page_title: Works by Francis Bacon
section_title: The Great Instauration
hierarchical_section_title: Works by Francis Bacon / Scientific works / The Great Instauration
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of Bacon's Novum Organum
context_page_description: Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author, and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.
  Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularized inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the Scientific Method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.
context_section_description: Francis Bacon is considered one of the fathers of modern science. He proposed, at his time, a great reformation of all process of knowledge for the advancement of learning divine and human. He called it Instauratio Magna (The Great Instauration - the action of restoring or renewing something). Bacon planned his Great Instauration in imitation of the Divine Work – the Work of the Six Days of Creation, as defined in the Bible, leading to the Seventh Day of Rest or Sabbath in which Adam's dominion over creation would be restored, thus dividing the great reformation in six parts:
  Partitions of the Sciences (De Augmentis Scientiarum)
  New Method (Novum Organum)
  Natural History (Historia Naturalis)
  Ladder of the Intellect (Scala Intellectus)
  Anticipations of the Second Philosophy (Anticipations Philosophiæ Secunda)
  The Second Philosophy or Active Science (Philosophia Secunda aut Scientia Activæ)
  For Bacon, this reformation would lead to a great advancement in science and a progeny of new inventions that would relieve mankind's miseries and needs.
  In Novum Organum, the second part of the Instauration, he stated his view that the restoration of science was part of the "partial returning of mankind to the state it lived before the fall", restoring its dominion over creation, while religion and faith would partially restore mankind's original state of innocence and purity.
  In the book The Great Instauration, he also gave some admonitions regarding the ends and purposes of science, from which much of his philosophy can be deduced. He said that men should confine the sense within the limits of duty in respect to things divine, while not falling in the opposite error which would be to think that inquisition of nature is forbidden by divine law. Another admonition was concerning the ends of science: that mankind should seek knowledge not for pleasure, contention, superiority over others, profit, fame, or power, but for the benefit and use of life, and that they perfect and govern it in charity.
  Regarding faith, in "De Augmentis", he wrote that "the more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honor is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." He wrote in The Essays: Of Atheism, "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." Meanwhile, in the very next essay called: "Of Superstition" Bacon remarks, "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion was not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravished all the spheres of government".  Percy Bysshe Shelley cites this passage in his essay The Necessity of Atheism.  Yet even more than this, Bacon's views of God are in accordance with popular Christian theology, as he writes, "They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature."
  He considered science (natural philosophy) as a remedy against superstition, and therefore a "most faithful attendant" of religion, considering religion as the revelation of God's Will and science as the contemplation of God's Power.
  Nevertheless, Bacon contrasted the new approach of the development of science with that of the Middle Ages:
   Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws 
caption: Frontispiece to Instauratio Magna (1620). The Latin inscription is from Daniel 12:4: "Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia." ("Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.")
exif: {}