Light from Darkness: The Relationship between Francis Bacon's Prima Philosophia and his concept of the Greek Fable

Abstract

Francis Bacon's Great Instauration was projected as a restoration of learning. At the end of it, mankind would have re-established the knowledge Adam had before the fall, 'the pure knowledg of nature and vniversality, a knowledge by the light whereof man did giue names vnto other creatures in Paradise, as they were brought before him, according vnto their proprieties'.1 This knowledge was not lost because of man's first disobedience;2 it declined through the workings of time after man had lapsed into mortality. '[T]he truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a Riuer, or streame, which carryeth downe to vs that which is light and blowne vp; and sinketh and drowneth that which is weightie and solide.'3 Thus, all the knowledge Bacon wanted to unearth on his quest for complete dominion over nature was, most probably, known to the earliest ages. But this probability was of no practical importance for his project, for two reasons. First, because we have no records of these times and therefore no knowledge of them.4 And second, because Bacon wanted truth to 'be discovered by the light of nature, not recovered from the darkness of the past'.5 There is, however, one apparent exception to this rule: the interpretation of Greek fables. In the first part of the Great Instauration, the division of sciences as represented in De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Bacon makes research into the stories of the pagan gods a desideratum of the new philosophy and gives three examples to demonstrate how they are properly interpreted. In the following, I would like to argue that Bacon made this exception because he hoped to find axioms of prima philosophia in the fables.Closing his recent re-appraisal of 'Francis Bacon, Allegory, and the Uses of Myth', Rhodri Lewis included prima philosophia in a short list of areas that connect myth and Bacon's larger philosophical project, but framed a potential relationship between myth and prima philosophia in very circumspect terms.6 My further research, comprised in the following article, allows me to argue their congruity. Furthermore, Lewis argued successfully against the previously standard view of Bacon's mythography as a rhetorical device created solely to sugar the pill of his political and philosophical innovations. My article will take this even further by embedding Bacon's mythography in the broader fabric of his thought.Prima Philosophia: the Stem of the Tree of KnowledgeThe first part of Bacon's Great Instauration was meant as an overview of all knowledge, which would be divided into its parts and thus reviewed as to its deficiencies. But, Bacon warns, the partitions of knowledgeare not like seuerall lines that meete in one Angle, and so touch but in a point, but are like branches of a tree, that meete in a stemme; which hath a dimension and quantitie of entyrenes and continuance, before it come to discontinue & break it self into Armes and boughes, therfore it is good, before wee enter into the former distribution, to erect & constitute one vniuersal Science by the name of PHILOSOPHIA PRIMA, PRIMITIVE or SVMMARIE PHILOSOPHIE, as the Maine and common way, before we come where the waies part, and deuide themselues.7Primary philosophy, as Bacon set it down in both the Advancement and De Augmentis, thus unites the knowledge of God, nature and man. It is important to note that primary philosophy represents the lowest level of abstraction from nature and finds its experimental equivalent in the Instances of Correspondence, i.e. experiments which discover parallels and substantial resemblances between different areas of investigation.8 While, as Lisa Jardine has pointed out, the term prima philosophia existed in scholastic classifications of knowledge as a synonym for metaphysics, Bacon is at pains to show that what he wants to establish is something quite different.9 Prima philosophia, in Bacon's unique definition, is a universal science consisting of axioms which are so fundamental that they can be transferred from one science (or branch of knowledge) to many other sciences. …