British Society for the History of Science

Francis Bacon's Concept of Objectivity and the Idols of the Mind

Author(s): Perez Zagorin
Source: The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 379-393
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of
Science
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4028370
Accessed: 23-02-2016 22:36 UTC
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BJHS,2001, 34, 379-393

Francis Bacon's concept of objectivity and the

idols of the mind
PEREZ ZAGORIN*

Abstract. This paper examines the concept of objectivity traceable in Francis Bacon's natural
philosophy. After some historical background on this concept, it considers the question of
whether it is not an anachronismto attributesuch a concept to Bacon, since the word 'objectivity'
is a later coinage and does not appear anywhere in his writings. The essay gives reasons for
answering this question in the negative, and then criticizes the accounts given of Bacon's
understanding of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Julie Robin Solomon. It argues that this
understanding is most directly and fully expressed in his discussion of the idols of the mind. In
this connection, the paper notes Bacon's critical attitude to sixteenth-century scepticism and its
relevance to the idea of objectivity implicit in his comments on the idols. In conclusion, the paper
argues that Bacon was not a pure empiricist and describes the place assigned to theories and
hypotheses in his natural philosophy.

In contemporary philosophical and other discourse, the term 'objectivity' is mainly used
with three principal meanings in mind, all of which are related to one another in the sense
of sharing family resemblancesas describedby Wittgenstein in his well-known remarks on
meaning and language games.' As commonly understood, objectivity can denote any one
of the following: first, the true and certain knowledge of a thing, property or state of
affairs; second, a method of enquiry designed and competent to elicit a true knowledge,
understanding or explanation of a thing, property or state of affairs; third, a type of
judgementor mental disposition on the part of scientists, scholars, moralists, philosophers
and other investigators that sets aside prejudice, partiality and predeterminedanswers in
the process of any kind of enquiry and the appraisal of its results. All three of these
definitions are among those attributedto or implied by the word 'objective' and its cognate
term 'objectivity' in the tenth, 1994 edition of my Merriam Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary, and may also be found among the definitions of 'objective' in the Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary; although framed to my purpose, they also correspond closely
to the several meanings of objectivity which Allan Megill has summarized in his useful
discussion in an issue, devoted to the question of objectivity, of the journal Annalsof
Scholarship.2
While thinking and language are obviously very closely connected, it is certainly possible
*

2990 Beaumont Farm Road, Charlottesville, Virginia 22901, USA.

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn., New York, 1970, nos. 66-7.
2 Allan Megill, 'Four senses of objectivity', Annals of Scholarship (1991), 8, 301-20. Megill's essay is the
introduction to a symposium of articles on objectivity in this and the succeeding issues of Annals of Scholarship
(1992), 9, nos. 1-2, later published as Rethinking Objectivity (ed. Allan Megill), Durham, 1994.

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to conceive of an idea without having one specific word for it. In the Western intellectual
tradition, some of the ingredients presently constituting the concept of objectivity long
antedated the time of Francis Bacon and can be traced back to classical antiquity, despite
the fact that in neither Greek nor Latin is there a particular word that designates this
concept. Terms like the Greek di'kaiosand the Latin aequum, however, whose meanings
included fairness and lack of bias as well as what is right or equitable, contained distinct
connotations that are clearly part of the semantic field pertainingto our word 'objectivity'
and its uses in various contexts. In Greek philosophy an awareness of what might be called
ontological objectivity as the determinationof the way things really are was implicit in the
speculations and enquiries of some of the pre-Socraticthinkers, Plato and Aristotle, which
aimed at attaining true and certain knowledge of the necessary and universal features of
reality or the natural world. Aristotle's enquiry into the nature of being, for example,
which he pursued in his Metaphysics, and the theory and logic of scientific explanation
outlined in his Posterior Analytics, which explains that we possess 'scientific knowledge
when we ... know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no
other and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is',3 presupposed a type of
knowledge that is unconditioned, necessary, absolute and, hence, entirely objective.
Similarly, a perception of at least a part of what is involved in historical objectivity
underlies the claim of Greek and Roman historians to describe the facts and explain their
causes truly and impartially. Thucydides' observations on the method of writing history,
which he placed near the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War, his comments
on the early history of Greece and his deep probing into the causes of the war between
Athens and Sparta, clearly intimate or envisage the idea of a self-consciously critical and
objective historical knowledge.4 A consciousness of objectivity is likewise evident in the
pledge of the Roman historian Tacitus to relate the events of the EmperorAugustus' reign
without either passion or partiality ('sine ira et studio'); and also in his denial that his
political elevation under the emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian had impaired his
impartiality as a historian who held the truth to be inviolable.5
When we pass from the ancient world to the sixteenth century and Francis Bacon (b.
1561), we observe that the word 'objectivity' does not appear anywhere in his writings,
since at that period it did not yet exist in English or any other European language. As
several scholars have pointed out, its lexical origin is the non-classical Latin adjective
' objectivus', which medieval and early modern scholastic philosophers used in the phrase
3 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 71b8-12, or Book I, Chapter 2.
4 Thucydides, History, 1.1-21. When Thucydides comes to tell about the plague at Athens in the second year
of the war, he says he will leave aside all speculation as to its origin but simply describe its nature and symptoms;
History, 2.48. This statement, it is worth noting, furnished the inspiration for the best known epitome of the
principle of historical objectivity in the nineteenth century as formulated in the famous comment of Leopold von
Ranke that the task of history was not to judge the past but to show what had actually happened ('wie es
eigentlich gewesen'). Ranke's dictum is an almost direct quotation from Thucydides and appears in the Preface
to his own History of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514, Leipzig, 1824, and also recurs in some
of his other writings; see the passages from Ranke reprintedin Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History, Cleveland,
1956, 57, 58, and for Ranke's use of Thucydides' remark, see M. I. Finley, 'How it really was', Ancient History
and Models, London, 1985, 47-8, 116 n. 5.
5 Tacitus, Annals, 1.1; idem, Histories, 1.1.

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Francis Bacon's concept of objectivity

381

conceptus objectivus to signify an external object insofar as it is present to the mind.6 Not
until about the mid-nineteenthcentury and after did the word 'objective' enter the English
language with some of the meanings it presentlypossesses, while 'objectivity' is even more
of a latecomer to the philosopher's lexicon.7 This raises the problem of whether it is not
a dangerous anachronism to speak of a conception of objectivity in reference either to
Bacon or to any of the philosophers or historians of antiquity. The short answer to this
question is that in trying to understand and analyse the beliefs and ideas of past societies
and cultures, historians and philosophers must not only learn to comprehend the language
and concepts by which these societies and cultures understood themselves and reflected
upon the world, but also are often obliged to apply to them other and later concepts of
which they were ignorant or only partially and inadequately possessed. Prior to the
emergence of the modern term 'objectivity' and its multiple semantic affiliations
constituting an entire family of meanings, it seems to be undeniable that notions
approximating some of the contemporary meanings of objectivity are to be found in
Western philosophy, law and historiography,for example. If there is a risk of anachronism
in talking of objectivity in connection with Bacon or any of his philosophic predecessors,
the same risk is equally present when we speak, as everyone unavoidably does, of science
in ancient Greece or during the Renaissance, since at neither period was there any word
or idea synonymous with all the meanings we have in mind when we use the word 'science'
today. Indeed, historians of whatever field would find their task impossible if they were
barredfrom using concepts and terminology unknown to those whom they study. In such
cases of conceptual translation from the present to the past, I believe that historians and
philosophers need not worry about misleading readers by anachronismprovided they take
care to make the necessary semantic distinctions and to remain clear about what they are
doing.
In the case of Bacon, while he was ignorant of objectivity as a distinctive term, certain
aspects of the concept were nevertheless familiar to him in other language. Thus he was
thoroughly acquainted with objectivity in the sense of impartiality as one of the
requirementsof truth and justice in both law and history, and sought to practise it himself
in his activities as a judge, a writer on jurisprudenceand a historian.8 An awareness of
objectivity is no less implicit in his discussion of the affiliation between rhetoric and the

6 Scholastic and neoscholastic thinkers distinguished the conceptus objectivus from the conceptus formalis,
which denoted an object that is solely in the mind and thus has only an intellectual existence; see the excellent
discussion by Michael Ayers, 'Ideas and objective being', in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy (ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers), 2 vols., Cambridge, 1998, ii, Chapter 30, and the remarks on
the terminological and intellectual ancestry of the modern idea of objectivity in Peter Dear, 'From truth to
disinterestednessin the seventeenth century', Social Studies of Science (1992), 22, 619-31; and Lorraine Daston,
'Objectivity and the escape from perspective', in ibid., 597-618.
7 See the discussion in Daston, op. cit. (6). The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary had no separate
entry for 'objectivity' and cited it only in connection with the definition of 'objective'. The second edition lists
it separately with the following brief definition: 'The quality or character of being objective; external reality;
objectiveness.' It is striking that there is also no separate entry for 'objectivity' in such major works of reference
as the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, the Encyclopaedia Britannica,the old
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and its successor the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
8 I have discussed Bacon's treatment of these subjects in my book, Francis Bacon, Princeton, 1998, 187-220.

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imagination and of the latter's role as an instrumentof both reason and passion.9 It is also
a prominent feature of the political reflectionsand comments on worldly problems and the
architectureof fortune contained in his essays, in which his mastery of objectivity in the
decipherment of human designs and political stratagems is akin to that of Tacitus and
Machiavelli.'" When he observes in The Advancement of Learning 'that we are much
beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do',
he is praising the Italian thinker for his realism and objectivity as an analyst of political
conduct." But it was in his natural philosophy or theory of science and the investigation
of nature that Bacon addressed the question of objectivity as a methodological problem
most fully and directly, and with an originality that went well beyond preceding
understandingsof the concept. Studentsof Bacon's thought, however, have generally failed
to give his treatment of this subject the attention it deserves.12 To this comment, though,
there are two exceptions, the first an essay by LorraineDaston, the second a recent book
by Julie Robin Solomon, each of which attempts to explain the Baconian view of
objectivity.'3
It was Daston who first introduced the question of objectivity into the discussion of
Bacon's natural philosophy as a part of her wide-ranging project of investigating the
history and evolution of the principle of objectivity in the natural sciences.'4 In her view,
his idea of objectivity centred on the new significance his natural philosophy ascribed to
facts, independentof all theories or interpretations,as the core of knowledge. 'Seventeenthcentury objectivity', she states, 'insofar as one can use the word for this period without
anachronism, was about facts and nothing but the facts'."5 Taking note of Bacon's
conviction that natural history as collections of particular facts must provide the
indispensable basis of natural philosophy, she sees in him the 'pivotal figure in the
rehabilitation of facts as knowledge';"6 she further observes that under his influence
9 Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 180-1.
10 Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 133-46.
11 The Advancement of Learning (ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath), Works, 15
vols., Cambridge, MA, 1863, vi, 327.
12 The present writer's recent book, Francis Bacon, touched on the subject only briefly and inadequately
(Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 82-6 ), and it has likewise been neglected in the important studies by Peter Urbach, Francis
Bacon's Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal, La Salle, IL, 1987, and Antonio Perez-Ramos,
Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition, Oxford, 1988, the latter of which is
probably the most significant contribution in recent years to the historical understanding of Bacon's theory of
science. Objectivity is also not mentioned in any of the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (ed.
Markku Peltonen), Cambridge, 1996.
13 Lorraine Daston, 'Baconian facts, academic civility, and the prehistory of objectivity', Annals of
Scholarship (1991), 8, 337-63; Julie Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics
of Inquiry, Baltimore, 1998. Mary Tiles and Jim Tiles, in their An Introduction to Historical Epistemology: The
Authority of Knowledge, Oxford, 1993, Chapter 2, also include some comments on Bacon's idea of objectivity,
but it is not the focal point of their discussion.
14 Daston's other essays in this project include 'Objectivity and the escape from perspective' (op. cit. (6));
'Fear and loathing of the imagination in science', Daedalus (1998), 127, 73-95; and in collaboration with Peter
Galison, 'The image of objectivity', Representations (1992) 40, 81-128. I have also had the benefit of seeing
Daston's unpublished 1993 article, 'The moralized objectivities of nineteenth-centuryscience'.
15 Daston, op. cit. (13), 338.
16 Daston, op. cit. (13), 345.

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subsequent English natural philosophers like Robert Boyle believed that absence of bias
and scientific impartiality depended on the avoidance of theories and the concentration
upon and allegiance to facts conceived as sheer theory-free empirical posits.'7 In this way,
Daston holds, 'Baconian facts' became 'the premier objects of objectivity' and likewise
served to define the relationship between objectivity and impartiality in later seventeenthcentury science.'8
In my summary of Daston's essay, I have not done justice to some of its interesting and
suggestive comments. Its analysis of Bacon's conception of objectivity, however, is
seriously incomplete and also unbalanced in the view it presents of Bacon's natural
philosophy. While it is true that in the latter he attached great significanceto the collection
of facts, he is mistakenly represented,as a number of scholars including the present writer
have shown, when pictured, as he is in Daston's story, as a pure empiricist who equated
knowledge simply with facts and left no room for theories in the practice of science.'9
Moreover, although his emphasis on facts as a vital part of natural philosophy may have
been an influential aspect of his legacy to the succeeding generation of English natural
philosophers, his understandingof objectivity, if we are willing to attribute such a concept
to him, included a good deal more than this and was considerably deeper and more
interesting than Daston's discussion enables us to realize.
Solomon's book, which is premised on the assumption that objectivity has been
overthrown as a norm of scientific knowledge, defines it as ' self-distancing' and
'disinterestedness' or, more explicitly, 'the holding in abeyance, or erasure, of the
individual mind's desires, interests, assumptions, and intents while that mind is in the
process of knowing the materialworld '*20 Claiming to show how 'class' and 'occupational
positions inflect the production of culture and ideology', it maintains that Bacon's version
of objectivity was an ideological offspring of the commercial and mercantile capitalism of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the socio-economic context for the emergence of
the strategies of self-distancingand objective calculation.2' Unhappily, however, despite its
pretensions, this work is unable to establish any actual connection between the character
of Bacon's philosophy and his supposed class affiliation.22Not only does it fail to provide
an adequate or detailed examination of the writings that can be related to his conception

17 Daston, op. cit. (13), 345-56.

18 Daston, op. cit. (13), 350, 356. For the importance assigned to facts in Bacon's natural philosophy and its
influence upon seventeenth-century science in adopting norms of impartiality and fidelity to facts as both a
methodological necessity and an essential part of scientific discourse, see Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact,
Ithaca, 2000.
19 See Urbach, op. cit. (12), Chapters 2, 6 and passim; Perez-Ramos, op. cit (12), Chapter 18; Zagorin, op.
cit. (8), Chapter 3.
20 Solomon, op. cit. (13), pp. xi, xv, xviii-xix.
21 Solomon, op. cit. (13), p. xiii.
22 Solomon is mistaken in identifying Bacon with the English commercial bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century.
Both his father Sir Nicholas Bacon and his uncle William Cecil, Lord Burghley, were self-made men who rose to
wealth and high position in the service of the Tudor monarchy, acquired titles, country houses and estates, and
established themselves as members of the Tudor aristocracy. Their sons all belonged to the aristocratic sector of
society. The interest Bacon took in commercial policy and trade was typical of the statesmen of his period, who
looked upon trade as an important element of national power.

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of objectivity, but by equating his understanding of the latter with 'philosophic selfdistancing'23it also overlooks new and major aspects of the meaning of objectivity which
are traceable in his theory of science.24
Bacon's foremost goal as a philosopher was the attainment of a new logic of discovery
in the investigation of nature that would greatly enhance human cognitive power and
assure the continual progress of the sciences and the growth of knowledge. His conception
of objectivity is entirely bound up with this end. This conception is formulated most
completely in his Novum Organum (The New Organon), published in 1620 as the second
part of his Instauratio Magna (The Great Instauration). Never finished but designed to
consist of six parts, The Great Instauration was Bacon's title for the most ambitious
project of his intellectuallife, his plan for the reconstructionand renewal of philosophy and
the study of nature.25As a preamble to the exposition of his new logic of discovery based
on a reformed induction, which occupies the second book of The New Organon, he
devoted the first book to a critique of preceding philosophical doctrines and systems and
to pointing out the defects of current methods of enquiry and their causes. The entire
discussion in the first book was thus intended to expose the various obstacles that had
hitherto blocked the progressof mankind's knowledge of nature. Bacon regardedthis prior
critique as a therapeutic necessity which would help to purge the understanding of his
readers so that it would be cleansed and receptivelypreparedfor the discussion to follow,
a discussion centring on induction as a discovery procedure.26In his survey of the obstacles
to the growth of knowledge, the most formidablewere those he called the idols of the mind
(idola intellectus). It is in his analysis of these idols, rather than in the importance he
assigned to the accurate compilation of facts, that we find the strongest evidence of his
understanding of objectivity and his most distinctive and significant contribution to its
realization in the practice of science. It is no doubt true that as encapsulated in the familiar
phrase 'the idols of the mind', Bacon's account of the idols is among the best-known parts
of his philosophy. As a concept profoundly relevant to his view of objectivity, however, it
has been almost entirely overlooked. For this reason we are obliged to re-examine what he
says on this subject in order to see what it conveys about the place of objectivity in his
natural philosophy.
In dealing with this matter, I think it may help us to perceive what Bacon was trying to
do if we pause for a moment to notice the profound differencebetween how the question
of objectivity presents itself today and the way it appeared in Bacon's time. Nowadays
objectivity is a highly contested concept in the philosophy and sociology of science and
other disciplines and is strongly attacked by critics who deny that it is either attainable or
23 Solomon, op. cit. (13), p. xii.
24 See also the critical reviews of Solomon's book by Brian Vickers, Isis (1999), 90, 594-5; and Robert K.
Faulkner, American Historical Review (1999), 104, 987-8. Among its faults, both authors note its failure to
analyse or clarify Bacon's theories and its questionable argumentslike its explanation of Baconian objectivity as
an ideology and the creed of the rising bourgeoisie.
25 On The Great Instauration and its plan and character, see Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 73-7.
26 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Works, op. cit. (11), viii, 99, 146-7, or Book I, aphorisms lxviii, cxv.
The Latin original is printed in ibid., p. i. In furtherreferencesI cite the English translation with occasional slight
changes.

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385

necessary as a norm or regulativeprinciple of enquiry. Most of these critics, whatever their

differences, tend to share a common relativism about knowledge and truth, which they
reduce to collective belief, disciplinary and community agreement and conventions of
language. Taking objectivity to postulate an impossible value-free, neutral or aperspectival
position in the process of knowing, they see it as a product of the illusion that scientific
knowledge is not a human and social construction but something simply discovered and
true.21 Opposed to this view are the numerous philosophers who reject epistemological
relativism and defend the principle of objectivity as a valid cognitive standard, guiding
ideal and essential requisite of scientific and other enquiry.28For them, objectivity entails
that truth is universal rather than relative to social position or cultural membership and,
moreover, that scientists and other investigators are sufficiently capable of transcending
their personal and cultural background, beliefs and prejudicesto arrive at valid knowledge
and objective truth.29
The problem confronting the idea of objectivity in contemporary thought may thus be
described as chiefly the consequence of some version of relativism which serves as the
common ground for objectivity's critics. In Bacon's time, however, relativism in the several
forms it has assumed today was not available as a real philosophical option. The sociology
of knowledge and theory of ideology did not exist, the status of truth as an ideal and as
the goal of knowledge remained largely unquestioned, and the possibility of impartiality
in moral deliberation, the administration of law and the writing of history was generally
not denied. Early modern philosophers knew of course about some of the relativistic
doctrines of the sophists which are reported in the dialogues of Plato, but these seem to
have exerted little influence. In his theory of science, Bacon himself disagreed with the
dictum of the celebrated sophist Protagoras, which Plato quoted in his Theaetetus, that
'man is the measure of all things', because he held that men need to accommodate their
thoughts to the measure of the universe rather than to their own predilections.30The
nearest resemblanceto modern relativism in Bacon's world was the philosophy of ancient
Academic and especially Pyrrhonian scepticism, revived in the sixteenth century, which
produced argumentsdoubting the possibility of certain knowledge and truth. Scepticism of
27 The essays contained in Rethinking Objectivity (Megill, op. cit. (2)) provide a good sample of contemporary
criticisms of objectivity in science and other disciplines; see among others Kenneth Gergen, 'The mechanical self
and the rhetoricof objectivity'; LorraineCode, 'Who cares? The poverty of objectivism for moral epistemology';
and Evelyn Fox Keller, 'The paradox of scientific subjectivity'.
28 Among the philosophic opponents of epistemological relativism and defenders of objectivity are Karl
Popper, 'The rationality of scientific revolutions' and 'The myth of the framework', in idem, The Myth of The
Framework, London, 1994; Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, 2nd edn., Indianapolis, 1982; Thomas
Nagel, The View from Nowhere, New York, 1986; idem, The Last Word, New York, 1997; Nicholas Rescher,
Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason, Notre Dame, IN, 1997; Larry Laudan, Science and
Relativism, Chicago, 1990; Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science, New York, 1993; Susan Haack,
Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, Chicago, 1998.
29 This last statement must be qualifiedin the case of Popper's anti-relativism,since he always maintained that
it is impossible to know if a theory is true and that the measure of a scientific theory is not its truth but its ability
to resist falsification.
30 Plato, Theaetetus, 160d; Although Bacon nowhere mentions Protagoras, one of the essential themes of his
natural philosophy, often stated in The New Organon, is that men must adjust their thoughts to the measure of
the universe.

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several types was an important trend in early modern philosophy and its representatives
included such noted thinkers as Montaigne, Charron, Gassendi, Pascal and Bayle, as well
as many lesser figures.31In Bacon's case, though, albeit he was a great doubter and
questioner of particularknowledge claims, he never attached much weight to the challenge
of the sceptical philosophy and always maintained that knowledge could be firmly
established and continually enlarged. If he had happened to be acquainted with
Montaigne's sceptical comment that what is true on one side of the mountain is false on
the other, he gave no indication that he took this view seriously.32When discussing
scepticism, he mentioned in particularthe doctrine of akatalepsz'a,the inability of the mind
to know anything, which he explained had been made into a dogma by the later disciples
of Plato in the New Academy.33He charged the sceptics with making 'a cult of the
incomprehensibility of nature' and promoting 'a deliberate and artificial despair'
concerning the acquisition of knowledge. What later came to be termed epistemology, the
branch of philosophy concerned with whether and how knowledge is possible, was not for
him a genuine problem, and he was not troubled by the deceptions of the senses and other
arguments sceptics advanced as reasons against the attainability of truth. He was
convinced that all the impediments to knowledge, including those due to the weakness of
the senses, could be overcome by the intellect when supplied with the proper helps and a
method for dealing with the subtleties of nature.34
What all of this means is that in his reflections on what we now call objectivity Bacon
did not need to worry about providing an answer to relativism. Instead he was entirely
preoccupied with the specific problems he perceived as hindrances to the advancement of
knowledge and the implementation of objectivity in the sciences. This is the principal
context in which his discussion of the idols of the mind should be read. He had previously
touched upon the idols in several of his earliest writings and also given them some attention
in The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, his most important philosophical
treatise prior to The New Organon. In a comment in the former work on the deficiency
of human judgement,he used a striking optical metaphor to observe that 'the mind of man
is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect
according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of

31 See the survey by Charles Larmore, 'Scepticism', and the literaturethere cited, in The Cambridge History
of Seventeenth-CenturyPhilosophy (ed. Daniel Garberand Michael Ayers), 2 vols., Cambridge, 1998, ii, Chapter
32, and Stephen Gaukroger'sdiscussion of ancient and sixteenth-centuryscepticism and relativism in Descartes:
An Inellectual Biography, Oxford, 1995, 311-16.
32 Bacon had read some of Montaigne's Essais. The observation mentioned in the text comes from his
Apologie de Raimond Sebond, Essais, Book II, 12, a classic argumentand collection of examples intended to prove
that the human mind can know nothing with certainty.
33 Bacon, op. cit. (26), viii, 98, or Book I, aphorism lxvii. See also the notes on akataleps:'ain Thomas Fowler's
edition of Novum Organum, 2nd edn., Oxford, 1889, 210-12, 254-5.
34 See Francis Bacon, The Refutation of Philosophies (Redargutio Philosophiarum), printed in Benjamin
Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, Liverpool, 1964, 127; Francis Bacon, Thoughts and Conclusions
(Cogitata et Visa), printed in ibid., 88-9; The Great Instauration,'Plan of the work', Works, viii, 43-4; the Latin
original is printed in ibid., i. The New Organon includes a critical referenceto the Greek sceptic Pyrrho and his
followers and a number of criticisms of scepticism; ibid., viii, 75-6, 98, 158, or Book I, aphorisms xxxvii, lxvii,
cxxvi.

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superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced'.3 In another equally

compelling image from the preface to The Great Instauration, he declared that 'the
universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed like a labyrinth, presenting as
it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, such deceitful resemblances of objects
and signs, natures so irregularin their lines, and so knotted and entangled.36 One of his
greatest hopes, accordingly, was to rescue the mind from its superstitions and impostures
so that it could explore and conquer nature's labyrinth. His introduction of the idols was
related to this purpose.
A word anglicized from the Greek ei'dolon and the Latin idolum, the idols Bacon
scrutinized did not refer to false gods that are worshipped, but to phantoms, false
appearances, fictions, delusive images, illusions, prejudices, fallacies and false notions. In
their impact on thought, some of the idols were the result of external influences, while
others sprang from certain innate propensities of the human mind. Their importance lay
in the fact that their effect extended far beyond particular mistakes to the entire warping
and misdirection of the intelligence. By identifying them and their operation, Bacon sought
to uncover the deep-seated and often unconscious sources of misconception, irrationality
and error that barred the way to a true understandingof nature. He found a comparison
to them in Aristotle's De Sophisticis Elenchis or Sophistical Refutations, noting that 'the
doctrine of the idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation
of sophisms is to common logic'.3 While Aristotle's treatise, however, was concerned with
the description of logical fallacies or sophisms, Bacon's examination of the idols ranged
more widely in order to identify the mental, psychological and socially engendered
dispositions and beliefs that were responsible for systematic distortion and error.
Bacon divided the idols of the mind into four categories. The first, the idols of the tribe
('idola tribus'), were rooted in human nature and hence common to mankind. These were
the errors to which human beings were innately prone, and caused men to look on the
universe as if it were formed according to their own measure and by analogy to themselves.
Among the consequences Bacon attributed to the idols of the tribe were the mind's
assumption of greater order and regularity in the world than is actually the case; its
perception of fictitious analogies and parallels for phenomena in nature; its tendency, after
adopting an opinion, to maintain it with the aid of continual rationalizations despite the
existence of countervailing evidence, a practice to which was due all the superstition in
astrology, dreams, omens and impressions of divine judgments; its attraction to positive
rather than negative instances, even though the latter are the stronger force in the
establishment of true axioms; and its disposition to fall back on final causes as
explanations, a practice that defiled philosophy and accorded more with human nature
35 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Works, vi, 276. The word 'reduced' in this context means
'corrected' and is related to the Latin term 'reductio' in Bacon's preface to Novum Organum, ibid., i, 234, on
which see also the editor's note, ibid.
36 FrancisBacon, The Great Instauration, Works, viii, 32. In the plan of The Great Instauration, after stressing
the necessity of 'keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature' so as to receive their images 'simply as
they are', he made the comment, 'For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for
a pattern of the world'; ibid., 'Plan of the work', 53.
37 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 76, or Book I, aphorism xl. Bacon also speaks of Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations in
connection with the idols of the mind in The Advancement of Learning, ibid., vi, 274-5.

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than with the nature of the universe. All these errors, Bacon believed, were traceable to the
inveterate anthropocentrism with which human beings projected onto nature and the
world the patterns of their own instinctual thinking. His analysis went further still,
however, in observing that the human understanding, far from being a 'dry light', was
strongly affected by the will and passions. Hence there come into being what he termed
'wishful sciences' ('ad quod vult scientias'), because 'what man wishes were true he more
readily believes' ('quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id potius credit').38 Yet another
effect of these same idols was the intellect's inclination to reify abstractions by attributing
substance and reality to things in flux. But of the many aberrations they produced, the
greatest of all, he considered, were the incompetence and deceptions of the senses, which
were weak and erring when left to themselves. Owing to their weakness, many things in
nature remained unobserved; in this connection Bacon maintained that a truer
interpretation of nature could be achieved by appropriate experiments, since in these the
senses judged only the experiment while it was the latter that decided the point of nature
in respect to things themselves.39
The second category of the idols, those of the cave ('idola specus'), were errors due to
the peculiarities and variety of impressions of each particular individual, every one of
whom dwelt in his own cave, which refractedand distorted the light of nature. Under their
influence, men became attached to particular sciences and speculations in obedience to
their fancies. Thus Aristotle enslaved the study of nature to the syllogism and the
alchemists based their philosophy on a few experiments. Some minds noticed differences,
others looked for analogies; some venerated antiquity, others loved novelty - attitudes
equally injurious to science. As an antidote to the idols of the cave, Bacon proposed that
students of nature follow the rule that whenever their minds seized upon something with
special satisfaction, they should consider it suspect and take special care to keep their
minds balanced and clear.40
The most troublesome of the idols, according to Bacon, were the ones in the third
category, the idols of the marketplace ('idola fori'), which stemmed from the deceits of
language. Although people supposed that reason governs words, the opposite was also
true, that words govern reason and give rise to innumerable empty controversies and
fictions. As a result learned men have disputed merely about words and names, an evil that
not even definitions could cure, since they themselves were words and begat more words.
These idols also misled the understanding in two ways: they gave confused, ill-defined
names to things that exist, and they gave names to unrealthings like Fortune, PrimeMover,
Orbits of the Planets ('PlanetarumOrbes'),41 Element of Fire and other fictions that owed
their origin to false and idle theories ('quae a vanis et falsis theoriis ortum habent'). In
38 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 82, or Book I, aphorism xlix.
39 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 79-83, or Book I, aphorisms xlv-li.
40 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 77, 84-6, or Book I, aphorisms xlii, liii-lviii.
41 I am not sure whether the referenceto 'Orbits' in the English translation of this phrase is correct, although
it also appears in the translation in Spedding'sedition, viii, 87, or Book I, aphorism lx. It has been suggested to
me that by Orbes Bacon may have meant the fictitious spheres on which the planets were thought to revolve; or
possibly the word signified 'circles', one of its possible meanings, since he regardedas false the belief that celestial
bodies move in perfect circles; ibid. 79, or Book I, aphorism xlv. When speaking of circles in Novum Organum,
however, he used the word circulus.

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Bacon's opinion it was much easier to expel the second of these errors by getting rid of bad
theories than to eliminate the first, which was deeply rooted, complicated and due to faulty,
incompetent abstraction.42
Finally, in the fourth category were the idols of the theatre ('idola theatri'), consisting
of the differentdogmas that migrated into human minds from false systems of philosophy,
false demonstrationsin logic and false principlesand axioms in the sciences and which gave
rise, like stage plays, to fictions and unreal worlds. Bacon devoted his lengthiest strictures
to this class of idols, criticizing various philosophies for their deficiencies and errors. The
Rationalist school, for example, applied meditation and ingenuity of wit to a small amount
of uncritically accepted experience. The Empirical school, to which the alchemists
belonged, constructed vain and incredible systems out of a few experiments, wresting facts
to make them conform with its conclusions. The Superstitious school, which included
Pythagorasand Plato, mixed theology with philosophy to the detriment of each. Aristotle,
whom Bacon placed with the Sophistical school, corrupted natural philosophy with his
logic, fashioning the world out of categories, and although he made some experiments,
actually reached his conclusions beforehand and failed to consult experience. Bacon
cautioned against the intemperance with which philosophical systems either give or
withhold their assent: those too ready in deciding caused the sciences to be dogmatic and
magisterial, while the others, who denied the possibility of knowledge, pursued enquiries
that led to nothing. He indicted 'vicious demonstrations' ('pravae demonstrationes') in
logic,43

whoseeffectwas to makethe worldthe slaveof thoughtand thoughtthe slaveof

words. He found fault with these demonstrations for various reasons: their use of faulty
sense impressions and of notions ill drawn from the senses; their reliance on a bad kind
of induction that infers the principles of the sciences by simple enumeration; and their
mode of discovery and proof by first establishing the most general principles and then
deriving intermediateaxioms, a procedurehe denounced as 'the parent of all error and the
curse of all science'."' In opposition to these practices, he maintained that the best
demonstration was experience provided it did not go beyond the experiment, because
unless a transfer to other cases deemed similar was done in a correct and orderly way, the
result would be fallacious. And he felt forced to state that the method currently used in
making experiments was blind and stupid.45
Bacon was convinced that the idols in all four categories had to be renounced and
eliminated as far as possible in order to free the human understanding.46To be sure, in
reviewing them, he based many of his criticisms on his own natural or experimental
philosophy with its belief in a reformed induction, which he took as a standard. Moreover,
his disparagingand destructivecomments on the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, and other
philosophers whose influence he wished to overthrow, were heavily biased by his own
42 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 78, 86-9, or Book I, aphorisms xlii, lix-lx.
43 Bacon, op. cit. (42), 99, or Book I, aphorism lxix.
44 Bacon, op. cit. (42), 100, or Book I, aphorism lxix.
45 Bacon, op. cit. (42), 78, 90-100, or Book I, aphorisms xliv, lxii-lxx.
46 Bacon, op. cit. (42), 99, or Book I, aphorism lxviii. In the plan of The Great Instauration he expressed the
view that the first two classes of idols were hard to eradicate and the other two classes could not be eradicated
at all. The most that could be done with the latter, he said, was to point them out so that their insidious effect
on the mind could be identified and overcome; ibid., 45.

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polemical purpose and failed to do them justice. In the main, nevertheless, his overriding
aim was to reveal the aberrationsand failures of intelligence wrought by the idols' sway.
What he attacked in the idols' effect upon the mind were animism, anthropocentrismand
anthropomorphism, unreal abstract entities and human wish projections and delusions
that saw in the universe the reflection of their own image and desires. He endeavoured to
teach the mind to be aware of its own naive and spontaneous operations, to help it to
overcome its prejudiced, self-centred assumptions and beliefs, and to enable it to gain an
objective rationality and standpoint as an essential prerequisite for the advancement of
knowledge of nature.
If we attempt to define the conception of objectivity underlyingand implicit in Bacon's
analysis of the idols, we should have to say that it means a mental attitude and type of
enquiry that leads to true knowledge and understandingof the world and the phenomena
of nature and their causes. It does not seem to carry with it any implication of
disinterestedness,cognitive self-distancing or the suppression of subjectivity or the self.47
As he conceived of it, the consciousness and identification of the idols, along with the
attempt to banish their influence, was equivalent to a reorientation, redirection and
widening of the mind, the achievement of a new clarity and a rectified perspective in the
interests of scientific understandingand its productive results. For Bacon this reorientation
was not incompatible with such strong cognitive emotions as passion and ambition in
enquiry, pleasure and gratification in contributing to the increase of knowledge, and
happiness in scientificdiscovery.48Bacon is famed for his conviction that knowledge brings
power and his insistence that the production of works of all kinds for the relief of the
human condition is the proper end of knowledge. Nevertheless, he was always consistent
in regardingtruth as the highest goal of scientificenquiry from which works would be sure
to follow. In his natural philosophy he often compared truth to light and placed it above
any other earthly good.49The thoughts and feelings which he associated with the quest for
truth as a supreme human value are eloquently stated in his essay on truth: 'the inquiry
of truth, which is the love-making and wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the
presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of
human nature'.50
47 One recent scholar's readingof Bacon's philosophy is that 'the inductive method is a machine that displaces
the faculty of choice' and, in referenceto the idols, that 'to advance in learningis to mortify the minds of inquirers
so that they see and perform the works of truth'; see John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature,
Cambridge, MA., 1989, 9, 15. I have not succeeded in finding any warrant for these characterizations in what
Bacon wrote. Nowhere in his discussion of the idols does he suggest that the mortificationof the mind is necessary
to eliminate or reduce their influence. In the preface to The New Organon he refers to machinery when, after
insisting on the need for a fresh start in the work of understanding,he comments that the mind must be guided
at every step and 'the business done as if by machinery' ('ac res veluti per machinas conficiatur'). As its context
immediately makes clear, however, this statement does not imply a mechanical or machine-likeconception of the
mind or the denial of its faculty of choice. Thus he goes on to say that just as the mechanical arts have not relied
for their achievementsonly on the naked hands but sought the help of instruments, so in intellectual matters the
mind cannot rely solely on the naked forces of the understanding but needs instruments and machinery to
accomplish great works. His essential point is that induction is such an instrument; Bacon, op. cit. (26), 61-2,
preface.
48 See Scheffler,op. cit. (28), Appendix B, 'In praise of the cognitive emotions'.
49 See Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 88-9.
50 Bacon, 'Of truth', Essays, Works, xii, 82.

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The misapprehension that objectivity for Bacon centred on the supremacy he assigned
to facts is closely connected with the mistaken image we continue to have of him as a pure
empiricist who wished to divorce science from theories, hypotheses and interpretations.
Natural history, which he designated as part three of The Great Instauration, occupied a
vital place in his philosophy of science because the facts it supplied on various topics were
to provide the data upon which induction would operate. In the instructions, however, that
he drew up for the writing of natural histories, he did not envisage them as indiscriminate
accumulations of facts. They were intended in principle to consist of critically sifted
information on particular subjects whose collection would be steadily directed by the
investigator's questions, enriched by experiments and controlled by the aim of facilitating
induction. Their chief purpose, moreover, was to aid in the formation of axioms.51Bacon
condemned the syllogistic demonstration of Aristotelian natural philosophy for leaping at
once 'from particulars to remote axioms' of the highest generality, including first
principles, and then erroneously treating these principles as unshakeable truths which it
used to prove middle-range axioms; whereas the correct procedure, he argued, would be
to ascend successively from particularsto lesser axioms to intermediateaxioms and finally
to the most general.52He also decried 'anticipations of nature' ('anticipationes naturae'),
by which phrase he did not mean hypotheses, as has been supposed, but the practice of rash
and premature generalizations based on a few familiar instances.53In Bacon's scheme,
axioms as a higher and more generalized level of knowledge that leads to an operative
science, not facts, are the principal fruit and main achievement he expected from his
method.54He was also quite explicit that the axioms established by induction must cover
more than the particularsfrom which they were derived; they should be 'wider and larger'
and capable of indicating 'new particulars' that would serve to confirm them.55Axioms
thus functioned in Bacon's philosophy as theories and hypotheses to lead to the discovery
of new facts, suggest further experiments and generate new axioms. His recognition of the
continual interaction between experiment and theory is well conveyed in the following
declaration in The New Organon: 'my method ['via et ratio'], as I have often clearly
stated ... is this, not to extract works from works or experiments from experiments (like
the empirics), but from works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and again

51 Francis Bacon, A Preparative toward a Natural and Experimental History (Parasceve ad Historiam
Naturalem et Experimentalem), Works, viii; the Latin original is in ibid., ii. Bacon included this treatise in the
same volume as The New Organon; see also the discussion of Baconian natural history in Zagorin, op. cit. (8),
103-6.
52 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 137-8, or Book I, aphorism civ.
53 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 73-4, or Book I, aphorisms xxvi-xxx. Karl Popper erroneously supposed that the
anticipations of nature' Bacon criticized were the same as hypotheses; see his The Logic of Discovery, London,
1975, 279 n., and Conjectures and Refutations, New York, 1962, 255.
54 I have shown elsewhere that Bacon refrainedfrom using the word 'methodus' or 'method' to describe his
logic of discovery based upon induction and the reasons why he did so; see Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 51-7. As pointed
out in ibid. and likewise noted below, instead of methodus, he preferred such phrases as via et ratio for his
discovery procedure. It is convenient, however, and need not lead to misunderstanding,to follow the terminology
of the English translation in Spedding's edition of Bacon's Works, and refer to Baconian induction as his method;
see, e.g., Bacon, op. cit. (26), 61, 63 (preface), 74, 159, or Book I, aphorisms xxxiii, cxxvii.
55 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 139, or Book I, aphorism cvi.

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from those causes and axioms new works and experiments, as a legitimate interpreterof

nature'.56
Finally, in this connection, it is worth noticing the presence of the word 'interpreter'
('interpretes') in the above passage and the prominence in Bacon's philosophy of what he
called 'interpretation' ('interpretatio'). Interpresin classical Latin signified an explainer,
a translator, an interpreter,and interpretatioreferredto an explanation or interpretation.
The derivations of both words were also part of the English language in Bacon's time.
Deeply conscious of nature's subtlety and its many unobserved and unobservable
operations, Bacon did not think the understanding of nature, or what we would call
scientific explanation and the discovery of laws of nature, consisted in the establishment
and registration of particularfacts. He always conceived of such explanation as a work of
interpretationin which the facts contributedby natural history were certainlyessential but
also ancillary. The New Organon is subtitled Aphorisms Concerningthe Interpretationof
Nature and the Kingdom of Man, ('Aphorismi de Interpretatione Naturae et Regno
Hominis'),57 and its very first sentence depicts 'man' as 'the servant and interpreter of
nature' ('Homo, naturae minister et interpres'). Other writings contain the phrase 'the
interpretation of nature' in their titles,58 and the word 'interpretatio' occurs quite
frequentlyin his reflectionson science. By 'interpretation' he usually referredto his method
of induction as the basis for explaining the workings of nature. 'That reason which is
elicited from things by a just and methodical process', he said, 'I am accustomed to call
the Interpretation of Nature', ('illam rationem quae debitis modis elicitur a rebus
InterpretationemNaturae ... vocare consuevimus'), and he described 'true and legitimate
induction as the very key of interpretation' ('Inductio legitima et vera, quae ipsa clavis est
interpretationis').59 Hence in Book II of The New Organon, when he comes to expound
his 'directions for the interpretation of nature', he says they embrace 'two generic
divisions; the one how to educe and form axioms from experience; the other how to
deduce and derive new experiments from axioms'.60 Statements like these appear to leave
no doubt that in Bacon's natural philosophy, interpretation as a reliance on a properly
designed induction for the attainment of axioms necessarily included theories and was
conceived of as a theoretical enterprise.
Bacon's analysis of the idols of the mind seems to have little if any precedentin the work
of previous thinkers and is one of his most significant contributions to the philosophy of
science, although its originality has not always been recognized or understood.61Michael
56 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 148, or Book I, aphorism cxvii.
57 For the significance of Bacon's idea of the kingdom of man, see Zagorin, op. cit. (8), 77-9.
58 See, for example, Bacon, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretationof Nature, Works, vi, a work written in
English; De InterpretationeNaturae Proemium (Proemiumon the Interpretationof Nature), ibid., vii; Cogitata
et Visa; de InterpretationeNaturae, sive de Scientia Operativa (Thoughts and Conclusions on The Interpretation
of Nature or An Operative Science), in ibid.
59 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 73, 179, or Book I, aphorism xxvi; Book. II, aphorism x; see also the preface to this
work, ibid., 64, in which Bacon stated that he has chosen to call his method or way the 'Interpretationof nature'.
60 Bacon, op. cit. (26), 178, or Book II, aphorism x.
61 In his preface to Novum Organum, Bacon's learned editor, Robert L. Ellis, examined the possibility that
Bacon had borrowed his classification of the idols from his thirteenth-centurynamesake Roger Bacon, whose
Opus Maius included an account of four offendiculaor causes of errorimpeding the road to knowledge. Ellis saw
little similarity between FrancisBacon's discussion of the idols and the work by Roger Bacon, and also noted that

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Ayers, writing on the theory of knowledge in the recent CambridgeHistory of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, goes far astray in commenting on the idols that 'Bacon's list of
intellectual vices appears as a polemic aimed at philosophical and religious enemies rather
than as a general natural history of human unreasonablenessand cognitive failure'.62 The
identification and explanation of some of the main causes of human unreasonablenessand
cognitive failure is exactly what Bacon's discussion of the idols is all about. No other
philosopher of the seventeenth century tried to explore the sources of error in science with
more care, or showed greater awareness and understandingof what we can retrospectively
recognize as the problem of objectivity, or tried harder to devise constructive suggestions
for the achievement of objectivity in the conduct of enquiry.

the former could not have known Opus Maius, which was not printed until the nineteenth century. His conclusion
was that Bacon's conception of the idols was 'altogether his own'; Bacon, op. cit. (11), i, 158-9. Fowler, who
also considers this subject in his edition of Novum Organum, 212-13, is in accord with Ellis and observes that
the resemblance between the offendicula and the idols is very slight.
62 Michael Ayers, 'Theories of knowledge and belief', The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy (ed. Daniel Garberand Michael Ayers), 2 vols., Cambridge, 1998, ii, 1044. Another misunderstanding
is John C. Briggs's confusion of the idols with idolatry and his claim that Bacon's discussion of the idols regarded
opposition to the new sciences as 'idolatrous heresies' which must be 'smashed'. 'Bacon's science and religion',
The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (ed. Markku Peltonen), Cambridge, 1996, 177-8.

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