Content area
Full Text
Dedicated to Nieves Mathews
THE new science envisioned by Francis Bacon involved a penetrating interrogation of nature, far more intrusive than the respectful observation that was the touchstone of Aristotelian science. Bacon asserted that Aristotelian science only touched nature "by the fingertips," without yielding much power over her; he urged the new "sons of science" to engage her far more closely, to "vex" and alter her usual course through probing experiments. This intense inquiry naturally gave rise to questions: What justifies its intensity? How far can experiment go without violating nature?
Especially in its formative stages, the new science called on metaphorical language to clarify its scope and legitimacy even before its activities had fully unfolded. Francis Bacon, in particular, used a rich variety of figurative language to try to address these questions, especially to an audience steeped in classical literature but ignorant of the emergent science. He reinterpreted classical myth to give a more familiar form to his strange new vision. For instance, in De sapientia veterum (1609) he argues that the Sphinx is really science; the Sphinx's womanly form represents "the beauty and facility of [scientific] utterance" and her wings are added "because the discoveries of science spread and fly abroad in an instant," while her claws are like "the axioms and arguments of science [that] penetrate and hold fast the mind."1 Likewise, Bacon takes Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, as a figure of "Matter -the most ancient of all things, next to God." The hero who wrestles with Proteus prefigures "any skillful Servant of Nature [who] shall bring force to bear on matter and shall vex it and drive it to extremities."2
Here the exact words used to characterize such probing experimentation are important indications of its true character and scope. Bacon's words, in particular, have excited much controversy. It was long a scholarly commonplace that Bacon called for the "torture of nature." Perhaps the locus classicus for this view is Goethe's declaration that "Nature falls silent on the rack," deploring what he considered the "evil" of Newtonian physics and calling for the liberation of "the phenomena once and for all from its gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic torture chamber."3 Later, other critics pressed the accusation that science abuses and even rapes nature.4...