Maxims, laws and habits of nature in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy

SILVIA MANZO

Berlin

Seminario; Forschungskolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte; 2013

Technische Universität Berlin

Francis Bacon's discourse on natural philosophy employs very frequently in a rather imprecise way a nomological vocabulary. He does not provide a systematic, detailed and fully coherent view of the laws of nature. However, it is undeniable that laws of nature are an integral and important part of his conception of nature. Mentions to the laws of nature are quite frequent across Bacon's works. One good instance of this is the reference to matter's resistance to annihilation and matter's search for union in order to avoid a vacuum as "laws of nature". The central role of the laws of nature, besides, is affirmed in the very definition of man, as expressed in a preliminary draft of a sentence that later would become the inaugural aphorism of Novum organum. It states that man, as nature's minister and interpreter, does and understands only as much as he has observed the order of nature with by the experience or by his mind, "being himself meanwhile besieged [obsessus] by the laws of nature." In the Advancement Bacon claims that, unlike the sensitive soul, the rational soul excited in human body by God is not subjected to the "laws of heaven and earth which are the subject of philosophy". In addition, Bacon confess that his work does not consist in giving "laws to the intellect or to things" but "to take down and copy the ones dictated and proclaimed by the very voice of nature itself." Similarly, he presents himself like a faithful scribe, who picks up and writes down "the very laws of nature" and nothing else. While the nomological terminology is vaguely used throughout his works, it is possible to recognize three nomological entities held in his natural philosophy: 1) the forms, 2) the summary law of nature, and 3) the highest axioms of natural philosophy gathered in first philosophy. It should be added that the scholarship had noted that Bacon also talks occasionally of "customs and habits of nature" and had posed the question whether or not these habits should be considered as nomological entities in Bacon's nature.