The spirit behind the method
Bacon voiced the highest passion of his age, the wish to improve life by spreading knowledge. Later scientists came under his influence and took heart not from his method but from his spirit. After centuries of intellectual stagnation, a man had appeared who loved the bitter taste of truth and the life-giving air of seeking and finding, and who showed distrust of deep ignorance, superstition and fear. Some of his contemporaries, such as Donne, believed the world was declining and would soon fall apart. Bacon declared that his own age, which the translator's note places after the Greeks and Romans, was the youth of the world, full of spirit and vigor.
At first nobody listened. In England, France and Germany people preferred to settle their religious quarrels by force of arms. Only when those quarrels eased did men of this bent, following Bacon, set out to extend human mastery not over other humans but over the conditions and difficulties of human life.
A line of heirs
When the English founded the Royal Society of London for the advancement of natural science (1660), they named Francis Bacon as its inspiration, and perhaps Solomon's House in the New Atlantis had shown them the way. Leibniz regarded Bacon as the creator of philosophy. The French philosophers dedicated their Encyclopedia to him (1751), a work that shook the foundations of its age. Diderot wrote that if the enterprise succeeded, the credit belonged above all to Chancellor Bacon, who had sketched a general dictionary of the sciences and arts in an age when there was almost no learning to put in it. That extraordinary genius, he said, wrote about what needed to be known at a time when no history of what was known could be written. D'Alembert, with great enthusiasm, called Bacon the greatest, the most universal and the most eloquent of philosophers. When the French Revolution drew inspiration from the same movement of enlightenment, the Convention had Bacon's works published at public expense.
English habits of thought, from Hobbes to Spencer, came to resemble Bacon's, with the exception of Berkeley, Hume and the followers of Hegel. His inclination to picture the world as Democritus had done leaned Hobbes toward materialism. His reliance on induction leaned Locke toward an experimental psychology, in which the study of the mind would be free of mental metaphysics. His stress on 'comforts' and 'fruits' had much in common with the philosophy of Helvetius, who in turn led Bentham to treat usefulness and the good as one. It was Bacon's spirit that prepared England for the Industrial Revolution.
At the head of his age
We may therefore place Francis Bacon at the head of his age. Unlike some of his successors, he was not self-opinionated. He refused any idea that had not passed the test of real experience, and any conclusion in which desires had a hand. He wrote that human understanding is no dry light but is infused by will and feeling, and that this gives rise to sciences one might call 'as one would wish', since a man more readily believes what he wishes to be true. He preferred a reason grounded in facts, and hoped much from a closer and purer union of the experimental and the rational faculties.
Like the philosophers of the eighteenth century, Bacon did not see reason as the enemy or the replacement of religion, but made room for both in philosophy and in life. He did, however, refuse to rely on hearsay and authority, and in place of emotional inference, supernatural intervention and popular legend he accepted rational, natural explanations. He raised a banner for every science and gathered the thinkers of later centuries around it. Whether he intended it or not, what he sought, the full organization of scientific research and the worldwide spread of science, carried within it the seed of the most stirring events of modern times: Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, would be forced to fight against the growth and power of science and philosophy. At that moment only the prologue of the drama had been announced to the world.
The Great Rebellion: a changing economy
A hundred and forty-four years before Louis XVI paid for the sins of his forebears, a revolution arose in England that established the supremacy of Parliament and ended in the execution of a king. It grew out of economic struggle and religious rivalry.
Feudalism rested on farming, and monarchy in western Europe was the crown of feudalism, bound up with an economy of landowners and land. In England two economic developments broke that bond. The first was the rise of a middle class without titles, standing between the titled nobles and the small landholders. It resented the acts of the king and court and the laws of the land, which still followed medieval custom. It bought or seized seats in the House of Commons, and it wanted a government answerable to Parliament, with a Parliament that carried out its own views. The second was the growing wealth of the bourgeois group: bankers, merchants, manufacturers, lawyers and physicians. Their demand for representation matched their economic power. These revolutionary forces had no common interests; they cooperated only to check the landed aristocrats, the haughty courtiers, and a king who thought hereditary nobility necessary to the economic and political order of the realm.
Year by year, England's economy was shifting its support from immovable land to money and movable property. Before 1540 a brass works needed only a small capital, but by 1620 it needed several hundred times as much (the book converts both sums into later American money, which is left out here). By 1650 heavy investment had created alum works in Yorkshire, paper mills at Dartford, cannon foundries at Brenchley, and deep mines for coal, copper, tin, iron and lead. In 1550 only a few English mines yielded more than 300 tons a year; by 1640 several gave more than 20,000 tons each. Metalworkers depended on mining and metal industries that were in capitalist hands. The textile trade supplied material to workshops with 500 to 1,000 workers and also gave orders to weavers and tailors scattered through thousands of houses in towns and villages. Farming did not escape the capitalists either: they bought large tracts and fenced them in to supply meat to the towns and wool to mills at home and abroad. Between 1610 and 1640 England's foreign trade grew tenfold.
The poor, the crises and the rival camps
England had never before seen the gap between rich and poor so deep. In the book's words, during the first half of the seventeenth century workers' wages fell to the lowest level, because food prices were rising while wages were falling. Taking 100 as the base, the real wage of English carpenters stood at about 300 around 1380 and 370 in 1480, then 200 in Elizabeth's time and only 120 under Charles I, the lowest point in four hundred years. In 1634 unemployment was so severe that Charles ordered the demolition of a newly built sawmill, because it threw many hand sawyers out of work. War with France raised taxes and damaged foreign trade, and bad harvests (the source gives the years as 1329 to 1630, an evident misprint, most likely 1629 to 1630) drove prices to famine levels. Economic crises followed in 1629 to 1632 and in 1638, even as the economy expanded. All these factors, together with religious conflict, drove many English families to America and plunged England into a civil war that changed the face and fate of the nation.
The class war also took the form of a regional war and a struggle over moral principles. The north of England suited farming, and most of its people secretly followed the Catholic faith; London and the south were more industrial and Protestant. The new class of craftsmen and businessmen was attached to its own monopolies and to the customs duties that protected its interests, yet it wanted a free economy in which wages and prices followed the supply of labor and goods. It wanted no feudal or state supervision of production, distribution, profit and property, and it wanted lending at interest, trade and investment no longer to be condemned as shameful. The barons and their tenants, by contrast, held to the mutual obligations and collective responsibility of the feudal order. (The source sentence is garbled here; it appears to say that they also favored state control of wages and prices and orderly terms of hiring and exploitation.)
These landed groups, together with the middle class and the state, felt that their property was endangered by the effect of monetary inflation on claims, rents and taxes. They therefore looked down on the lawyers who had a large share in running affairs and on the merchants who dominated the towns. They also feared the power of the merchants of London, a city of 300,000 in a country of five million, who were able to raise an army and make a revolution.