One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).
Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.
In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.
Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).
It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).
The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).
While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.
Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”. Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.
Notes
1. A few decades after the Bacon’s death, the French monarch Louis XIV deployed the coincidental existence of the human subject and the state as the philosophical – and indeed procedural – basis for his reign.
2. It can as a consequence be deduced that this line of reasoning will result in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle one hundred years later.
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