The Unfinished Restoration
“For man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.”
—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, II.52
Four Centuries of Hindsight
Hindsight, we say, is 20/20. The four centuries between the publication of Bacon’s Novum Organum in 1620 and the upheavals of 2020 give the familiar expression an unexpected resonance. The coincidence supplies an occasion to look back upon his intervention and ask what became of it. A project addressed to posterity has had time to acquire institutions, accomplish wonders, provoke resistance, and produce consequences its author could scarcely have imagined. We now inhabit a world that allows some of its promises to be judged by their fruits.
Distance, however, does not guarantee clarity. The success of a project can obscure its original purposes as effectively as neglect. Later generations select the elements that suit their needs, enlarge them, and come to regard the selection as the whole. Bacon’s association with experiment, invention, and useful knowledge has become familiar enough to conceal how closely he joined those ambitions to the reform of judgment and the government of power. Four centuries of hindsight invite us to examine the inheritance alongside the design.
The date 1620 gives that examination a definite point of departure. Bacon proposed an inquiry in which general principles would earn their authority through patient encounters with particulars and demonstrate their fertility in further discoveries. His intervention reached beyond a new set of conclusions. It concerned the conditions under which conclusions could be reached, corrected, transmitted, and put to work. He sought to make discovery cumulative and to give future investigators a disciplined means of exceeding their predecessors.2
Another document of 1620 offers a brief political counterpart. The Mayflower Compact constituted a civil body through mutual covenant and undertook to frame laws for its general good. Its signers remained subjects of James I, and its participation was limited; it supplied no universal democracy. Yet the conjunction is suggestive. In one text, intellectual authority had to answer to an ordered encounter with experience. In the other, a particular community established its immediate civil authority through an act of agreement. The resemblance concerns the formation and obligations of authority. It does not establish a connection between the two documents.3
Four hundred years later, the pandemic brought knowledge and government into an unusually intense relationship. Scientific observations and models informed decisions reaching into work, worship, education, movement, and association. The emergency exposed both the value of organized inquiry and the difficulty of governing through knowledge that was developing while action had to be taken. Public decisions required attention to evidence, uncertainty, unequal burdens, and the conditions of legitimate authority.4
The questions raised in that year reach beyond any verdict on a particular policy. How can expert judgment remain open to correction when it becomes an instrument of government? How can a public distinguish a finding about nature from a decision about the risks and sacrifices it should accept? How can institutions preserve trust while acknowledging what they do not yet know? These are questions about the moral and political government of knowledge. The anniversary made them especially apt questions to put to Bacon’s legacy.
No theory of recurring historical cycles is needed to give the interval significance. The four-century horizon allows us to consider a founding ambition beside the civilization that followed it. The point of looking back is to recover enough perspective to judge what deserves continuation, what requires correction, and what remains unfinished.
The Fruits of the Intervention
The civilization that followed Francis Bacon recovered a measure of dominion. It learned to extend sight beyond the unaided eye, preserve voices after the speaker had died, cross distances once thought insuperable, alter the conditions of disease, and convert hidden powers of nature into instruments of ordinary life. Discovery became organized, cumulative, collaborative, and increasingly rapid. Bacon did not produce this world by himself. No single philosopher could have done so. He nevertheless understood its governing possibility earlier and more comprehensively than most of his contemporaries. Knowledge could become a method of producing further knowledge. The arts of discovery could cease to depend upon rare accidents of genius and become an inheritance transmitted through institutions.
The methods of later science developed through many traditions and often departed from Bacon’s particular prescriptions. His achievement nevertheless remains visible in the scale of the enterprise he imagined: observations gathered beyond the capacity of one mind, instruments extending the senses, discoveries tested through works, and organized cooperation carrying inquiry beyond the lifetime of its founders. The relief made possible by such knowledge deserves gratitude. Any judgment that treats the resulting civilization only as a machinery of domination fails to account for the suffering that its arts have relieved.
That achievement forms only half of Bacon’s restoration. The human being who recovered dominion remained the fallen human being. Enlarged power did not enlarge wisdom at the same rate. Instruments became more exact while ends remained contested. Institutions accumulated knowledge while remaining subject to ambition, faction, prestige, secrecy, and fear. The power to relieve suffering developed beside the power to administer, exploit, deceive, and destroy. Modernity opened Bacon’s fountain more successfully than it built the bank he believed should govern its waters.
These results cannot all be credited or charged to a seventeenth-century author. They can, however, be assessed against the ends he proposed. Did increased knowledge become a common benefit? Did the institutions that gathered it become more capable of correcting themselves? Did the enlargement of human power bring a corresponding discipline to its use? Bacon’s intervention remains demanding because it gives us grounds for asking these questions of the very civilization that claims him as an ancestor.
The Unfinished Restoration
Bacon’s account of the two losses supplies the measure. Dominion and innocence name distinct injuries and distinct forms of repair. Arts and sciences may recover powers over creation. Religion and faith address the disorder of the human being who exercises them. Bacon promises only a partial restoration within this life. His formulation leaves human achievement under conditions of fallibility and places limits upon what any increase of technical capacity can accomplish.1
Innocence in this account cannot mean ignorance restored. A civilization cannot become innocent by forgetting what it has learned, and knowledge of danger is often necessary to prevent it. The problem concerns the ordering of will and action. A person may understand the causes of suffering and still choose to inflict it. An institution may possess accurate information while arranging its use around prestige, revenue, or control. The correction of an error in knowledge and the correction of a corrupt purpose require different kinds of work.
That government begins with purpose. Bacon warned investigators against seeking knowledge for pleasure of mind, contention, superiority, profit, fame, or power. They were to seek it for the benefit and use of life and to perfect and govern it in charity. The statement is the moral constitution of his project. Knowledge does not become good merely by becoming true, and power does not justify itself by becoming effective. The intention of the knower, the organization of inquiry, the discipline of interpretation, the choice of applications, and the distribution of benefits all belong to the work.2
His distinction between the two books protected the integrity of both fields. Nature disclosed causes and works; Scripture disclosed salvation and the will of God. Natural philosophy could not redeem the will or establish good and evil for itself. Theology could not dictate the physical structure of creation through careless readings of Scripture. This division gave inquiry room to advance while keeping the question of its ends before another tribunal.
Charity joined the two restorations. Bacon’s Writer’s Prayer imagined discovery as alms conveyed through many hands to the family of mankind. The image places knowledge within a relation of service and transmission. Its beneficiaries include people the discoverer will never meet. Its completion depends upon others carrying the gift forward. The glory of the Creator and the relief of the human estate gave the enterprise a purpose extending beyond the reputation or lifetime of its author.5
That purpose also exposes a difficulty within Bacon’s own institutional imagination. Salomon’s House decides which inventions to disclose and which to conceal, yet New Atlantis supplies no complete account of its accountability. Who governs the governors of discovery? Who bears the consequences of a decision to release, restrict, patent, weaponize, or forget? The questions have grown more urgent as technical systems have grown more powerful. Recovering Bacon’s moral intention requires us to examine the adequacy of the arrangements through which he hoped to realize it.6
Charity must therefore enter the conduct of institutions as well as the declared purposes of their founders. It requires attention to those who bear the costs of an invention and those excluded from its benefits. Intellectual humility requires procedures through which errors can be reported and corrected. Public service requires that expertise remain answerable for the uses made of it. The governing ideal is authority that remains teachable. These obligations give practical form to a restoration whose moral half cannot be supplied by more powerful instruments.
Modern criticism has often accused Bacon of inaugurating a dominion stripped of reverence. The charge identifies a danger that history has made impossible to dismiss. Nature can be reduced to material, reason to calculation, and invention to marketable power. Bacon’s language of empire can serve that development. Yet the criticism becomes incomplete when it omits the innocence paired with dominion, the charity paired with knowledge, and the submission to nature paired with command. Modernity may reveal less the completion of Bacon’s program than the disproportionate success of one half.
The Next Ages
Bacon entrusted his name and memory to foreign nations and the next ages. We are among those ages. His appeal to posterity gives the four-century retrospect a particular force: the reader becomes one of the judges to whom an unfinished undertaking was entrusted. That responsibility calls for attention to the whole design, including its limits, and to the uses made of the powers it helped to commend.7
The purpose of recovery is not to replace a divided reputation with a flawless hero. Bacon’s ambition, compromises, political errors, and institutional limitations belong to the same life as his intellectual greatness. A fuller account makes judgment more exact. It also permits his work to question us. We can recognize assumptions that his age left unexamined while finding that our own age has neglected purposes he regarded as essential.
Here the promise of 20/20 hindsight becomes an obligation to look more carefully. We possess evidence of consequences that Bacon could only anticipate. We also possess habits of thought that can make his moral and religious purposes difficult to see. The passage of time becomes instructive when we use both kinds of evidence: the world that emerged and the ends by which its emergence was meant to be governed. The anniversary invites reflection because it places achievement and intention within the same field of view.
Bacon’s work was addressed to successors capable of carrying it beyond him. Our succession requires more than continued invention. It requires the discipline to expose our idols, test our promises, join knowledge to works, and govern works by charity. Each increase of dominion renews the question of the gift: who receives it, who governs it, and toward what end? The civilization that inherited his ambition still has to learn how the powers it has acquired may serve the restoration it has left incomplete.
The unfinished restoration is therefore ours.