Bacon had two main faults to find with the learning of his day.
The first had to do with its bondage to the past.
In this respect, he considered Renaissance humanists and Protestant theologians worse
offenders than the schoolmen, because they gave far too much attention to the ancient
languages, to style and phrase, to the correction and annotation of texts.
In his opinion, it was time for scholars to wake up to the age in which they were living.
No longer need Europeans feel overawed at the achievements of Greece and Rome.
What we call antiquity was in fact the youth of the world.
"These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account
ancient by a computation backward from ourselves."
The second main fault was in mistaking the goal or purpose of knowledge.
Too great precedence had, he thought, been given to intellectual activity and not enough
to practical investigations.
Bacon pleaded for scholars to lay aside "vain speculations" and to turn to "the contemplation
of nature and the observation of experience."
Contemplation, he said, should ever be conjoined with action and should be pursued not out
of mere intellectual curiosity or for the honor or gain of the scholar, but for its
utility to civil society.
In the second and more substantial part of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon turned
his attention from the scholars to the matter of their scholarship.
His purpose was to point out areas of study that had not received sufficient attention
and in passing to note those that had not been neglected.
Among the latter he placed mathematics and physics, grammar and eloquence, ancient and
ecclesiastical history.
This was not to say that he considered them in a satisfactory condition.
"I am not now," he noted, "in hand with censures but with omissions."
Of physics, for example, which he did not report as deficient, he nevertheless noted:
"In what truth or perfection [its branches] are handled, I make not now any judgment;
but they are parts of knowledge not deserted by the labor of men.”
Bacon's originality appears in the number of new sciences which he envisaged a place
for, and the gaps he saw in the old ones.
For example, he urged that modern history should be studied with the same zeal as ancient,
and he called for a new science that would study human races in connection with climate,
geography, and natural resources.
There was need for a science of education and for books on practical morals which would
deal with ways of improving the mind and cultivating virtue.
A history of mechanics and inventions was needed to parallel the history of thought.
And handbooks were needed in the fields of business and diplomacy, comparable in "form
of writing" to Machiavelli's works on government.
Theology might see to be over­cultivated, but Bacon suggested two new areas--one dealing
with the limits of human reason in speculating about divine things, the other defining the
latitude which ought to be allowed for theological differences.
Medicine, Bacon thought, was in a particularly deficient way, being "a science which hath
been more professed than labored, and yet more labored than advanced; the labor having
been in my judgment, rather in a circle than in progression."
He complained that Hippocrates’ method of keeping case histories of his patients had
fallen into disuse.
He argued for the reinstitution of vivisection, particularly of beasts, in order that anatomy
might again go forward.
And he wished that physicians would give more attention to searching out specific medicines
and less to compounding confections for ready sale.
As would be expected, Bacon gave special attention to the arts of reasoning, anticipating many
of the themes of his famous Novum Organum.
He argued that invention has been far too much the sport of chance rather than the child
of intelligence.
"Hitherto men are rather beholden to a wild goat for surgery, or to a nightingale for
music, or to the ibis for some part of physic, or to the pot-lid that flew open for artillery,
or generally to chance or anything else than to logic for the invention of arts and sciences."
Bacon recommended several new angles of approach.
He pointed out the importance to invention of the negative instance and the exception
to the rule; consequently, he strongly recommended keeping calendars of doubts and problems and
popular errors, together with a history of the wonders and monstrosities of nature.
He mentioned the need of putting nature to torture in order to make her answer our questions.
He criticized the adequacy of syllogistic reasoning for the e investigation of nature
and he urged a more particular induction.
Also, he pointed to characteristic fallacies which he was later to call the "idols" of
the mind.
Perhaps more important than any of these details is the new principle of "the classification
of the sciences" which Bacon employed in this work, several features of which deserve notice.
In the first place, he drew a sharp division between human learning and divine, the obvious
purpose of which was to set human reason free from the authority of revelation.
In the second place, he divided human learning into three main parts, paralleling the "three
parts of man's understanding": memory he saw as the basis for all kinds of history­--natural,
civil, ecclesiastical; imagination, as the basis for poesy--narrative, representative,
and allusive; and reason, as the basis for philosophy--divine, natural, and human.
Bacon's emphasis upon the divisions within philosophy has been influential in empirical
circles to this day.
He deprecated the generalized kind of thinking which schoolmen called "philosophy" and parceled
out its matter to special sciences.
It was, he thought, rather a depredation of other sciences than anything solid and substantive itself.
In its place, he proposed a new discipline under the name of "first philosophy," which
would be a receptacle for axioms and rules which are valid for several parts of knowledge.
Such a science, were it cultivated, would prove a fruitful fountain from which all might draw.
Of special interest is the account he gave of the relation between physics and metaphysics.
Both, in his view, are branches of natural science, the former dealing with material
and efficient causes, the latter with formal and final causes.
Physics, in his estimation, stands above natural history in that it is explanatory and not
merely descriptive; but it is below metaphysics, in that it sees causes in their particularity.
For example, if the cause of whiteness in snow or froth is inquired, physics will explain
that it is due to the subtle intermixture of air and water.
Metaphysics must explain it in terms of the "form of whiteness" and show why this particular
intermixture of elements is united with this universal character.
Bacon said he was not surprised that little progress had been made in metaphysics understood
in this way, because men had not paid enough attention to particulars.
But he also let escape the doubt that much could ever be accomplished in this direction.
Natural philosophy, he said, is like a pyramid, with natural history as the base, physics
as the middle, and metaphysics as the vertical point.
But "as for the vertical point, the summary law of nature, we know not whether man's inquiry
can attain to it."
It is not difficult to see that behind the new division of the sciences lay Bacon's complete
rejection of the medieval synthesis of Aristotle and St. Augustine.
Without repudiating theology, he sealed it off, restricting "divine knowledge" to faith,
manners, liturgy, and church government.
As for Aristotelianism, while Bacon preserved much of its terminology, he rejected its fundamental
tenets and turned to Democritus, the materialistic atomist, for his model of the world.
(Compare in this respect his younger friend, Thomas Hobbes.)
The new system of classification also points up the anthropocentric ("humanistic" in the
twentieth century sense of the word) character of Bacon's thinking.
Bacon did not accept Copernicus' theory of the heavens, but the kind of "Copernican revolution"
which Kant claimed to have brought about was incipient in Bacon's decision to abandon the
traditional division of the sciences based on nature, and to reorganize knowledge according
to the faculties of the mind.
For example, Bacon brought botany and the rise and fall of civilizations together as
branches of a single kind of inquiry: one is "natural history," the other "civil history";
what they have in common is the fact that they are both founded in man's memory and
observation, rather than in imagination or reason.
Bacon made no secret of his conviction that all knowledge has for its end the use and
benefit of man.
This attitude is evident from what has appeared already in what has been said about the necessity
of combining contemplation with action and in the deficiency he reported in respect to
mechanical and practical knowledge.
He was the champion of the kind of learning we associate with polytechnic colleges, business
schools, and research institutes.
His bias is underscored by the disproportion in the amount of space which he devotes to
"human" philosophy (fifteen chapters) as against "natural" philosophy (two chapters).
"Know thyself," he said, following the ancient oracle; for the knowledge of man is the "end
and term" of human learning, notwithstanding the fact that it is but a portion of "the
continent of nature."
Bacon thought of himself as standing on the threshold of a new age.
Among its harbingers he mentioned the vivacity of the "wits" of that time, the improved knowledge
of the past, the invention of printing, worldwide navigation, the increase of leisure, and political stability.
He spoke of the period as constituting a third great age in the history of the world, which
he hoped would far exceed in glory and achievement the days of Greece and Rome.