8
In order to more fully understand why the Enlightenment remains incomplete, even in the
most technologically advanced and wealthy countries, it may be useful to explore some of the
limits of enlightenment as a process of human intellectual growth rather than an historical epoch.
To guide us in this exploration we turn to the father of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon.
The personality of Francis Bacon is puzzling indeed. The nobility and power of his
intellectual pursuits seemed often to have been blended with an unscrupulous and sometimes
foolish pattern of personal behavior. Moreover, Bacon conducted no experiments, made no
discoveries. His singularly important contribution was to lay down a recognizably modern
pattern for the conduct of empirical science (the Great Insaturation) and to infuse the philosophy
of his time with a sufficiently critical attitude toward traditional authority that the Enlightenment
could flower. In Advancement of Learning he cataloged the failings of traditional scholarship
that made its adherents useless for contemporary purposes. And in Novum Organum he argued
that " as the present sciences are useless for the discovery of effects, so the present system of
logic is useless for the discovery of science" (Bk 1, Sect. 11). It is surprising to discover that the
philosopher most widely credited with (or blamed for) laying down the pattern for the
Enlightenment’s domination of man over nature regarded the subtlety of nature as so far beyond
human understanding that the "theories of mankind are but a kind of insanity, only there is no
one to stand by and observe it" (Bk.1, Sect. 10). It was, in fact, the cognitive limitations of
mankind that the scientific method was intended to conquer, not nature per se.
Elsewhere is Novum Organum (Bk 1, Sects. 38-68) Bacon details the human failings that
must be overcome in the pursuit of enlightenment. Unlike the failings of the scholarship of his
time, these defects are general tendencies of the human mind that must be corrected if knowledge
is to be advanced. And from our vantage point, they appear as obvious obstacles to the
Convention