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.
By David Selzer