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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.