The Advancement of Learning

Summary

The Advancement of Learning, published in London in 1605 as The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane, is addressed to James I, a king Bacon praises as uniting the power of a ruler with the learning of a scholar. It was Bacon's first large statement, in English rather than Latin, of the reform of knowledge he would pursue for the rest of his life. Its plan is simple: the first book defends the dignity of learning against its detractors; the second surveys the whole territory of human knowledge, notes what has been well cultivated, and marks the regions that lie 'deficient'. Book I answers three kinds of objection. To divines who fear that knowledge puffs up, Bacon replies that the fault lies in the quality, not the quantity, of knowledge, and that a little philosophy may incline the mind to atheism while a further proceeding brings it back to religion, since God works through second causes; men should study both the book of God's word and the book of God's works, and apply both to charity. To politicians who think learning softens soldiers and unsettles subjects, he offers rulers and generals who were also learned. He then concedes the real faults of scholars: three 'distempers' of learning, the delicate (studying words rather than matter, as in the Ciceronian fashion), the contentious (the schoolmen spinning cobwebs from a few authors), and the fantastical (credulity in history, astrology and alchemy), followed by a list of lesser 'peccant humours' such as worship of antiquity, haste to systematize and, worst, mistaking the end of knowledge, which should be 'the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate'. The book closes with proofs of learning's dignity drawn from Scripture and from human history. Book II begins with defects in the institutions of learning: colleges devoted only to professions, poorly paid lecturers, no funds for experiments, no correspondence among European universities. It then divides learning by three faculties of the mind, history to memory, poesy to imagination, philosophy to reason, with divinity treated last. Philosophy runs from natural theology through physics and metaphysics (where Bacon relocates final causes, which he thinks have hindered physical inquiry) to the knowledge of man: medicine, the faculties of the soul, logic and rhetoric, the 'Georgics of the mind' that cultivate moral character, and civil prudence. Throughout, Bacon names missing sciences, among them a history of the arts and inventions, case histories in medicine, and a new method of induction. He ends by calling his survey the sound of musicians tuning their instruments, a prelude to the larger Instauratio Magna.

Plot or Argument

• Dedication to King James

  Bacon praises James as possessing the triple gift ascribed to Hermes, the power of a king, the illumination of a priest and the learning of a philosopher, and offers him a treatise in two parts: the excellency of learning, and the acts and defects of its advancement.

• Answering the divines (Book I, section I)

  Knowledge itself is not the danger, but knowledge without charity. God works by second causes; superficial philosophy may lead to atheism, deeper study back to religion; Scripture and nature are two books both to be studied without confusing them.

• Answering politicians and the faults of scholars (I.II-III)

  Learning does not make men unfit for arms or government, as Alexander, Caesar and others show. The discredit scholars bring on themselves by poverty, retired lives or flattery is weighed and largely excused.

• Three distempers and the peccant humours (I.IV-V)

  Delicate learning (words over matter), contentious learning (the cobwebs of the schoolmen) and fantastical learning (credulity) are diagnosed, followed by errors such as extremes of antiquity and novelty, premature system, impatience of doubt and the misplacing of the end of knowledge.

• Divine and human proofs of learning's dignity (I.VI-VIII)

  Wisdom is traced from God's works of creation, through Adam's naming of the creatures, Moses, Solomon and the apostles, to the honour paid to inventors and learned rulers, and the private benefits of learning in moral life.

• Defects in the institutions of learning (Book II, opening)

  Bacon asks for colleges open to the arts and sciences at large, better salaries for lecturers, funds for experiments, visitation of universities, correspondence across Europe and public designation of inquirers into neglected fields.

• History and poesy (II.I-IV)

  Learning is divided by memory, imagination and reason. Natural, civil and ecclesiastical history are surveyed, with a history of learning and of the mechanical arts noted as wanting; poesy is 'feigned history' that shapes events to the desires of the mind.

• Natural philosophy and the misplaced final causes (II.V-VIII)

  Natural theology, physics and metaphysics are distinguished; final causes belong to metaphysics, and mixing them into physics, as Plato, Aristotle and Galen did, has arrested the search for physical causes. Mathematics is placed as a branch of metaphysics.

• The knowledge of man: body and soul (II.IX-XI)

  The league of mind and body, medicine and its deficiencies, cosmetic, athletic and the arts of pleasure; then the soul, whose nature must finally be learned from revelation, with divination and fascination as doubtful appendices.

• Logic, rhetoric and the Georgics of the mind (II.XII-XXII)

  Invention, judgment, memory and tradition; the idols of the mind compared to an enchanted glass; then moral philosophy, which has described the good but neglected the husbandry of character through custom, exercise and the study of the affections.

• Civil knowledge and divinity (II.XXIII-XXV)

  Conversation, negotiation and government, with an extended treatment of how a man may rise in the world; then sacred theology, where reason submits to God's word as the will submits to His law.

Characters

• James I of England (James VI of Scotland), dedicatee and addressee

  The learned king Bacon addresses throughout, flattering his scholarship while urging him to fund and reform the institutions of learning.

• Aristotle, authority questioned

  Admired as a mind but called the schoolmen's 'dictator'; Bacon faults the scholastic dependence on his logic and his habit of mixing final causes into physics.

• Solomon, biblical exemplar

  Cited repeatedly as a king whose wisdom extended to natural history, and as the voice of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs on knowledge and its limits.

• The schoolmen, foil

  Medieval scholastic theologians whose subtle disputations Bacon likens to a spider's web, fine in workmanship but of no substance or profit.

• Hippocrates, medical exemplar

  Praised for recording the cases of his patients and their outcomes, a practice Bacon says later physicians have let lapse.

Lessons

• Two books, one Author

  Bacon answers those who think learning endangers faith by distinguishing the book of God's word from the book of God's works. He argues that a shallow philosophy may stop at second causes and forget the first, but that deeper study sees the dependence of causes on Providence. He also warns against mingling the two learnings and insists both be applied to charity.

  • Why does Bacon say that pretending God works without second causes is offering 'the unclean sacrifice of a lie'?
  • What does he mean by applying knowledge 'to charity, and not to swelling'?
  • Is Bacon's warning against confounding divinity and philosophy a protection for both, or a way of separating them too sharply?

• Words without matter, webs without substance

  Bacon's three distempers of learning describe failures he saw in his own century: humanists who chased Ciceronian phrasing more than weighty argument, schoolmen who spun endless distinctions from a few texts, and credulous writers who accepted marvels in history, astrology and alchemy. Each is a misuse of a real good: eloquence, logical rigour, and openness to report.

  • What historical causes does Bacon give for the rise of 'delicate learning' after Luther?
  • Explain the spider image: what is the difference between a mind working on matter and a mind working on itself?
  • Which of the three distempers is most tempting for a student today, and how would you guard against it?

• Begin with doubts

  Among the 'peccant humours' of learning Bacon lists impatience of doubt and haste to assertion. The man who begins with certainties ends in doubts; the one content to begin with doubts ends in certainties. The principle anticipates his later method of slow, graded induction in the Novum Organum.

  • How does Bacon's image of the two roads, smooth then impassable or rough then even, apply to study?
  • Is beginning with doubt compatible with beginning with faith? How might Bacon distinguish them?
  • What other 'peccant humours' in Book I, section V, are connected with impatience of doubt?

• The physician's duty at the end of life

  In Book II Bacon charges physicians with abandoning patients they pronounce incurable and argues that the office of medicine includes easing pain when recovery is no longer possible, so that death may be 'a fair and easy passage'. He uses the Greek word euthanasia for such an easy death and asks physicians to attend the dying rather than leave them. His argument concerns skilled palliation and attendance, not the deliberate taking of life, and it is an early landmark in the history of care for the dying.

  • What two deficiencies in the treatment of hopeless cases does Bacon identify in II.X?
  • How does Bacon use the example of Christ, who made the body the object of His miracles, to honour the art of medicine?
  • How does Bacon's meaning of 'euthanasia' differ from the way the word is often used now, and why does careful reading of the term matter?

• Cultivating the mind like a field

  Bacon complains that moral philosophers have painted fine pictures of virtue and happiness but given little practical instruction on how to form a character. He calls for 'Georgics of the mind', a husbandry of the soul attentive to the differing characters and tempers of men and to the affections, and working through custom, exercise, habit, education, example, company and friends, comparing moral formation to the patient work of farming.

  • Why does Bacon borrow the title of Virgil's poem on farming for his account of moral formation?
  • What means of shaping character does he list, and which have you seen work?
  • Does Bacon's emphasis on method in moral life leave room for grace, or does it assume grace and describe our part?

Context

Bacon wrote in the first years of James I's reign, when the new king's reputation for learning raised hopes of royal patronage. English universities still taught a curriculum shaped by scholastic logic and humanist rhetoric, while voyages of discovery, the printing press, gunpowder and new instruments had changed what Europeans knew about the world. Bacon's survey belongs to the Renaissance genre of encyclopedic classifications of knowledge, but it is unusual in pointing forward, listing what is missing and proposing institutions and methods to supply it. Its religious framing is explicit: Bacon argues that the Fall came from proud knowledge of good and evil, not from the natural knowledge by which Adam named the creatures, and he sets the book of Scripture beside the book of nature.

Composition

Bacon was knighted in 1603 and composed the work in 1603-05; it was printed in 1605 for Henrie Tomes in two books. Bacon later expanded and revised it in Latin as De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), in nine books, as the first part of his Instauratio Magna; the Novum Organum (1620) was its second part. The library's text is Henry Morley's edition (Cassell's National Library, 1893), via Project Gutenberg, which modernises much of Bacon's spelling and numbers sections and paragraphs within each book.

Reception

The work's division of learning by memory, imagination and reason was adopted, with acknowledgement, by Diderot and d'Alembert for the Encyclopédie (1751). Founders and apologists of the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, invoked Bacon as their guiding spirit. Later readers have debated whether his programme for 'the relief of man's estate' joined learning and charity, as he claimed, or prepared a purely technical view of nature. The work was chosen for the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 28.

Comparisons

• Novum Organum

  The Advancement maps what is missing; the Novum Organum supplies the missing instrument, the new induction, and turns the brief 'enchanted glass' passage of Book II into the full doctrine of the four Idols.

• New Atlantis

  Salomon's House in New Atlantis imagines the institutions Book II asks King James to found: endowed researchers, funded experiments, and correspondents gathering knowledge from abroad.

• Essays

  The Essays, first published in 1597, give the practical counsels on conversation, negotiation and rising in the world that the civil-knowledge chapters of Book II describe as a science still to be written.

• Discourse on Method

  Descartes also began by doubting the learning of the schools, but sought certainty through clear ideas and mathematical order, where Bacon sought it through patient collection of particulars.

• Areopagitica

  Milton, writing in 1644, shares Bacon's confidence that truth grows through free inquiry and his image of learning's progress, but argues against licensing books where Bacon appeals to royal patronage.

• Posterior Analytics and Physics

  Bacon attacks the scholastic use of Aristotle's logic and physics and relocates final causes to metaphysics, yet his own classification of sciences and stress on causes remain indebted to the Aristotelian ideal of knowledge through causes.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Book II, section X is a compact programme for the reform of medicine. Bacon judges medicine 'more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced' and lists deficiencies: the loss of Hippocratic case narratives recording how each patient fared; anatomy that describes the normal parts but neglects individual variation, the seats of the humours and the traces of disease found when opening the dead; the habit of declaring diseases incurable; the neglect of the dying; physicians' constant alteration of remedies instead of tested receipts; and failure to imitate mineral baths by art. His remarks on the dying, where he uses the word euthanasia for an easy and gentle death obtained by mitigating pain, are an early modern argument for palliative attendance and should not be read as advocacy of killing. He also discusses the public's preference for mountebanks over learned physicians, proposes vivisection of animals in place of the human vivisection Celsus condemned, and in section IX treats the 'league' of mind and body, including physiognomy, natural dreams as signs of bodily states, and the physician's remedies for frenzy and melancholy. Bacon's medicine is still largely humoral; his novelty lies in method, record-keeping and the moral claims he makes for the art.

• Book II, IX.2-3

  The league of mind and body: physiognomy, the interpretation of natural dreams as indicators of the body's state, and how bodily humours affect the mind and passions affect the body, including physicians' cures of frenzies and melancholy passions.

  Mind Body Dreams Nightmares Humoral Medicine
• Book II, X.2

  The body as the most compounded of substances; medicine as tuning a harp; physicians judged by outcomes, so that impostors and witches compete with them; Christ's miracles of healing cited as honouring the art.

  Physicians Doctors Quackery Charlatans
• Book II, X.4-5

  Call to revive Hippocratic case histories; anatomy faulted for neglecting individual variation, the lodging of humours and the marks of disease in the dead; vivisection of beasts proposed as an alternative to the human vivisection Celsus reproved.

  Anatomy Dissection Physicians Doctors Humoral Medicine
• Book II, X.6-7

  Physicians pronounce diseases incurable and so 'enact a law of neglect'; the office of medicine includes mitigating pain to make an easy passage at death (euthanasia), with examples from Augustus and Antoninus Pius.

  Death Dying Pain Medical Ethics
• Book II, X.8-10 (the paragraph after X.7 is misnumbered (5) in the Morley text)

  Physicians alter receipts at pleasure rather than keeping tested experimental medicines; artificial mineral baths proposed; a plea for ordered sequences of treatment rather than single sovereign remedies.

  Pharmacology Poisons Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Bacon says knowledge should be a storehouse 'for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate', not a couch, terrace, tower, fort or shop. Choose one modern field of study and argue which of his six images best describes how it is pursued, and why.

• Classroom

  Imitate Book II for your own school: survey its subjects, note what is well taught, and write a short list of 'deficiences' in Bacon's manner, each with a proposed remedy.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Bacon and a physician of 1605 who has just told a family that nothing more can be done, in which Bacon presses the arguments of Book II, X.6-7.

• Essay

  Compare Bacon's 'enchanted glass' in Book II with the Idols in the Novum Organum. What did he add in 1620, and which distortions of the mind do you recognise in yourself?

Further Reading

• The Advancement of Learning (The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. IV), Michael Kiernan (ed.)

  Critical edition of the 1605 text with commentary (Clarendon Press, 2000).

• Novum Organum, Francis Bacon

  The 1620 sequel that sets out the new induction and the Idols.

• Francis Bacon, Perez Zagorin

  A survey of Bacon's philosophy, science, ethics and politics (Princeton, 1998).

• Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy, Stephen Gaukroger

• Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart