature and human behaviour on which an experiential moral philosophy is based: ‘As historye of Tymes is the best grounde for discourse of Gouernemente…so Histories of Liues is the moste proper for discourse of businesse is more conversante in priuate Actions’.15 His moral philosophy is epitomized in his Essayes, an unsystematic collection of observations, first published in 1597, and reissued in expanded editions at different points later in his life. Insofar as the Essayes can be said to offer an idea of goodness, it is very much of social good. Bacon stresses the value of action and public service and defines virtue in terms of philanthropy. In other respects, the Essays can be read as a handbook of practical politics.
Most of Bacon’s works were written in Latin, with an educated and international readership in view rather than a learned one: his style is not academic, his dedicatee is the king rather than the universities. His first published writings (Essays and Advancement of Learning) were written in English, the appropriate language for a non-specialist audience. He presented his new ideas in a variety of informal ways, all of them characterized by brevity: the ‘myth’, the essay, and utopian fiction. The chief examples of these are De sapientia veterum (which presents new theories as reinterpreted classical myths), Essays (the main vehicle of his moral and political thought), and his utopia, New Atlantis, which contains a fictional realization of his grand project. Bacon’s Essays were his most immediately and enduringly popular work. Reprinted at least a dozen times before 1700, they were translated into French (by Jean Baudoin), Italian (possibly by Bacon’s friend Tobie Matthew), and German (in 1654). The Latin translation by William Rawley (1638), also printed selections from his other writings, and saw three European reprints. De sapientia veterum was published in a translation by Marc’Antonio de Dominis.16 Although unfinished, New Atlantis played a key role in disseminating his views among educational and social reformers of the 1640s and 1650s, as well as the general public. Bacon’s most widely reprinted work of natural philosophy was the book to which New Atlantis was appended, his posthumous Sylva sylvarum (1626). This was reprinted no less than twelve times before 1700, and three times overseas in Jacob Gruter’s Latin translation. The majority of English reprints of Bacon’s other writings, apart from his Essays, date from before 1660. A Latin collection of his writings, Scripta in naturali et universali philosophia, was published by Isaac Gruter in the Netherlands in 1653 (reprinted 1685). The first Latin translation of Bacon’s Opera omnia published in Frankfurt in 1665 had wide diffusion in Europe, with a further edition in 1694. There were several imprints of his major writings in the Netherlands, including two editions of Sylva sylvarum (1648 and 1661), four of De augmentis scientiarum (1645, 1652, 1663, 1694), two of Novum organum (1645, 1650). His Opera omnia were printed in Frankfurt in 1661.
Baconian ideas generated extensive interest outside the universities. His proposals for refounding philosophical enquiry in experience were taken up by educational reformers like Johannes Comenius and John Webster, and by members of the Hartlib circle such as Georg Ritschel. In the second half of the century Bacon’s name starts to appear on British university reading lists and lectures. However, his Novum organum did not succeed in supplanting the logical instruments of university education. Aubrey includes ‘all my Lord Chancellor Bacon’s writings’ in his recommended reading for his Idea of Education.
To judge by translations and European printings of his writings, there was strong interest in Bacon’s philosophy among his European contemporaries. Bacon figures in university disputations in the Netherlands as early as the 1620s and 1630s. Already in 1627 Naudé had listed ‘Verulam’ in his ideal library (translated in 1661 by John Evelyn as Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library). Bacon is cited as one of the ‘novatores’ by Huygens and Gerard de Vries (Introductio, 1683). Among the philosophical modernizers in Holland who signalled their openness to new ideas by asserting their freedom to philosophize (libertas philosophandi), Johannes de Raey (1622–1701) lists Bacon, Hobbes, and Digby alongside Galileo, Gassendi, and Descartes as the anti-scholastic moderns in his Clavis philosophiae naturalis (1654) (the 1658 edition alludes to Bacon by the addition to the title of the words, Organum philosophicum). In the ‘De ratione studendi’ printed in his Meletemata, Adrian Heereboord groups critics of Aristotle according to whether they simply refuted him, or laid new foundations. Bacon is listed in the latter group along with Descartes Comenius.17
Readers of De augmentis include Peiresc, Descartes Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Nicolas Malebranche in France, and Constantijn Huygens and Isaac Beeckman in the Netherlands. Mersenne read De augmentis in the pirated 1624 edition, published in France. Descartes endorsed Bacon’s method as complimentary to his own, but made no comment on Baconian induction. It was his anti-scholasticism which both Mersenne and Malebranche noted. Gassendi included a chapter on ‘Logica Verulami’ in his logic. The Italian scholar and natural philosopher Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), member of the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and correspondent of Galileo, played a central role in the diffusion of Bacon’s works in Italy. Among Bacon’s German contemporaries, the most prominent philosopher to take an interest in Bacon was Joachim Jungius (1587–1657), who, like Bacon, was critical of Aristotelianism, repudiated syllogistic logic, and advocated that the study of nature should be based on experience. Jungius certainly owned books by Bacon and quotes him, but it is not clear that he was a Baconian in any meaningful sense of the term. Daniel Morhof includes a chapter on Bacon in his Polyhistor of 1681, which gives an account of Bacon’s idea of natural history. Although a philosopher of a very different temper, and one who was critical of specific aspects of Bacon’s work, Leibniz respected Bacon as an innovator, and praised his experimental method. Finally, Voltaire’s account of Bacon in his Lettres sur les Anglais (1734) contributed greatly to the esteem in which he was held by the French philosophes in the eighteenth century, by whom he was celebrated as the harbinger of Enlightenment science.
Bacon’s most important and enduring legacy was methodological, in the development of experimental natural philosophy. His proposals for reforming natural philosophy contributed in a major way to the development of science as a discipline, distinguished from the other branches of philosophy by its experimental method of enquiry. It is an open question how far Bacon’s own theories about the nature and operations of the natural realm influenced other natural philosophers, although he was widely hailed as an inspiration by seventeenth-century experimentalists. The foundation of the Royal Society after the Restoration of 1660, with Bacon as posthumous patron, helped to secure Bacon’s reputation as the forefather of the experimental philosophy, and his later apotheosis as the father of scientific method. The precise debt of Royal Society experimenters, notably Robert Boyle, to Bacon’s experimental theory and practice is debatable. But in other respects the Royal Society represented the realization of his aim of raising the profile of natural philosophy through a collaborative enterprise dedicated to extending the frontiers of knowledge.
The Welsh philosopher Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury was a man of many parts: courtier, soldier, diplomat, poet, musician, historian, and autobiographer. Herbert’s reputation as a philosopher rests on four books: De veritate prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (1624), De causis errorum (1645), De religione laici (1645), and the posthumously published De religione gentilium (1663). Herbert of Cherbury’s first and main philosophical work, De veritate, was first published four years after the publication of Bacon’s Novum organum, and two years before the death of Francis Bacon.
Educated at University College, Oxford, Herbert seems to have developed a passion for philosophical enquiry while he was young, and he continued to pursue his interest in philosophy throughout his life. His library collection indicates that he read widely, and was well aware of the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Herbert took advantage of his travels in Europe between 1608 and 1617 to establish links with the intellectual circles in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. Subsequently he was able to strengthen his ties with French thinkers when he was appointed as English ambassador to France (1619–24). He visited France again in the 1640s. His personal acquaintances among European intellectuals included the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon, the Dutch humanists Gerard and Isaac Vos (Vossius), and the liberal theologian Daniel Tilenus. Strikingly, several of his European acquaintances were at the cutting edge of new thinking in philosophy and science: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Hugo Grotius, Pierre Gassendi, the Italian physician and reformist Aristotelian Fortunio Liceti, and the Huguenot scholar Claude Saumaise. Herbert also knew Marin Mersenne, who may have been responsible for the French translation of his De veritate. And through Mersenne he had contact with Descartes and Gassendi. Herbert apparently began a translation of Descartes, but this is no longer extant.18
The work to which Herbert devoted most of his philosophical attention was De veritate. Herbert began work on De veritate around 1617–19, publishing it in Paris in 1624 (apparently for private circulation). Two expanded versions followed in 1633 and 1645. The work is presented as an answer to the sceptics. Who these sceptics are, he doesn’t say, but the French provenance of De veritate suggests that a formative influence on Herbert was his encounter with the circle around Marin Mersenne, where the problem of scepticism was being discussed. Mersenne published his La Vérité des sciences contre les sceptiques [The Truth of the Sciences against the Sceptics] in 1624, the same year as the publication of Herbert’s book. That Herbert’s interest in scepticism owed much to French discussions would seem to be borne out by the fact that the two members of Mersenne’s group to whom Herbert gave copies of De veritate (Gassendi and Descartes) focused on the issue of scepticism in their responses. It is more than likely that Herbert had read Montaigne and Charron. It is not impossible that he may have met the sceptic La Mothe le Vayer, or the young anti-sceptic Jean de Silhon (1596–1667) whose first, and rather inadequate attempt to counter Pyrrhonism, Les deux veritez, was printed in 1626, two years after Herbert’s De veritate. But in other respects De veritate is very unlike anything produced by the French discussions of scepticism, for it presupposes a broadly Platonic metaphysics of harmonious order ordained by God, where the order of nature is expressed in correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, nature and ideas. Man is made in the image of God and the human mind is ‘the best image and exemplar of the divine wisdom’ (‘non solùm imaginis, sed & Sapientiae suae Divinae specimen aliquod’).19
Like Bacon, Herbert’s starting point in his investigation is the inadequacy of the present state of knowledge, which he saw as a chaos of rival theories, and controversies, beset by the contradictory claims that we can know everything and that we can know nothing. His solution lay in providing a definition of truth and a method by which we can distinguish the true from the false. Herbert takes as a given that ‘truth exists’, and devotes most of De veritate to an elaborate and, it must be said, cumbersome account of the conditions which must be fulfilled for there to be true knowledge. These include that what is known must be within the scope of our cognitive capacities and that different objects of knowledge must be examined by the appropriate means of perception. Herbert’s rules for obtaining true perception specify the circumstances under which we can be sure of the truth of things, and owe a good deal to Aristotle. He distinguishes four classes of truth: truth of the thing (veritas rei), truth of appearance (veritas apparentiae), truth of concepts (veritas conceptus), and truth of the intellect (veritas intellectus). Arriving at truth, according to Herbert, entails an act of recognition, resulting from the conformity between one of the faculties of the mind and the objects appropriate to that faculty. He also claims that there are as many faculties as there are things apprehended, by which he seems to mean that the mind has an unlimited capacity to grasp the different appearances of things.
Most of De veritate is taken up with an account of the faculties. Faculties are internal powers of the mind which Herbert likens to rays of the mind (radii animae). Every faculty has its appropriate object to which it is analogous. Knowledge results from its conformity or correspondence with its object. Herbert specifies that there are four faculties innate to the mind—but since he also says that there are as many faculties as there are objects, the four which he identifies must be four classes of faculty. The highest of these he calls ‘natural instinct’ (instinctus naturalis), which is able to grasp truth intuitively with absolute conviction. Its object is self-preservation and the desire for happiness. Natural instinct is not restricted to mankind, but is to be found in all natural creatures. The second faculty is ‘internal sense’, which includes will or conscience and which is concerned on the one hand with ideas of God and his attributes, and on the other with ideas of sense, imagination, and the passions. The third faculty is ‘external sense’, which includes the five senses. Discursive reason is the lowest of the truth-seeking faculties. Unlike the other faculties, it is not a mode of perception but of analysis. Its operations include generalization, analysis, judgement, and reflection. Since discursive reason is the most error-prone faculty, it is, therefore to be guided by the application of a set of rules or ‘zetetica’ which enable it to recognize the common notions and to perform its functions. The ‘zetetica’ are a scheme of logical classification not unlike Aristotle’s categories.20
Of key importance in Herbert’s epistemology are the common notions or self-evident principles, with which the mind is furnished and which are essential for enabling us to arrive at true knowledge. According to Herbert, the common notions are ‘derived from universal wisdom and imprinted on the soul by the dictates of nature itself ’.21 Herbert refers to them as notitiae communes or koinai ennoiai, terms suggestive of a Stoic source, though they are also to be found in Euclid.
Another possible source for the ‘common notions’ may be the work of the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon, whose works were widely used in both Oxford and Cambridge.22 Herbert’s list of common notions is fairly extensive: causality (first, intermediate, and final causes), ideas of order, degree, and change, ‘the law of self-preservation and the desire for happiness’. They are common in the sense that they are shared by everyone—and ‘even beyond our species’. Some are immediately apparent, others have to be discovered by discursive reason.23 The certainty of the common notions is founded in universal consent. And the test of that is empirical: for they are principles shared by all rational human beings in the world (but not everyone is aware of them). For Herbert, the common notions are not knowledge, but the means to knowledge, which dispose the faculties towards conformity with their appropriate objects, which constitutes the ground of truth. The common notions provide criteria by which the truth-seeker can assess whether the conditions of true perception of things have been met, and can give assurance that he has true knowledge. It is through the common notions that we can distinguish truth from falsehood. The common notions are therefore the precondition of certainty:
These Notions exercise an authority so profound that anyone who were to doubt them would upset the whole natural order and strip himself of his humanity. These principles may not be disputed. As long as they are understood it is impossible to deny them.24
Herbert’s short De causis errorum [On the Cause of Errors] (1645) supplements De veritate with further discussion of the conditions which apply to truth of appearance, and clarifications of various points. He discusses each of the five senses and errors to which they are prone. De causis errorum may have been written to clarify aspects of De veritate, and to meet objections, though there is no specific reference to criticisms, beyond an assertion of his freedom to philosophize. As we shall see, it certainly did not meet the objections raised by Herbert’s most distinguished critics, Gassendi and Descartes.
The search for a solution to religious strife was a major preoccupation for Herbert. He first arrived in France in the year that the French king, Henry IV, had been assassinated by a religious fanatic, an event which heightened his consciousness of the precariousness of religious toleration in France. He was sympathetic to the cause of the Huguenots, who had won a measure of toleration only after a bloody history of persecution. Subsequently he served under Maurice of Nassau against Spanish forces in the Netherlands. Having witnessed ‘the terrors of divers churches militant throughout the world’ (‘mediis diversarum universo Orbe militantium Ecclesiarum Terroribus’) he came to the conclusion expressed in De religione laici that ‘There is no church that does not breathe threats, none almost that does not deny the possibility of salvation outside its own pale’.25
A primary purpose of De veritate was to lay the ground for Herbert’s philosophy of religion. To this end, he includes in it an account of the common notions of religion (notitiae communes circa religionem). These are essential elements of religious belief accessible to reason and shared by all people. In this respect the epistemology which he outlines in the first part of De veritate serves as a propaedeutic to grasping the essential truths of religion, sufficient for attaining eternal life. These are that (1) there is a supreme being (esse supremum aliquod Numen); that (2) this being ought to be worshipped (supremum istud Numen debere coli); (3) that true worship consists in virtue and piety; (4) that vice is to be expiated by repentance (vitia e scelera quaecunque expiari debere ex poenitentia); (5) that there is reward and punishment in an afterlife (esse praemium, vel poenam post hanc vitam).26 Herbert claims that the five common notions of religion can be discovered by use of his method of applying the four faculties. Revealed truth, by contrast, depends on authority, the certainty of which is more difficult to distinguish. The five religious common notions form the basis of his discussion of religion in all his subsequent writings, including Henry VIII.
Herbert’s ideas on rational religion are developed further in his third published work, De religione laici (1645). As its title suggests this is directed to a lay and not a clerical reader. The addressee is a laicus or viator (a rational layman or wanderer) faced with the question of how to judge the competing claims of rival churches. How is he to preserve himself from their threats, and arrive at a correct judgement of where salvation lies? By identifying the essentials of religion as a minimum few which, he believed, every rational man could deduce for himself, Herbert sought to lay the foundations of religious toleration. These ideas are further elaborated in De religione gentilium which is in many ways a work of comparative religion. Herbert draws heavily on classical sources, but also extends its survey to China and the New World. He focuses on the common elements shared by different religions, including Christianity, even while condemning the abominable practices of many pagan religious rites. He argues that despite the errors of the pagans, ‘amongst those heaps of Ethnical Superstitions, a thread of truth might be found’.27 These threads of truth are the five common notions of religion, which have been obscured by corruptions introduced by priests. Both De religione laici and his posthumous De religione gentilium (1663) were highly critical of the clergy for fostering animosity between faiths, and misleading the lay public.
Herbert’s view that the basis of religious belief is a minimal set of tenets common to all mankind was shared by Hugo Grotius and the Huguenot leader Philippe du Plessis Mornay, whose De la verité de la religion Chrestienne (1583), anticipates Grotius’ more fully eirenic De veritate religionis Christianae (1640). Herbert claimed that Grotius encouraged him to publish De veritate.28 Herbert’s view that the all men agree on the principle of self-preservation and desire for happiness, ‘ratio propriae conservationis, appetitus beatitudinis’,29 echoes the principles on which Grotius bases his idea of the law of nature in that book. Herbert’s idea that paganism preserves elements of religious truth was one which had gained currency through the Renaissance idea of a prisca theologia or ancient theology. It would be extensively developed by Cudworth in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Herbert insisted that his common notions of religion are compatible with Christianity, but his views were perceived as undermining religion, not least because he held that the veracity of revelation could be tested by reason, and indeed that saving truth is deducible by reason. From this it follows that Christian revelation is not essential to salvation. Furthermore Herbert’s rational treatment of religion led him to theologically heterodox conclusions, notably his denial of absolute reprobation and his hope for universal salvation. Not surprisingly, therefore, De religione laici aroused suspicions about Herbert’s religious orthodoxy among his contemporaries, and not just from ecclesiastical quarters.
Herbert’s posthumously published De religione gentilium (1663) sealed his reputation as a danger to revealed religion. He was condemned as an atheistic impostor in the mould of Hobbes and Spinoza. One of the first to sound this theme was Christian Kortholt in De tribus impostoribus magnis [Of the Three Great Impostors] (1680). Michael Berns followed suit with his Alter der Atheïsten, der Heyden, und der Christen (1692). In Britain, hostile reactions to Herbert were provoked by the use made of his ideas on rational religion by his anticlerical admirers. The most important of these was the deist, Charles Blount, whose Religio laici (1683) draws extensively and openly on Herbert’s De religione laici. By emphasizing the power of human reason and Herbert’s anticlericalism, Blount transformed Herbert’s cautious eirenicism, into explicit deism. Blount claims that his argument is ‘grounded…upon his [Herbert’s] five Catholick or Universal principles’.30 In Oracles of Reason (1693), Blount again underlines Herbert’s anticlericalism and he makes open reference to Herbert’s common notions, and to his idea that a universal natural religion consists of virtue and the rule of right. With friends like these, Herbert became a target in anti-deist polemics well into the eighteenth century, drawing the fire of Thomas Halyburton (in his Natural Religion Insufficient, 1714) and Philip Skelton (in Ophiomaches: or, Deism Revealed, 1749). The controversies surrounding deism and natural religion probably explain why the second Latin edition of De religione gentilium was published in 1700, followed by an English translation by William Lewis with the title The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, published in 1705 (reprinted 1709 and 1711).
Herbert’s posthumous reputation as a deist has obscured his profound commitment to religious eirenicism as well as the earlier reception of De veritate.31 Few early readers of the work believed that he had intended to undermine revealed religion, though there were those who suspected his orthodoxy. The earliest responses to De veritate were epistemological. It was on Herbert’s claim that De veritate was intended to combat the problem of scepticism that Herbert’s most eminent philosophical readers, Descartes and Gassendi, focused. Gassendi drafted a set of objections to Herbert in a letter which he never sent.32 He made the obvious objection to Herbert’s doctrine of the Common Notions and natural instinct that their basis is subjective. Universal consent is no criterion for judging the indubitability of the common notions: far from there being agreement among people, there is a huge disagreement among people on just about everything, a situation which Herbert’s account of truth will only perpetuate. On the basis of Herbert’s internal criterion of truth, any single person can claim that the opinions of others are unsound, but his own are correct. Far from defeating scepticism, Herbert’s system will result in scepticism. In another letter, to their mutual friend Elie Diodati, Gassendi delivered himself more forthrightly of a negative judgement on the De veritate. The best he could say for it was that it ‘is only a kind of dialectic which can well have its advantages, but which does not prevent us from being able to make up a hundred other schemes of similar value and perchance of a greater one’.33 All Herbert has produced is a maze of confusions. Herbert certainly has not found truth, which, in Gassendi’s own sceptical view, is unknowable.
Descartes received a copy of De veritate via Mersenne in 1639, and he apparently read it in a French version probably prepared by Mersenne. Descartes reciprocated by sending Herbert a copy of his Meditationes. Although he was, apparently, more sympathetic than Gassendi to Herbert’s anti-sceptical intentions, he was unimpressed by Herbert’s efforts. He summarized his objections in a letter to Mersenne.34 A basic problem was that without already knowing what truth is, we could not be sure that Herbert’s account was true. A set of operations for recognizing truth is useless unless we already know what truth is. For Descartes truth is only known intuitively. Another fundamental problem was Herbert’s reliance on universal consent as the criterion of truth. Descartes objects that universal consent is unreliable since we are just as likely to find agreement on errors. Herbert’s concept of Natural Instinct is also unreliable as a guide to truth, since it derives partly from our corporeal nature. By contrast, natural light, which for Descartes is the rule of truth, is the same in all people, and entirely free from interference from our bodily nature.
Aside from these sceptical objections by Gassendi and Descartes, Herbert’s epistemology was criticized by others on other counts. Franco Burgersdijk, author of several epitomes of Aristotelian philosophy, objected that since, as Aristotle held, the mind is a tabula rasa there are no innate ideas. The diplomat William Boswell claimed that Burgersdijk’s Metaphysica was written for the express purpose of refuting Herbert. Other European readers of De veritate include Tommaso Campanella, Claude Saumaise, Daniel Heinsius, and Joachim Hübner. Gassendi claimed that Pope Urban VIII thought highly of the work, but this did not prevent it from being put on the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1633. Herbert also attracted the interest of the education reformers, Hartlib and Comenius. Hartlib praised Herbert for making the common notions the foundation of logic, and he compared Herbert’s philosophy to that of Francis Bacon, Francisco Sanchez, René Descartes, and Ramon Lull. Jan Amos Comenius also had a high opinion of Herbert’s common notions.35 The enthusiastic reception in the Hartlib circle associated Herbert with the reforming intentions of Bacon and Descartes.
One of Herbert’s earliest English readers was Hobbes, who read De veritate in 1636, apparently approvingly.36 However, Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne confessed to him that he and many others found it hard to follow, that they were, ‘uncapable of his sublime conceptions’.37 The extent of Herbert’s relations with Hobbes is unexplored. The existence of an early manuscript of Hobbes’s De corpore among Herbert’s papers, suggests that they were in philosophical contact. Herbert’s final trip to Paris while Hobbes was in exile there, and around the time of the publication of his anticlerical De religione laici, raises the intriguing possibility that Herbert may have influenced Hobbes’s Leviathan.
The most famous response to Herbert by a seventeenth-century English philosopher are the objections made by John Locke. These were first made in the second draft of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671), and subsequently included as an appendix when the Essay was published in 1690.38 In Book 1, in the course of his refutation of innate ideas, Locke targets both Herbert’s common notions (as set out in De veritate), and his common notions of religion (as listed in De religione laici). Locke concedes that Herbert’s common notions are ‘clear truths’ which ‘a rational Creature can hardly avoid giving assent to’, but he denies that Herbert has demonstrated that they are innate to the mind. Furthermore, they contain terms of uncertain meaning (e.g. virtue and sin), so, consequently, cannot be used as a rule of truth—‘it will scarce seem possible, that God should engrave Principles in Mens Minds, in words of uncertain signification, such as Vertues and Sins, which amongst different Men, stand for different things’.39
Another English critic of Herbert’s epistemology was Locke’s contemporary Richard Burthogge. Although an admirer of Locke, Burthogge exhibits affinities with the Cambridge Platonists (see Chapter 7). He also held Herbert in high regard, referring to him in his Organum vetus et novum (1678) as, ‘the truly-Noble and Learned the late Lord Herbert’. Burthogge saw parallels between Herbert’s epistemology and Descartes’s intuitionism. Against the claim that ‘Truth consisteth in the Analogy, Agreement, Harmony of things to our Faculties’, Burthogge objects first that ‘a bare Congruity between the Object and the Understanding is not the ground of Truth, but of Sense or Intelligibility’; secondly, assent is not blind inclination, but an act of judgement, involving proposition and proof; thirdly, Herbert’s theory is no guarantee of truth, since we may just as easily mistake falsehoods for truths.40
The Cambridge Platonists certainly knew and responded to Herbert’s philosophy. The lines of connection between them extended well beyond epistemology to broadly Platonic metaphysics, and his interest in natural religion. But the Cambridge Platonists do not exhibit the same anticlericism, and their interpretation of pagan religion was more positive than Herbert’s. The fullest discussion of Herbert is by Nathaniel Culverwell who describes him as an author who ‘hath both his truth and his errour’ in his An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), which was published well before the publication of De religione gentilium.41 Culverwell interpreted Herbert’s conception of ‘natural instincts’ not as ‘connate ideas’ of the Platonist kind, but as dispositions of the soul (‘powers and faculties of the soul’). He also accepted that the mind was furnished with common notions as ‘cleare and undelible Principles, some first and Alphabetical Notions’ in human nature by which it can read the law of nature.42 George Rust used Herbert’s conception of the common notions and natural instinct in his account of ‘right reason’ in his posthumously published A Discourse of the Use of Reason in Matters of Religion (1683). Rust’s editor was Henry Hallywell, who may have chosen this moment to publish this in order to defend the idea of a ‘rational religion’ consistent with revelation against the deist’s repudiation of Christian mystery. The subtitle suggests as much: Shewing that Christianity Contains nothing Repugnant to Right Reason; against Enthusiasts and Deists. It was published in the same year as Charles Blount’s Religio laici (1683) which quotes extensively from Herbert’s De religione laici.
The fortunes of both Bacon and Herbert illustrate the fact that the importance of a philosopher’s work is not contingent on his/her immunity from refutation. Bacon’s own speculations in natural philosophy and his metaphysical theory were not taken up by his successors. And his recommendations for the method of investigating nature were considerably redrawn by later experimenters. But the principles which underlay his inductive approach—the appeal to experience and agnosticism about explanatory theory—inspired his successors. The fact that Herbert’s epistemology failed to convince Descartes, Gassendi, and Locke, does not mean that writing De veritate was a waste of his intellectual energies. Of more significance is the fact that the greatest thinkers of the age considered it worthy of refutation. Although Herbert’s philosophy of religion failed in its aim to provide a philosophical grounding for religious toleration, its take-up in ways he did not intend among the deists and anti-religious thinkers ensured that it nevertheless contributed to Enlightenment debates about the rational grounds of religious belief. Thus the major themes of their philosophies anticipate the direction of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and philosophy of religion. Although they diverged on epistemology, both Bacon and Herbert were centrally concerned with question of how we arrive at a true knowledge of things, a quest which led each of them to propose new theories, which were radically different from the received Aristotelianism of the schools. Bacon and Herbert were philosophers for their time, but, like all thinkers of any stature, their philosophy was interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of later developments, and the changing horizons of succeeding generations.
British philosophy in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was as yet untouched by the Cartesian revolution of mid-century, though Herbert evidently knew Descartes. Their reforming intentions bear comparison with those of the Mersenne circle in Paris, where Descartes was the rising star. Bacon and Herbert’s quest for new beginnings in philosophy was also shared by other Britons, most important of whom was that younger contemporary of their acquaintance, Thomas Hobbes. To a far greater extent than Herbert, Hobbes was deeply influenced by developments in France. The publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan within two years of Herbert’s death announced a new philosophical voice to be reckoned with, uncompromising in its application of the new mechanical philosophy to all branches of philosophy, and radical in its materialism.
1 Thomas Tenison, Baconiana (London, 1679), p. 7.
2 On Bacon as a philosopher, see Marta Fattori, Introduzione a Francis Bacon (Roma: Laterza, 1997); Marta Fattori, Francis Bacon: terminologia e fortuna nel XVII secolo (Rome: Edizione del Atteneo, 1984); Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
3 Graham Rees, ‘Bacon’s Speculative Philosophy’, in Marku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 121–45; Guido Giglioni, Francesco Bacone (Rome: Carrocci, 2011).
4 Bacon, ‘To my Lord Treasurer’, printed in Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, ed. William Rawley (London, 1657), p. 96.
5 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 14. See also Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge’, in Peltonen (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Bacon, pp. 47–74.
6 The third edition published in 1625 contains fifty-eight essays.
7 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 28.
8 Francis Bacon, Novum organum, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverstone, p. 51, Aphorism 62.
9 Bacon, Advancement, p. 85.
10 Bacon, Advancement, p. 81.
11 Bacon, Advancement, pp. 80 ff. Paulo Rossi, ‘Bacon’s Idea of Science’, in Peltonen (ed.), Companion to Francis Bacon, pp. 1–46; A. Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
12 Bacon, Novum organum, p. 36, Aphorism 19.
13 Ian Box, ‘Bacon’s Moral Philosophy’, in Peltonen (ed.), Companion to Francis Bacon, pp. 260–82.
14 Bacon, Advancement, p. 134.
15 Bacon, Advancement, p. 163.
16 De Dominis may have revised Tobie’s translation of the Essays. See Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (London, 1994), ch. 8, pp. 47 ff. Saggi morali del Signore Francesco Bacono appeared in London, in 1681, with a dedication to Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany.
17 On the reception of Bacon see Paul Dibon, ‘Sur la recéption de l’oeuvre de F. Bacon en Hollande dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle’, in M. Fattori (ed.), Francis Bacon: terminologia e fortuna nel XVII secolo (Rome: Edizione Atheneo, 1984), pp. 91–115; M. Le Doeuff, ‘Bacon chez les grands au siècle de Louis XIII’, Fattori (ed.), Francis Bacon, pp. 155–78; C. W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation with a Checklist of Books Translated from English into Dutch 1600–1700 (Leiden: Leiden University Press for the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, 1983).
18 Biographical studies of Herbert: R. D. Bedford, In Defence of Truth. Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); Paolo Rossi, La vita, le opera, i tempi di Eduardo Herbert di Chirbury, 3 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1947). For studies of his philosophy, see Sarah Hutton, ‘Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists’, in Stuart Brown (ed.), British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 5 (London: Routledge, 1996); Jacqueline Lagrée, Le Salut du laïc: Edward Herbert de Cherbury. Étude et traduction du ‘De religione laïci’ (Paris: Vrin, 1989); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
19 Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate prout distinguitur a reuelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (London, 1633), p. 43, and Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, trans. with an introduction by Meyrick H. Carré (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1937), p. 105. On Herbert and scepticism, see Richard Popkin, A History of Scepticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 8.
20 The term derives from the Greek zetein, to enquire. It was used in mathematics by Vieta, and by Joachim Jungius in the name of the short-lived Societas Ereunetica sive Zetetica (Society for Research or Investigation) which he founded in Rostock, 1622–4.
21 Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, trans Carré, p. 106.
22 Melanchthon, De anima p. 208. Melanchthon’s works were widely used in English universities when Herbert was an undergraduate. See Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Reception of Melancthon in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge and Oxford’, in Günter Frank and Kees Meerhoff (eds), Melanchthon und Europa (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2002).
23 Herbert, De veritate, trans. Carré, pp. 126–7.
24 Herbert, De veritate, trans. Carré, p. 140.
25 ‘Nulla [ecclesia] enim non spirare minas, nulla fere extra Pomaeria sua salute proferri non negare’. Herbert Religione Laici, ed. Hutcheson, p. 87. On Herbert and religion see D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972), ch. 5; Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
26 Herbert, De veritate (1633), pp. 210–21; De veritate, trans Carré, pp. 291–303.
27 Herbert, Antient Religion of the Gentiles (London, 1705), p. 3.
28 Herbert owned several of Grotius’ works, some of them gifts from the author, including De iure belli ac pacis. Most of the books by Grotius listed in his library catalogue were theological, but he owned a copy of De iure belli ac pacis (Amsterdam, 1642). C. J. Fordyce and T. M. Knox, ‘The Books Bequeathed to Jesus College Library, Oxford, by Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury’, in The Library of Jesus College, Oxford (Oxford Bibliographical Society; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
29 Herbert, De veritate (1633), 48, trans. Carré, p. 126.
30 Blount, Religio laici (London, 1683), p. 38.
31 R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate’, The Seventeenth Century, 17.2 (2001): 217–38.
32 Pierre Gassendi, ‘Ad librum D. Edoardi Herberti Angli, De veritate, epistola’, in Opera omnia (Louvain, 1658), vol. 3, pp. 411–19. Herbert owned Gassendi’s Exertatio against Robert Fludd and his Exertationes paradoxae adversus Aristotelem (1636).
33 Mersenne, Correspondence, vol. 4, p. 336. Translation by Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 133.
34 Printed in CSMK, vol. 3, p. 139.
35 Serjeantson, ‘Herbert of Cherbury before Deism’.
36 Thomas Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. 1, p. 32.
37 Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 40.
38 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1.3.15–19, pp. 77–80.
39 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 19, p. 79. See R. L. Armstrong, ‘Cambridge Platonists and Locke on Innate Ideas’, JHI, 30 (1969): 187–202; R. L. Greenlee, ‘Locke and the Controversy over Innate Ideas’, JHI, 33 (1972): 251–64; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas’, JHI, 40 (1979): 191–205.
40 Richard Burthogge, Organum vetus & novum, or, A discourse of reason and truth wherein the natural logick common to mankinde is briefly and plainly described (London, 1678), p. 52–4.
41 Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1971), p. 83.
42 Culverwell, Discourse of the Light of Nature, p. 84.