The Advancement of Learning

Overview

The Advancement of Learning is two hundred pages in two books, published in 1605 and addressed directly to James I, who had come to the English throne two years earlier and liked to be thought a scholar. It is an argument, a survey and a funding application at once, and the last of these is not incidental: Bacon wanted a king to pay for what he is describing.

It is also the first substantial philosophical work written in English rather than Latin, which was a deliberate decision and one Bacon later half regretted; he expanded and translated it in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum, nearly three times the length, on the grounds that English would not travel and might not last.

Its relation to the rest of his work is straightforward. The Advancement says what is wrong and what is missing. The Novum Organum, fifteen years later, supplies the method. New Atlantis imagines the institution. This is the one to read first, because it is the only one he finished and because it is much the most enjoyable: the prose is dense with images, and Bacon is funny about his opponents.

The argument

Book I: the defence. Bacon begins by answering three groups who disparage learning.

The divines say knowledge puffs up and leads to unbelief. Bacon replies that it was the desire for moral knowledge, to be as gods knowing good and evil, that caused the fall, not natural knowledge, and that a little philosophy may incline a mind to atheism while depth in it brings men back to religion. God’s works and God’s word are two books, and reading the first cannot damage the second.

The politicians say learning softens men and unfits them for affairs. Bacon works through the examples, comparing learned and unlearned rulers, and observes that the times most fertile in arms were also fertile in letters.

The learned themselves are the third and the most interesting. Bacon says their own conduct has done the damage, and diagnoses three distempers. Fantastical learning, which is the study of frivolous matters and credulous report. Contentious learning, which is the schoolmen: men of sharp wits shut up in cells with a few authors, who spun out of a small quantity of matter an infinite quantity of cobwebs of learning, admirable for fineness and of no substance or profit. And delicate learning, the humanists’ obsession with style, where men hunt more after words than matter, after choiceness of phrase and roundness of period than after weight of matter and soundness of argument.

He then sets out the true ends. Knowledge has been sought for curiosity, for ornament, for victory in argument, for money. It ought to be sought for the benefit and use of life, and governed by charity, and here Bacon supplies the argument that the improvement of the human condition is the point.

The inversion of antiquity comes in this book too, and it is his best single stroke. The appeal to the ancients gets its force from the respect owed to age. But the world is older now than it was then; these are the ancient times, and the writers we call ancient lived in its youth. If age brings experience, it belongs to us.

Book II: the map. Three quarters of the work, and it is a survey of everything.

Bacon divides knowledge by the faculty that produces it. Memory yields history, imagination yields poetry, reason yields philosophy. Each then subdivides. History is natural, civil, ecclesiastical and literary, and natural history splits into nature in course, nature erring, meaning monsters and anomalies, and nature altered, meaning the mechanical arts, which Bacon insists belong in the survey and which scholars had always despised. Poetry is narrative, dramatic and parabolic. Philosophy divides into divine, natural and human, natural into physics and metaphysics with mathematics as an auxiliary, human into the knowledge of the body and of the mind, and the knowledge of the mind into logic and ethics, with civil knowledge treated separately as conversation, negotiation and government.

The method is what makes it live. At every branch Bacon marks whether the field has been cultivated and, where it has not, names the missing work as a deficiency. He supplies over a hundred of these, some of which read as commissions: a natural history that includes the trades, a history of the errors and anomalies of nature, a calendar of doubts, a history of learning itself, a study of the different characters of men, a treatise on the influence of the body on the mind.

He is also concrete about what an institution would need: endowments not just for lecturers but for experiments, better salaries, funds for instruments, correspondence and exchange between universities, and books, gardens and collections. New Atlantis is this passage turned into fiction.

How to read it

Read Book I entire; it is short and it is the best writing. Then read the opening of Book II for the classification, and then browse the deficiencies, which are more interesting than a summary of them.

Read for the sentences. Bacon is one of the great English prose writers and the Advancement is full of images that have entered the language, about ill discoverers who think there is no land because they see only sea, about cobwebs of learning, about men who worship their own understandings.

Do not expect the method. Bacon promises a new instrument here and does not deliver it; that is the Novum Organum, and even there it is unfinished. This book is a diagnosis and a map, and it is honest about being those.

Take the deficiencies seriously as a device. Marking what is missing, rather than summarising what is known, is an unusual way to write a survey and it is what makes the book a programme rather than an encyclopaedia.

Read it alongside Descartes’ Discourse on Method, published thirty-two years later. Both are arguments that learning must start again; Descartes’ remedy is a single mind proceeding from certainties, Bacon’s is many people gathering facts over generations. Almost everything about how science actually developed follows Bacon rather than Descartes, and almost everything about how philosophy developed follows Descartes.

Questions it raises

• Bacon says knowledge should be sought for the benefit and use of life. Is that the right end, and what does it exclude?
• The classification runs by the faculties of the mind rather than by the structure of the world. Does that matter?
• He argues we are the true ancients. Is accumulated experience actually inherited, or does each generation have to acquire it?
• Bacon demands that natural history include the mechanical arts and the anomalies of nature. Why had those been excluded, and what does including them change?
• The argument that God’s works and God’s word are separate books kept science and religion out of each other’s way for a long time. Was that a truce or a solution?
• This book asks a king to fund the advancement of knowledge. What does it assume about who science is for?