Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620): The Scientific Method

The Novum Organum is a philosophical work by the English statesman Francis Bacon, published in London in 1620, which argued that knowledge of nature should be built up slowly from observation and experiment rather than deduced from ancient authorities. Its title, “New Instrument”, challenged the Organon, the collection of Aristotle’s logical works that dominated university teaching. Bacon’s analysis of the “idols” that distort human thinking and his call for organised, collaborative research made the book a founding text of early modern science.

Background: Bacon and the state of learning

Francis Bacon was born in London on 22 January 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and trained as a lawyer. His political career rose under James I: he became Solicitor General, Attorney General, Lord Keeper in 1617 and Lord Chancellor in 1618, when he was also created Baron Verulam.

Bacon believed that learning in his day had stalled. University philosophy, based on Aristotle and his commentators, relied on syllogisms and verbal disputes that produced, he argued, few useful discoveries. Meanwhile the printing press, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, unknown to the ancients, had changed the world.

He had already set out a survey of knowledge in The Advancement of Learning (1605). The Novum Organum was meant as the second part of a much larger project, the Instauratio Magna (“Great Renewal”), which he never completed.

The book and its frontispiece

The Novum Organum was published in October 1620 and dedicated to King James I. Its engraved title page showed a ship sailing out between the Pillars of Hercules, the classical limit of the known world, with a Latin motto from the Book of Daniel: “Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” The image presented science as a voyage of discovery beyond ancient boundaries.

The work is written in Latin, the international language of scholarship, as a series of numbered aphorisms in two books. Bacon chose the aphorism deliberately: short, separate statements, he believed, invited readers to test and extend ideas rather than accept a finished system. Book One criticises existing learning and the causes of error. Book Two sets out Bacon’s new method, using the nature of heat as a worked example.

The idols of the mind

Bacon’s best-known contribution is his account of four “idols”, false notions that block the path to truth:

• Idols of the Tribe are errors common to all humans, such as seeing more order in the world than exists or noticing evidence that confirms our beliefs while ignoring what contradicts them.
• Idols of the Cave come from each individual’s own temperament, education and habits.
• Idols of the Marketplace arise from language, when words are vague or name things that do not exist.
• Idols of the Theatre are the received systems of philosophy, which Bacon compared to stage plays creating fictional worlds.

His description of the Idols of the Tribe is often seen as an early account of what psychologists now call confirmation bias.

Bacon’s method

Bacon rejected two approaches: leaping from a few observations to sweeping general principles, and simply piling up facts without order. Instead he proposed a careful, step-by-step induction, rising gradually from particular observations to more general laws.

The investigator was to compile “tables”: instances where a quality is present, similar cases where it is absent, and cases where it varies in degree. By excluding explanations that did not fit, one could reach the true “form” of the quality. Applying this to heat, Bacon concluded that heat is a kind of motion of small particles, a view that anticipated later physics.

He stressed the special value of decisive tests, which he called “instances of the fingerpost”, later known as crucial experiments. He also saw research as a collective enterprise needing institutions, funding and many workers, and he insisted that the aim of knowledge was practical benefit for human life. In a famous aphorism he wrote that nature can be commanded only by obeying it.

The Great Renewal

The Novum Organum was only one part of a six-part plan. The Instauratio Magna was to include a new classification of the sciences, the new method, a vast collection of natural and experimental histories, examples of the method at work, provisional conclusions and finally a complete new natural philosophy.

Bacon knew he could not finish such a programme alone. He appealed to the king and to future generations to support collaborative research, and he believed that properly organised investigation could, within a few generations, transform human understanding of nature. His later collections of observations, such as Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1627, were attempts to start the natural histories the plan required.

The book also contains a striking view of history. Bacon argued that the ancients were in a sense the youth of the world, and that his own age, having accumulated more experience, was older and should be wiser. Respect for antiquity, he thought, should not prevent the moderns from going further.

Fall from power

Shortly after the book appeared, Bacon’s career collapsed. In 1621, months after he was made Viscount St Alban, Parliament impeached him for accepting gifts from people with cases before his court. He admitted the charges, was fined £40,000, briefly held in the Tower of London and barred from office.

He spent his remaining years writing, including the unfinished utopia New Atlantis, which described Salomon’s House, an ideal research institution. He died on 9 April 1626.

Influence and criticism

Bacon’s ideas inspired the founders of the Royal Society in 1660. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) and Abraham Cowley’s prefatory poem presented Bacon as the prophet of the new experimental philosophy. Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke worked in a Baconian spirit, collecting experiments and natural histories; Boyle’s work on the pressure of air is a classic example.

In the eighteenth century Diderot and d’Alembert credited Bacon in their Encyclopédie and based their classification of knowledge on his.

Critics have pointed out that Bacon underrated mathematics and the role of bold hypotheses, both central to the work of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. His own experiments were few. According to John Aubrey, the physician William Harvey remarked that Bacon wrote philosophy “like a Lord Chancellor”. Yet his vision of systematic, public and useful science proved lasting.

Myths and facts

Myth: Bacon simply told scientists to collect facts. He warned against mere fact-gathering as strongly as against hasty theorising, comparing the first to ants that only collect and the second to spiders that spin webs from themselves. The ideal, he said, was the bee, which gathers material and transforms it.

Myth: Bacon’s method was how later science actually worked. Few scientists followed his tables step by step. His influence lay more in the ideals he promoted, experiment, cooperation and scepticism towards authority, than in a precise procedure.

Timeline

• 1561, 22 January: Francis Bacon born in London.
• 1605: The Advancement of Learning published.
• 1618: Bacon becomes Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam.
• 1620, October: Novum Organum published.
• 1621: Bacon impeached and removed from office.
• 1626, 9 April: Bacon dies at Highgate.
• 1627: New Atlantis published posthumously.
• 1660: Royal Society founded, inspired by Baconian ideals.

Why it matters

The Novum Organum gave the new science of the seventeenth century a clear programme and a vocabulary of error. Its insistence on testing ideas against nature, guarding against bias and organising research collectively remains part of how science understands itself.