- Length
- 320 pagesJardine and Silverthorne, The New Organon, Cambridge, 2000
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Novum Organum
The book that told Europe science should be a collective, cumulative, institutionally supported enterprise rather than a private contest of systems - and that got almost everything right except the method it proposed.
- Date
- 1620
- Author
- Francis Bacon
- Region
- England
- Language
- Latin
- 1620 English, contemporary partial versions The Latin original appeared with English matter in the same year Consensus
- 1863 English, James Spedding Public domain; the basis of most online texts Attested
- 2000 English, Jardine and Silverthorne The scholarly standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
The founding charter of the Royal Society's self-image and of the idea of organised, cumulative, publicly funded research; the method it actually prescribes was never used by anyone.
What the book says
Two books of numbered aphorisms proposing that the whole method of learning about nature be replaced. The first book is the demolition. Bacon argues that the syllogism cannot discover anything, since it manipulates propositions built from words whose meanings were fixed carelessly in the first place, and that the ancients are revered for having gone first rather than for having got things right. He then names four classes of systematic error, which he calls idols. The idols of the tribe are built into human nature - we see more order than there is, and we notice confirmations and ignore exceptions. The idols of the cave are the distortions of an individual's education and temperament. The idols of the marketplace come from language, where words impose false categories on things. The idols of the theatre are the philosophical systems themselves, received whole like stage plays. The second book sets out the replacement: a graded collection of instances, arranged in tables of presence, absence and degree, with negative instances weighted heavily, working upward from particulars to general laws by stages rather than leaping to axioms at once.
What it argues
That the mind left to itself gets nature wrong in predictable ways, and that a procedure is needed to correct for it. The four idols are the first systematic account of cognitive bias: Bacon notices that people register hits and forget misses, that they prefer explanations they can visualise, that the words they inherited carve the world at the wrong joints, and that a system once adopted governs what its holder can see. His remedy is procedural rather than personal - no amount of care will fix a faculty that is bent, so the work must be organised so that individual bias does not accumulate. Negative instances are given more weight than positive ones, because a single well-attested exception does more than a hundred confirmations.
What it answered
Aristotelian logic as the schools taught it, and the whole idea that knowledge of nature comes from starting with received principles. It also answers, more quietly, the humanist alternative: Bacon has no more time for the rediscovery of ancient wisdom than for the schools, since both look backwards. What he proposes instead is that the useful knowledge of the world is almost entirely still to be found, that finding it will take generations of people working together, and that no individual will see the end of it.
How it argues
In numbered aphorisms, and the form is chosen for a reason he states: continuous prose invites the reader to accept a system whole, whereas separated observations must each be considered on their own. It is the same argument he makes against the idols of the theatre, applied to his own book. The first hundred and thirty aphorisms of Book One are among the most quotable philosophical prose in English or Latin; the second book, where the actual method is set out with worked tables on the nature of heat, is dry, and is the part almost nobody finishes.
The moment
England under James I, with Bacon at the top of a legal and political career - Attorney General, Lord Chancellor - which ended in 1621 when he was impeached for taking gifts from litigants, fined and barred from office. The Novum Organum appeared the year before the fall, and the remaining five years of his life were spent on the natural history that was supposed to feed the method. He died in 1626 after, by a well-known and poorly evidenced story, catching a chill while stuffing a fowl with snow to test whether cold preserves flesh.
How it travelled
As an inspiration rather than an instruction. The founders of the Royal Society took Bacon as their patron saint, printed his image and described their work in his terms, while doing something quite different - hypothesis, mathematics and controlled experiment rather than exhaustive tabulation. The French Encyclopedists dedicated their project to him. His account of science as public, organised and cumulative became the modern default so completely that it is hard to see as a proposal. Meanwhile his tables of instances were never used to discover anything by anyone.
The strongest objection
That the method cannot start. Bacon's procedure requires collecting instances of a phenomenon and sorting them by presence, absence and degree - but which instances are relevant cannot be decided without some idea of what one is looking for, and that idea is the hypothesis his method was designed to make unnecessary. Every subsequent account of scientific reasoning has had to put the conjecture back in. There is also the awkward fact that Bacon rejected Copernicus and did not use Gilbert's or Harvey's results, so the greatest science of his own lifetime happened without him and mostly against his prescriptions.
Why read it
Book One, which is short, brilliantly written and still useful - the idols section repays anyone who has ever wondered why they find their own arguments so convincing. Book Two can be skipped by everyone except historians of science, and its dryness is itself informative about why the method was admired and not adopted.
- First printed
- 1620
- First in English
- 1620
- Digitised
- Yes
Published in Latin as the second part of an unfinished six-part plan; the first part, on the division of the sciences, exists, and the rest was never written. The Oxford Francis Bacon is the critical edition.
Spedding's Victorian English is public domain and is what most online texts use. Jardine and Silverthorne's 2000 translation is in copyright and is the scholarly standard.
Where it stands
Historical as a method and permanently present as a programme. Nobody does Baconian induction; everybody does organised, funded, collaborative, publishing science, which is what he actually argued for. The four idols have aged remarkably well and are cited in psychology as an early statement of confirmation bias.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain and Spedding's English is too, but the famous phrasings circulate in modern in-copyright renderings. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much Bacon contributed to actual scientific practice as opposed to scientific ideology is a long-running argument, with positions ranging from founder of the modern scientific method to a lawyer who wrote well about a subject he did not practise. Whether the aphorisms of Book One and the tables of Book Two belong to one project is questioned. The snow-and-chicken story comes from Aubrey decades later and is not well attested. And how far his programme is inseparable from a language of dominating and constraining nature, which some twentieth-century critics have pressed hard, is disputed both as reading and as history.