From arcane learning to public knowledge

Bacon's project was to harness firmly to the yoke of the state a new attitude to knowledge, and in the course of attempting to do this, he was led to think through and transform this new attitude to knowledge. At the most elementary level, his aim was to reform natural philosophy, but what exactly he was reforming, and how he envisaged its reform, are not straightforward questions. The object of this reform was both the practice and the practitioners of natural philosophy. He was concerned to reform a tradition of natural philosophy in which the central ingredients were areas such as natural history and alchemy: empirical, labour-intensive disciplines.

In a pioneering essay, Kuhn attempted to distinguish between what he referred to as the mathematical and the experimental or ‘Baconian’ traditions. This is a useful first approximation, and it indicates a divergence of research in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although Newton, for example, was considered to have produced models in both traditions, in his Principia and his Opticks, respectively). It is only to be expected that this characterisation is of less help in understanding the way in which fields of research were structured at the time Bacon was writing – and of course it is this that we need to understand if we are to comprehend what Bacon's reforms were directed towards – but there is a similar divergence between two broad kinds of discipline.