An Idol of the Market-Place: Baconianism in Nineteenth Century Britain

Abstract

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the name of Francis Bacon was closely associated with the idea of experimental philosophy or natural science. For the leading members of the early Royal Society, he was the guiding moral and intellectual spirit of the scientific endeavour, or, as Abraham Cowley's Ode would have it, a prophetic Moses who led natural philosophers towards the promised land.1 Similarly, within a European context, one writer commented that Bacon was "the greatest man for the interest of Natural Philosophy that ever was".2 This association is now almost totally disrupted; practising scientists are less given to public pronouncements about methods and goals than their predecessors and, since the early years of this century, professional philosophers of science have treated his work with nearly complete indifference.3