III The Expurgation of the Intellect

CONSIDER the reaction of an experienced statesman who leaves the service of a king to enter the service of truth. He has left a field wherein all workers moved in subordination to one head and one focal purpose; he enters a field in which each worker is working by himself, with no division of labor, no organization of endeavor, no correlation of ends. There he has found administration, here he finds a naïve laissez-faire; there order, here anarchy; there some sense of common end and effort, here none. He understands at once the low repute of philosophy among men of affairs. “For the people are very apt to contemn truth, upon account of the controversies raised about it; and so think those all in a wrong way, who never meet.”¹ He understands at once why it is that the world has been so little changed by speculation and research. He is a man whose consciousness of pervasive human misery is too sharp for comfort;² and he sees no hope of remedy for this in isolated guerilla attacks waged upon the merest outposts of truth, each attack with its jealously peculiar strategy, its own dislocated, almost irrelevant end. And yet if there is no remedy for men’s ills in this nascent science and renascent philosophy, in what other quarter, then, shall men look for hope and cure?

There is no other, Bacon feels; unless victory is first won in the laboratory and the study it will never be won in political assemblies; no plebiscite or royal edict, but only truth, can make men free. Man’s hope lies in the reorganization of the processes of discovery and interpretation. Unless philosophy and science be born again of social aims and social needs they cannot have life in them. A new spirit must enter.

But first old spirits must be exorcised. Speculation and research must bring out a declaration of independence against theology. “The corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is ... widely spread, and does the greatest harm.”³ The search for final causes, for design in nature, must be left to theologians; the function of science is not to interpret the purposes of nature, but to discover the connections of cause and effect in nature. Dogma must be set aside: “if a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”⁴ Dogma must be set aside, too, because it necessitates deduction as a basic method; and deduction as a basic method is disastrous.

But that is not all; there is much more in the way of preliminaries: there must be a general “expurgation of the intellect.” The mind is full (some would say made up) of prejudices, wild fancies, “idols,” or imaginings of things that are not so: if you are to think correctly, usefully, all these must go. Try, then, to get as little of yourself as possible in the way of the thing you wish to see. Beware of the very general tendency to put order and regularity in the world and then to suppose that they are native to the structure of things; or to force all facts into the unyielding mould of a preconceived opinion, carefully neglecting all contrary instances; or to give too credulous an ear to that which flatters the wish. Look into yourself and see the forest of prejudices that has grown up within you: through your temperamental attitudes; through your education; through your friends (friendship is so often an agreement in prejudices); through your favorite authors and authorities. If you find yourself seizing and dwelling on anything with particular satisfaction, hold it in suspicion. Beware of words, for they are imposed according to the apprehension of the crowd; make sure that you do not take abstractions for things. And remind yourself occasionally that you are not the measure of all things, but their distorting mirror.

So much by way of clearing the forest. Comes then induction as the fount and origin of all truth: patient induction, obedient to the call of fact, and with watchful eye for, above all things, the little unwelcome instance that contradicts. Not that induction is everything; it includes experiment, of course, and is punctuated by hypothesis.⁵ (More, it is clearly but the servant of deduction, since the aim of all science is to predict by deduction from generalizations formed by induction; but just as clear is it that the efficacy of the whole business lies grounded in the faithfulness of the induction: induction is servant, but it has all men at its mercy.) And to formulate methods of induction, to surround the process by mechanical guards, to protect it from the premature flights of young generalizations,—that is a matter of life and death to science.