Bacon's Theory of Imagination Reconsidered

Author(s): Eugene P. McCreary

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly , Aug., 1973, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Aug., 1973), pp. 317-
326
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

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 Bacon's Theory of Imagination Reconsidered
By EUGENE P. MCCREARY

BACON'S PRECISE attitude toward the human imagination has long been a
bone of contention among his commentators; for while few would deny
the essentially traditional basis of his faculty psychology, agreement on
imagination breaks down into two camps, one claiming that Bacon re-
spected the activities of imagination, the other maintaining that he
damned them with faint praise because his whole system was biased
against imagination.' Actually there is truth on both sides; for Bacon had
a dual view of the imagination based on his division of human knowledge
into branches according to the different faculties of knowing, so that
imagination could have legitimate and appropriate work in one branch
but not in another. The key to this double view of imagination, as well as
to many other major distinctions in Bacon, is the thorough dualism of his
philosophy and its close affinity with his religious beliefs. This dualist
approach lies behind Bacon's distinction first between science or natural
philosophy and poetry, and second between human knowledge and di-
vinely revealed knowledge. In this study I would like to look at how imag-
ination operates, especially in science and religion, and to explain why
Bacon felt as he did about that faculty.
Karl Wallace, in his study Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man, use-
fully distinguishes the two roles imagination plays in Bacon's theory, the
reproductive and the creative; and certainly this distinction helps to ex-
plain many of Bacon's statements on imagination.2 Yet it is hardly the
full story; for while in theory Bacon acknowledges the place of imagina-
tion's reproducing capacity, in practice he almost always deals with its
creative impulses, because these present the most serious problems. In
general he finds that although its creative powers may work well enough

'Most adverse criticism comes from those who adhere partly or entirely to Basil Willey's
influential The Seventeenth Century Background (New York, 1934). See, for example, Sidney
Warhaft, "Science against Man in Bacon," Bucknell Review, VII (1958), 158-173. Other at-
tacks come from literary critics, like L. C. Knights, who notes in "Bacon and the Seventeenth-
Century Dissociation of Sensibility," Explorations (New York, 1964), p. 122: "Bacon in fact
sanctions that divorce between imagination and reason, emotion and intelligence, that-long
after the Romantic Revival-was to have a bad effect on English poetry." An extreme defense
of Bacon's view of imagination is found in Thomas Jameson, Francis Bacon: Criticism and
the Modern World (New York, 1954); John L. Harrison, "Bacon's Views of Rhetoric, Poetry
and Imagination," HLQ, XX (1957), 107-125, presents a more balanced handling of the
subject. See also Murray W. Bundy, "Bacon's True Opinion of Poetry," SP, XXVII (1930),
244-264; Paul Kocher, "Francis Bacon on the Drama,"Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan
Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (London, 1963), pp. 302, 306.
2Urbana, Ill., 1967, pp. 71-72, 75, 79.

317
? 1973 by The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

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 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

in poetry and religion, "imagination hardly produces sciences."3 Thus

Bacon's primary analysis of imagination arises from his understanding of
how it works in science, that is, as he defined science. That definition is
structured according to legal and monarchical analogies in which Bacon
wishes to frame all of human experience. His deep desire to control and
exert power over human experience expresses itself in the grand new
method, the Novum Organum, that seeks to impose rule over human re
flective activities, particularly those of natural philosophy, irn the hope of
reducing them to laws and axioms. The restraints and bonds Bacon wants
to impose on imagination do not arise merely from contemporary theo-
ries of hierarchical faculty psychology that he undoubtedly shared, but
from his full realization that imagination as the source of human free-
dom, spontaneity, and unpredictability would be a prime suspect in such
a system of law and order.
First of all, imagination by its very nature tends to be arbitrary and
unfettered-as no sensible faculty ought to be. Bacon clearly implies this
when he describes how the mind works with intellectual impressions:

Now this composition and division is either according to the pleasure of t

mind, or according to the nature of things as it exists in fact. If it be accordi
to the pleasure of the mind, and these parts be arbitrarily transposed into the
likeness of some individual, it is the work of imagination; which, not bein
bound by any law and necessity of nature or matter, may join things which
are never found together in nature and separate things which in nature are
never found apart; being nevertheless confined therein to these primary parts
of individuals.... If on the other hand these same parts of individuals are com-
pounded and divided according to the evidence of things, and as they really
show themselves in nature, or at least appear to each man's comprehension to
show themselves, this is the office of reason; and all business of this kind is
assigned to reason. (Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, Ch. i; X, 404)

Few passages reveal so well how precisely and carefully Bacon severs the
traditional alliance of imagination and reason by showing how funda-
mentally different each works with Nature. The language here is totally
weighted against the imagination; it could hardly produce science in the
Baconian sense because it is never satisfied with things as they are. First,
not being tied to any laws of the mind, it is a very unbusinesslike faculty
and conducts itself according to its own pleasures, i.e., according to the
feelings, emotions, and desires of men; and so like Proteus it changes
3Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Baconi,
ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (Boston, 1900), IX, 62;
Book V, Ch. i. Subsequent references will be given within parentheses in the text. For the
reader's convenience I have given, whenever possible, reference to the original internal
divisions in Bacon's works, followed by reference to the edition I use.

318

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 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

form and continually resists any such constraints as Bacon's proposed

methodological rule over the mind. Second, imagination is not bound
externally to Nature or matter as they exist but may unite or combine
things at will, whereas for Bacon Nature is a system of fixed forms and
laws. Moreover, the essential first step of induction is to buckle the mind
down to things as they are. From imagination's first mode of operation
spring many manifestations of the Idols as described in the Novunm
Organum and the defects of knowledge mentioned in the Advancement
of Learning.4 Imagination, indeed, is that tempter which seduces men to
think that things are as they want them to be instead of as God lhas made
them and as they are in fact, or, as Bacon puts it, to impress their own
stamp on creation instead of reading God's stamp on Nature (Historia
Naturalis, IX, 370-37 i). From its second characteristic, its freedom from
the bonds of Nature, comes imagination's usefulness in poetry and reli-
gion: "I come now to Poesy which is a part of learning in measure of
words for the most part restrained, but in all other parts extremely free
and licensed; and therefore (as I said at first) it is referred to the Imagina-
tion, which may at pleasure make unlawvful matches and divorces of
things" (De Augmentis, Book II, Ch. xiii; VIII, 439). I shall deal with
imagination's role in religion and poetry shortly. The point is clear, how-
ever, that Bacon considers imagination as a rebel and lawbreaker; in his
eyes it promises to be a Lord of Misrule. If it is appropriate to poetry,
nevertheless from the viewpoint of science it is like a radical and hereti-
cal priest who threatens to undo all the good work that Bacon as a true
priest of the senses hopes to accomplish by his lawful and ratified mar-
riage between Nature and the senses.
Imagination is the chief agitator and troublemaker in the kingdom of
philosophic knowledge, as Bacon explains in speaking of certain danger-
ous philosophies that arise from its influence: "For the human under-
standing is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination no less than to
the influence of common notions. For the contentious and sophistical
kind of philosophy ensnares the understanding; but this kind, being
fanciful and tumid and half political, misleads it more by flattery. For
there is in man an ambition of the understanding, no less than of the
will, especially in high and lofty spirits" (Novum Organum, Book I, aph.
lxv; VIII, q3). Because it is rooted in unredeemed and intractable human
4"Vain imaginations" are one of the three diseases of learning treated by Bacon in Book I
of the Advancement of Learning (VI, 127), when he refers to the aberrations of astrology,
natural magic, and alchemy. He also mentions them in his essay "Of Truth": "Doth an}
man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false
valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a nuim-
her of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indispositions, and unpleasing to
themselves. One of the Fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it
filleth the imagination; and yet it is but a shadow of a lie" (XII, 82). This passage aptly de-
scribes a mind receptive to Idols.

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 BACON'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION

desires, imagination hatches all sorts of fantastic schemes in t

knowledge. Then it interferes with Bacon's intention to level men's
minds and to humiliate properly the human spirit, and instead puffs men
up with false pride in philosophical systems that lead them astray.
Throughout his comments on imagination Bacon weaves a continuous
pattern of imagery, combining political images that describe imagination
as a rebel and lawbreaker, civil images that term it a servant yet a free
citizen, and court images that characterize it as a flattering and ambitious
courtier (a courtier who does not scruple to put his own stamp on God's
royal decrees on Nature)-all of which adds up to a major controlling
image for all of Bacon's works: that of a kingdom ruled by laws generated
by royal power. The political monarchy ruled by the king mirrors the
kingdom of Nature sustained by God's decrees on matter-which in turn
the kingdom of man's mind, supported by the laws of induction, should
reflect.5 If any progress is to be made in natural philosophy, if man is to
regain his rightful sovereignty over creation, that he lost after the Fall,
then he must bow his mind to the laws of Nature as they truly exist in
matter and forsake the influence of imagination. Yet such is human na-
ture that it needs compulsion to do its proper work: "The human under-
standing is moved by those things most which enter the mind spontane-
ously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and
supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, simi-
lar to those few things by which it is surrounded. But for that going to
and fro to remote and heterogeneous instances, by which axioms are tried
as in the fire, the intellect is altogether slow and unfit, unless it be forced
thereto by severe laws and overruling authority" (Novum Organum,
Book I, aph. xlvii; VIII, 8o). It is presumably because of imagination's
freedom and undue influence that men are unfit to govern themselves
(at least intellectually), are unable to perceive true relations within their
environment, and therefore need "severe laws and overruling authority."
Bacon frowns particularly at imagination's tendency to find more order
in Nature than there is (Novum Organum, Book I, aph. xlv; VIII, 79),
a major obstacle to science. Only a rigorous system of induction, whose
hierarchy of axioms are both the objects of discovery and the rules of
future research, can counteract this dangerous propensity. As far as sci-
ence is concerned, then, imagination is the subversive and anarchic ele-
ment in the empire of knowledge.
Nevertheless, the history of science has shown just how wrong Bacon
was about imagination's role; for most great discoveries and break-

5For more of Bacon's comments on imagination see De Auginentis, Book V, Ch. i; for one
of the central passages that explains his notion of Nature as the laws over matter and puts
it clearly into the religious context of God's work of Creation and man's Fall, see Bacon's
Confession of Faith, XIV, 49-50.

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 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

throughs, including many made in Bacon's own time, have depended on

an imaginative ability, indeed often on a kind of intuition, to frame hy-
potheses that departed far from contemporary knowledge and arose in
ways very different from Bacon's inductive hierarchy. Bacon, of course,
knew about hypotheses and tested some himself, although he made no
important scientific discoveries; but he did not understand fully the
significant function hypothesis plays in scientific method. Nor did he
realize that freedom of imaginative thinking enables scientists to frame
hypotheses that lead to progress in knowledge. These two oversights
about hypothesis and imagination, interacting with one another, form
a major weakness in Bacon's science.
Since imagination does not submit to things as they are and thus fails
to produce sciences, it must be assigned to things as they should be; and
therefore it thrives most fruitfully in poetry's domain, where it can also
intertwine itself with religion. For poetry clearly pertains to the ideal
world:

As for Narrative Poesy,-or Heroical, if you like so to call it (understanding it

of the matter, not the verse)-the foundation of it is truly noble and has a spe-
cial relation to the dignity of human nature. For as the sensible world is in-
ferior in dignity to the rational soul, Poesy seems to bestow upon human na-
ture those things which history denies to it; and to satisfy the mind with the
shadows of things when the substance cannot be obtained. For if the matter be
attentively considered, a second argument may be drawn from Poesy, to show
that there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more
perfect order, and a more beautiful variety than it can anywhere (since the
Fall) find in nature. And therefore, since the acts and events which are the
subjects of real history are not of sufficient grandeur to satisfy the human
mind, Poesy is at hand to feign acts more heroical; since the successes and
issues of actions as related in true history are far from being agreeable to the
merits of virtue and vice, Poesy corrects it, exhibiting events and fortunes as
according to merit and the law of providence; since true history wearies the
mind with satiety or ordinary events, one like another, Poesy refreshes it, by
reciting things unexpected and various and full of vicissitudes. (De A ugmen tis,
Book I, Ch. xiii; VIII, 440-441)

Bacon's account of poetry here contrasts sharply with that of an earlier

humanist, Sir Philip Sidney, whose words he echoes. The differences are
instructive. While both men would agree that natural philosophy is cir-
cumscribed by Nature and that poetry is not, for Sidney this is poetry's
peculiar glory, its secret of success in transforming Nature. For, as he
says, natural philosophy, like other similar arts, has "the works of nature
for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on
which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of

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 BACON'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION

what nature will have set forth"; whereas only "the poet, disdaining to be
tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention,
doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than
nature brought forth, or quite anew."6 Bacon would assent to all of this
but the implication that poetry's freedom from Nature's limits gives it
the power to re-create Nature. In delivering his golden world, says Sid-
ney, the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature" and apparently leads her
along with him. Bacon maintains, however, that poetry has little or no
connection with the real world, but instead presents a feigned history
that approximates God's transcendent Providence. For Bacon science
provides the energy to reach his goal of relief of man's estate, while poetry
furnishes a kind of pleasant refreshment in that weary toil. For Sidney, on
the other hand, only poetry's energy "may make the too much loved earth
more lovely" (Apology, p. 15)-and more worthy to be loved.
Bacon's argument-that science claims real history, wvhether natural or
human, for its field and works its wonders there to satisfy human needs,
whereas poetry erects an ideal world to satisfy human desires-depends on
a fundamental separation of matter and spirit. Poetry's power of tran-
scending the material world makes it a natural ally to morality and reli-
gion precisely because these latter have their origins in an immaterial
and transcendent God and yet must affect a human soul, caught in a
body, mired in history and in the sensible world that lies since the Fall
under God's curse of corruption and his wrath. This world indeed shows
little of the greatness, order, and beauty it once showed to Adam before
his sin; yet the Fall has not changed human nature so much that it no
longer desires its pristine state in some dim fashion, and it remains capa-
ble of some efficacy in the world in the form of arts and sciences.7 Bacon
contends, then, that the poetic imagination can temporarily satisfy the
soul's longings by lifting it into the ideal world of poetic justice and di-

6An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (New York, 1970), pp. 13, 14. Subsequent
citations from the Apology will be given within parentheses in the text.

7Bacon's full interpretation of the Fall is too complex to be treated here, but his belief
that man could progress in the material world allies him with the Calvinist interpretation,
that stretching back at least to Augustine sharply distinguished between the Fall's effects on
man's spiritual nature and on his material nature. For a full account see Arnold Williams,
The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, 1948), p. 250. Bacon's most concise description of t
Fall reveals many of the same elements and attitudes that apply to his theory of imagination:
"God created Man in his own image, in a reasonable soul, in innocency, in free-will, and in
sovereignty: That he gave him a law and commandment, which was in his power to keep,
but he kept it not: That man made a total defection from God, presuming to imagine that
the commandments and prohibitions of God were not the rules of Good and Evil, but that
Good and Evil had their own principles and beginnings; and lusted after knowledge of those
imagined beginnings, to the end to depend no more upon God's will revealed, but upon
himself and his own light, as a God; than the which there could not be a sin more opposite
to the whole law of God" (Confession of Faith, XIV, 51). One notes that imagination also
plays a role in the Fall.

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 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

vine Providence. By thus affecting human desire, poetry can help move
men to moral action in this world, particularly to acts of charity that he
so often calls for. These acts are, of course, applications of natural philos-
ophy to the relief of man's estate. Thus poetry can give a picture of
Bensalem, but only science can seek to build it.
Once again one may profitably compare Bacon and Sidney. For each
writer poetry furnishes a different proof that men are fallen, and yet re-
tain some power. Bacon's poetics is idealist: poetry's imaginative power
suggests something of Adam's original condition, which through the help
of science men might to a degree regain; its moral effect, working through
a therapeutic escape from reality, depends on a simplified, ideal version
of history as poetic justice-virtue rewarded, vice punished. Sidney's
poetics is realist. The dimension of fallen men and Nature that poetry
indicates is not a nostalgic vision of prelapsarian Eden, but the disparity
between human desire and intention and human action. The imagina-
tive power of poetry is "no small argument to the incredulous of that first
accursed fall of Adam, sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfec-
tion is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (A pol-
ogy, p. 17). By convincing men of the distortions in their emotions, in
their ways of acting and living together, poetry teaches and gently pushes
men to correct these failures. Poetry's moral impulse does not rely on a
simplistic poetic justice, but on "feigning notable images of virtues,
vices, or what else" (Apology, p. 2 i)-the "what else" presumably being
the whole range of human experience in between. Sidney's points are
two: first, the Fall makes it impossible for men to be perfect people, and
poetry is a good sober reminder of that; second, the real problem of mak
ing the world a better place to live in is a psychological one of right ac-
tion that in turn depends on human desires and feelings. Bacon, of
course, knows much about the psychological obstacles in human nature,
although for him men's failures in natural philosophy are the best evi-
dence of the Fall's effects; but since his real interests lie with the problem
of knowledge, his analysis of the psychology of action seems rather
sketchy, even simplistic when applied to poetry. Even though he realizes
generally the importance of imagination in human action, Bacon does
not bother to explain specifics that cry out for elaboration: how, for ex-
ample, poetry's transcendent thrust becomes redirected into moral acts
of charity. Perhaps his strong Calvinist background prevented him from
fully accepting and accounting for imagination's creative powrer and free-
dom, not only here in poetry but in science as well.8
8The Calvinist affinities of Bacon's thought and background have been attested to by many
commentators, though no separate study of his religious beliefs and their effect on his philoso-
phy exists. Among the sporadic references the reader might consult Fulton Anderson, Francis
Bacon: His Career and Thought (Los Angeles, 1962), p. 83; Douglas Bush, English Literature
in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. rev. (Oxford, 1962), p. 284; Paolo Rossi, Francis

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 BACON'S THEORY OF IMAGINATION

Nevertheless, Bacon holds that imagination can play a significant role

in religion for many of the same reasons it produces poetry: "For we see
that in matters of faith and religion our imagination raises itself above
our reason; not that divine illumination resides in the imagination; its
seat being rather in the very citadel of the mind and understanding; but
that the divine grace uses the motions of the imagination, just as it uses
the motions of the will as an instrument of virtue; which is the reason
why religion ever sought access to the mind by similitudes, types, para-
bles, visions, dreams" (De Augmentis, Book V, Ch. i; IX, 61-62). Though
fully spiritual and above reason, which is tied to sense and matter, faith
and divine revelation must use some human faculty to be applicable to
men. What better vehicle than imagination, that unlike reason is free
from the limitations of Nature and the material world? Theoretically
God directly infuses faith into the human soul; but divine grace normally
uses imagination to enable men to comprehend the mysteries of revela-
tion, as far as spiritual things may be reduced to sensible ones.
Poetry, then, can be religion's instrument; but it can also be the agent
for natural philosophy, which after all is a kind of second religion to
Bacon. Poetry can work allegorically to express religious mysteries or
philosophical truths; and it can work rhetorically to show, for example,
how human life might have been before the Fall or how it might be in the
final kingdom of God's glory, or to show what wonders science might
produce. Bacon looks very favorably indeed on poetry that works in
these ways: "But Parabolical Poesy is of a higher character than the oth-
ers, and appears to be something sacred and venerable; especially as reli-
gion itself commonly uses its aid as a means of communication between
divinity and humanity . . . , wherein it serves (as I have said) for an in-
foldment; for such things, I mean, the dignity wvhereof requires that they
should be seen as it were through a veil; that is when the secrets and mys-
teries of religion, politics, and philosophy are involved in fables or para-
bles" (De Augmentis, Book II, Ch. xiii; VIII, 442-443). This allegorical
theory of poetry lies behind Bacon's own interpretation of classical myths
in De Sapientia Veterum, which deals precisely with the ancient and hid-
den mysteries of religion, philosophy, and politics. It also structures his
own mythic parable, New Atlantis, which Howard WVhite has argued is
Bacon's apocalyptic and secret revelation to his disciples.9 Indeed, the

Bacon: Fronm Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago, 1968), p. 164; Virgil K.
Whitaker, Francis Bacon's Intellectual Milietu (Los Angeles, 1962), p. 22. However, not all
Calvinists shared the same opinion about imagination, Sidney himself being an example to
the contrary.
9Peace amotng the Willows (The Hague, 1968), pp. io8ff. Sidney would place such Parabo
cal Poesy on the fringes of poetry because it does not conform strictly to the true office of a
poet; of such allegorical poets he wryly commenlts, "whether they properly be poets or no
let grammarians dispute" (Apology, pp. 19-20).

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 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY

theory of criticism propounded here basically restates the traditional

humanist idea of poetry as allegorized moral philosophy, a rhetorical in-
strument in the service of virtue and religion, with the difference that for
Bacon poetry is also in the service of science.
Bacon, therefore, has a double view of the imagination based not sim-
ply on its various relations to other faculties but more on its use in differ-
ent branches of knowledge, particularly natural philosophy and poetry.
This distinction accounts for some apparently contradictory comments
about the imagination and rests on a deeper separation of spirit and mat-
ter that permeates all dimensions of human experience. For many rea-
sons, some of them religious, others rooted deeply in his own personality,
Bacon thinks men's earthly existence is and ought to be governed by laws
of various sorts, of which the prototype are the physical laws over matter;
and if the job of natural philosophy is to determine those laws, the free
spontaneity of imagination could have little to offer. Yet he allows it
license in the ideal world of poetry and the sphere of religion, and even
at times lets it serve as minister of propaganda for science.

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