The Memo and Modernity

Abstract

Bacon’s curious phrase “the Method of Tradition” probably does not suggest a precise meaning to modern readers. In his Of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning, the expanded Latin version of the Advancement, Bacon rendered this phrase as “ars tradendi.” The Latin was retranslated into English again by Spedding andEllis in their nineteenth-centuryedition of Bacon’s work as the “art of transmission.” Returning to this somewhat arcane notion, the editors of the present volume evokewhat is now anenormous field of discourse about themeans andmodes of communication;but for Bacon, this discoursewas still waiting for an inquiry thatwouldestablish its basic principles. The “controversy” to which he alludes, perhaps the first attempt at formulating such principles, was initiated by Petrus Ramus, whose notorious “method” of transmitting knowledge by arrangement of concepts into dichotomies was embraced by some for its brevity and systematicity and rejectedbyothers, includingBacon, for itsoversimplification and specious rigor. Both Bacon and Ramus were concerned with trans-