Parliament, kings and a utopia
Bacon did not believe in Parliament. He thought it made up of illiterate, bigoted landowners and merchants or their agents, and compared with them he found James I better informed and more humane. Given greedy parties and fierce convictions, he thought even this king's theoretical despotism more useful. Like his contemporary Richelieu, he saw concentration of power in the king, and the obedience of great nobles to the crown, as a necessary step toward orderly government. Like Voltaire, he thought it easier to educate one individual than a whole population. His own great wealth did not trouble him, and James meanwhile persisted in extravagance, tax gathering and keeping the peace.
Bacon criticized the philosophers who invent imaginary laws for countries, saying their words are like stars, which give little light because they are so high. But late in life he tried to show the society in which mankind should live according to his view. He had surely read More's Utopia, and Campanella had by then published his City of the Sun. In 1624 Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, which begins with a voyage from Peru, where the narrator had stayed a full year, toward China and Japan through the South Sea. It goes on to tell of a long calm, dwindling supplies, a godlike island, and a people living in perfect happiness under laws laid down for them by Solomon.
In place of a parliament these people had observatories, libraries, botanical gardens and zoological gardens, where scholars, economists, technicians, physicists, psychologists and philosophers worked. After being given equal opportunity to learn, they were chosen by equal examinations (as in Plato's Republic) and then, without elections, put in charge of running the country, in other words of mastering nature for the people's benefit. One of them tells the European visitors that the purpose of the institution is to know the causes and hidden motions of things, to enlarge the bounds of human empire, and to effect all things possible. In this cheerful setting in the South Pacific, the sages of Solomon's House have invented the microscope, the telescope, self-acting clocks, the submarine, the motorcar and the flying machine. They have discovered anesthetics, artificial sleep, methods of hygiene and ways of prolonging life, and have found ways to graft plants, create new species, transmute metals, and carry musical sounds over distances.
The parliament, named Solomon's House, is joined with science, and has all the instruments and research establishments that Bacon had asked of James as the apparatus of the state. The country avoids foreign trade, which it regards as a cause of war, and the island is economically self-sufficient. Only science, and not goods, judges. So the humble philosopher takes the place of the proud statesman, and the man who sometimes called war a tonic medicine now, late in life, longs for a heaven of peace and quiet.
The standard-bearer of reason
Bacon worked to the end of his life. A year before his retirement he wrote the History of the Reign of King Henry VII, a model of historical writing: a clear account in strong, beautiful prose of the conflicts, policies and events of the reign. It is just, impartial and effective, about a reign that had not been given a poetic form, and it offers real information.
After this he published several treatises, such as one on the winds, one on density and rarity, and one on life and death. He now had unexpected leisure, but no fixed place, no child, and no friend, since those who had gathered round him in his years of power to gain rank were now at another door. He once asked a correspondent what companions worked with him, saying he himself lived in utter loneliness.
Wanting to know how long meat will keep from spoiling in snow, he broke off a journey one spring day to buy a hen. He killed it and stuffed its body with snow, but caught a chill himself. He had to go to the house of Lord Arundel nearby and take to bed. Bacon thought his illness would soon pass, and wrote to a friend that the experiment had succeeded very well. It is true that he saved the hen from decay, but it cost him his life. Fever burned through him and phlegm choked his throat, until he died on 9 April 1626, at sixty-seven according to the book (he was in fact sixty-five), and the burning candle was suddenly put out.
A verdict
Bacon was not, as Pope thought, the wisest, brightest and meanest of mankind. Montaigne was wiser, Voltaire brighter, and Henry VIII meaner. His enemies thought him kind, helpful and easily hurt. Although Bacon was vain to a point of baseness and proud enough to anger the gods, we have enough of these faults ourselves, and should overlook his, for the light he casts. His self-regard was like the wind in his sails. If we had to see ourselves as others see us, we would be paralyzed.
Bacon was not a scientist but a philosopher of science. His range of observation was huge, but his thought covered so vast a field that it left little room for research of his own. He did some work in the field but obtained no result. He lagged far behind the science of his day: he rejected the Copernican theory in astronomy, though he raised important arguments against it, and he paid no attention to Kepler, Galileo or Napier. Though he took note of the role of imagination, hypothesis and deduction in research, he still discounted their importance. His proposal to collect and classify facts was important in astronomy, where the observations of thousands of Copernicus's pupils gave induction material from which Copernicus made revolutionary deductions. But Bacon's proposal had little resemblance to the methods that in his age led to the laws of planetary motion, the moons of Jupiter, the earth's magnetism and the circulation of the blood.
Bacon made no claim to have discovered induction; he knew many had used it before him. Nor was he the first to overthrow Aristotle, since men like Roger Bacon and Petrus Ramus had done so in earlier centuries. The Aristotle they rejected, in Bacon's view, was not the Greek scholar who used and approved induction and experiment but the philosopher as altered by the Arabs and the scholastics. What Bacon rejected were the errors of those who drew certain medieval conclusions from Greek wisdom. In any case, he kept Renaissance Europe from too much deference to the ancients.
Nor was he the first to see science as a source of power: Roger Bacon held the same view, and Campanella said in his own pithy style that our power is proportionate to our knowledge. The statesman may have exaggerated the practical uses of science beyond what was fitting, but he distinguished the value of pure science from applied science, and of light from fruits. He thought the study of ends and means necessary, and was aware that an inventive century, unless it changes human motives, solves some problems but brings greater ones. Perhaps he saw his own moral failings as a whirlpool created by scientific progress that had no effect on individual character.
After all this we conclude that Francis Bacon was the most powerful and influential thinker of his time. Shakespeare surpassed him in imagination and literary art, but Bacon's mind ranged over the whole world like a searchlight sweeping every corner of space. All the joyful curiosity of the Renaissance, the excitement and pride of a man like Christopher Columbus sailing madly toward a new world, was concentrated in him. Here, then, are the words of this standard-bearer of science announcing the start of a new age.
He wrote that he had finished the part of knowledge concerned with civil science, with civil science ended human philosophy, and with human philosophy philosophy in general. Pausing a little to look at what he had done, he judged his writing, as far as one can judge one's own work, no better than the noise musicians make while tuning their instruments: not pleasing to the ear, but showing why the music later becomes pleasant. So he had tuned the instruments of the minds of others to play better. Considering the state of the times, with learning in its third period (the book's footnote questions the number), the vigor of contemporary minds, the valuable help from ancient writers, printing that puts books in reach of rich and poor, and the opening of the world through navigation, which has produced many experiments and much natural history, he was persuaded that this age would advance far beyond the age of the Greeks and Romans. As for his own labors, if there were any, he asked of anyone who wished to criticize them the old patient request: strike me, if you will, but listen. Let some criticize the work, so that they may see and weigh it.