Pillars of Hercules

Francis Bacon – not the figurative Irish

painter, the almost incomparable

depictor of human unreason –

but the Elizabethan/Jacobean

English essayist, diplomat, lawyer,

philosopher and politician, who was,

according to Euro-centric legend,

not only the real author of Shakespeare’s

plays but also the last person to have read

every book that had ever been written –

went to Trinity College, Cambridge,

when he was 12, and left at 16

to join the diplomatic service.

While at Cambridge he concluded that,

though admirable in itself, Aristotle’s

approach was not fit for purpose since

it did not improve ‘the estate of man’.

 

Later he would write THE ADVANCEMENT

OF LEARNING, whose taxonomies would inform

The Enlightenment, and NOVUM ORGANUM,

in Latin, whose empiricism

would establish the scientific method.

 

In a parallel life he was an MP

in a number of constituencies,

took gifts from litigants while Lord Chancellor,

and campaigned tirelessly for the urgent

beheading of Mary Queen of Scots.

 

***

 

The title NOVUM ORGANUM alludes

to Aristotle’s ORGANUM, his work

on logic the youthful Bacon decried.

The engraved title page of Bacon’s book

shows a galleon in full sail surging

through the Pillars of Hercules – now the Straits

of Gibraltar – west of which, according to

Plato, Atlantis lay. The pillars

were inscribed with a sailors’ warning:

Non Plus Ultra – Nothing Further Beyond.

 

Meanwhile, however, in far Cathay,

medical practitioners still consult

regularly a book of herbal medicines

and their uses which was written in the late

Han dynasty more than a thousand years

before Francis Bacon put quill to parchment.