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Knowledge is Power
Bacon and Descartes

In the century between Copernicus and Galileo, science had

turned the world upside down. The earth was no longer at the
centre of the universe, and new discoveries in anatomy, physiology,
chemistry and physics reminded people that the Ancients did not
know everything after all. There was a lot out there still to be
discovered.
People also started thinking about science itself. What was the
best way to do it? How could we be sure that new discoveries were
accurate? And how could we use science to improve our comfort,
health and happiness? Two individuals in particular thought deeply
about science: one an English lawyer and politician, the other a
French philosopher.
The Englishman was Francis Bacon (1561–1626). His father,
Copyright 2012. Yale University Press.

Nicholas Bacon, rose from humble beginnings to become a

powerful official for Queen Elizabeth I. Nicholas knew how impor-
tant education is, so he sent his son to the University of Cambridge.

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Francis, too, served Elizabeth, as well as King James I, after

Elizabeth died. He was an expert on English law, took part in
several important trials and, after he became Lord Chancellor, was
one of the major legal figures of his time. He was also active as a
member of parliament.
Bacon was very enthusiastic about science. He spent a lot of time
doing chemistry experiments and observing all kinds of curious
things in nature, from plants and animals to weather and
magnetism. More important than any discovery he made were his
elegant and persuasive arguments about why science was worth
doing, and how it should be done. Bacon urged people to value
science. ‘Knowledge is power,’ he famously said, and science is the
best way to achieve that knowledge. So he encouraged Elizabeth
and James to use public money to build laboratories and provide
places for scientists to do their work. Scientists, he thought, should
form societies, or academies, so they could meet and exchange
their ideas and observations. Science, he said, offers humans the
means to understand nature, and, by understanding, to be able to
control her.
Bacon wrote clearly about the best way for science to advance.
Scientists needed to make sure that the words they used were
precise and easily understood by others. They needed to approach
their investigations with open minds, instead of trying to prove
what they thought they already knew. Above all, they must repeat
their experiments and observations, so that they can be certain of
their results. This is the method of induction. For example, by
counting, weighing or mixing chemicals again and again, the
chemist can become properly confident about what is going on. As
scientists collect more and more observations, or inductions,
they will become surer about what will happen. They can use
these inductions to form generalisations, which in turn will
show them the laws governing how nature works. Bacon’s ideas
continued to inspire scientists for many generations. They still do
so today.
So, in different ways, did those of the Frenchman René Descartes
(1596–1650). He thought deeply about the work of both Harvey

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and Galileo. Like Galileo, Descartes was a Catholic who neverthe-

less passionately believed that religion should not come into the
study of the natural world. Like Harvey, Descartes examined
human and animal bodies and explained how they worked in ways
that went far beyond what Galen had taught. In fact, even more
than either Harvey or Galileo, Descartes tried to establish both
science and philosophy on entirely new foundations. Although
today we remember him mostly as a philosopher, he was much
more of a practising scientist than Bacon.
Descartes was born in La Haye, in Touraine, France. A clever
boy, he went to a famous school, La Flèche, in the Loire region,
where excellent French wines are made. At La Flèche, he learned of
Galileo’s discoveries with his telescope, Copernicus’s placing the
sun at the centre of the universe, and the latest mathematics. He
graduated in law at the University of Poitiers, and then he did a
very surprising thing: he volunteered for an army of Protestants.
War raged in Europe during the whole of Descartes’ adult life (the
Thirty Years War), and for almost nine years, he was part of it.
Descartes never actually fought, although his knowledge of prac-
tical mathematics, and where cannon-balls might land, could have
helped the soldiers. He was attached to both Protestant and
Catholic armies during these years, and seemed always to be where
important political or military events were taking place. We don’t
know what he was doing, or how he got the money to travel so
much. Perhaps he was a spy. If so, it was probably for the Catholics,
to whom he always remained loyal.
Early in his adventures, on 10 November 1619, in a warm, stove-
lit room, half asleep, half awake, he came to two conclusions. First,
if he were ever to come to true knowledge, he had to do it all
himself. The teachings of Aristotle and other authorities would not
do. He needed to start over. Second, he concluded that the only
way to start over was simply by doubting everything! Later that
night, he had three dreams that he understood as encouraging this
idea. He didn’t publish anything then, and in any case, his military
adventures had just begun. But this decisive day (and night) started
him on his path to explain the universe and everything in it, as well

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as the rules that might help others obtain scientific knowledge with
confidence.
Doubting everything meant taking nothing for granted, and
then, bit by bit, following your nose by accepting only things you
can be sure about. But what could he be sure about? In the first
instance, only one thing: that he was planning this scientific and
philosophical project. He was thinking about how to arrive at
certain knowledge, but, more simply, he was thinking. ‘Cogito, ergo
sum,’ he wrote in Latin: ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ I exist because I
am thinking these thoughts.
This simple statement was Descartes’ starting-point. That is all
well and good, we might say, but what next? For Descartes, it had
one immediate and far-reaching consequence: I exist because I am
thinking, but I can imagine that I could think without having a
body. However, if I had a body and couldn’t think, I wouldn’t know
it. Therefore, my body and the thinking part (my mind, or soul)
must be separate and distinct. This was the basis of dualism, the
notion that the universe is made up of two completely different
kinds of things: matter (for instance, human bodies, but also
chairs, stones, planets, cats and dogs) and spirit (the human soul or
mind). Descartes thus insisted that our minds – how we know we
exist – have a very special place in the universe.
Now, people before and long after Descartes recognised that
human beings are a special kind of animal. We have the ability to
do things that no other animal has: to read and write, to make
sense of the complexities of the world, to build jet planes and
atomic bombs. Specialness was not the unusual part of Descartes’
separation of our minds and our bodies. The amazing step
was what he did with the rest of the world, the material part.
Mind and matter are what the world is made up of, he said, and
matter is the subject of science. This means that the material, non-
thinking, parts of how we function can be understood in simple
physical terms. And it means that all plants and all other animals,
none of which have a soul, can also be completely reduced to
matter doing its stuff. Along with trees and flowers, the fish and
elephants are nothing but more or less complicated machines.

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According to Descartes, they are things that can be completely

understood.
Descartes knew about automata, mechanical lifelike figures
specially made to move and do certain things. We would call them
robots. For example, a lot of seventeenth-century town clocks had
little mechanical figures, often a man coming out on the hour to
strike a gong. They were all the rage in Descartes’ day (and some
still work now). People had already wondered if – since human
beings could make such delicate figures, able to move and imitate
humans or animals – perhaps a better mechanic could go one step
further and make a dog that could eat and bark, as well as move.
Descartes had no desire to make these toys, but in his thinking,
plants and animals were just extremely complicated automata, with
no real feelings and only the capacity to respond to what was
happening around them. These machines were matter, which
could be understood by scientists in terms of mechanical and
chemical principles. Descartes read William Harvey’s work on the
‘mechanical’ actions of the heart and the circulation of the blood,
and he believed that this provided evidence for his system. (His
own explanation of what goes on when the blood reaches the heart,
and why it circulates, has been forgotten.) Descartes had great
hopes that such ideas could explain much about health and disease,
and ultimately offer human beings the knowledge of how to live, if
not forever, at least for a very long time.
Having shown to his satisfaction that the universe is composed
of two separate kinds of thing, matter and mind, Descartes puzzled
how the human mind and its body were actually connected. He
asked himself how they could be connected, if matter has substance
and occupies space, and mind is the opposite, located nowhere and
without any material basis at all. It had been common since the
time of Hippocrates to associate our thinking powers with the
brain. A blow to the head could knock a person out, and many
medical men had observed that injuries and diseases of the brain
led to changes in our mental functions. At one point, Descartes
seemed to think that the human soul is located in a gland, in the
middle of our brains, but he knew that, according to the logic of

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the system he had created, matter and mind could never physically
interact. People later called this model of human beings ‘the ghost
in the machine’, meaning that our machine-like bodies were
somehow driven by a ghost-like mind, or soul. The problem then
was to explain how many dogs, chimpanzees, horses and other
animals share so many of our mental capacities without having
their own ‘ghosts’. Dogs and cats can show fear or anger, and dogs
at least seem to be able to express love for their owners. (Cats are a
law unto themselves.)
Descartes’ curious mind puzzled over many other things: not
surprising for someone who wrote a book called simply Le Monde
(‘The World’). He accepted Copernicus’s ideas about the relation-
ship between the earth and the sun, but was more careful than
Galileo had been in presenting his ideas so that he did not offend
the Church authorities. He also wrote about motion, falling objects,
and other problems that attracted Galileo. Unfortunately, despite
having some followers in his day, Descartes’ ideas about how the
universe works could not compete with those of giants like Galileo
and Isaac Newton, and few remember Descartes’ physics today.
If he lost out to clever men in the physics class, whether you
know it or not, you follow in Descartes’ footsteps every time you
solve problems in algebra and geometry. Descartes had the bright
idea of using a, b, c in algebra problems to stand for the known,
and x, y, z to stand for the unknown. So when you are asked to
solve an equation such as x = a + b2, you are continuing the prac-
tice that Descartes started. And when you plot something on a
graph, with a horizontal and a vertical axis, you are also using his
invention. Descartes himself solved various algebraic and geometric
problems in his book on those subjects, published along with the
one on the world.
By so sharply separating body and mind, the material and the
mental worlds, Descartes stressed how important the material
world is for science. Astronomy, physics and chemistry deal with
matter. So does biology, and if his idea of the animal-machine
seems a bit far-fetched, biologists and doctors still try to under-
stand how plants and animals function in terms of their material

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parts. It was just unfortunate for Descartes that his idea that medi-
cine would quickly show people how to live for much longer was a
bit before its time. He himself was pretty healthy until he accepted
an invitation to go to Sweden to teach the Swedish queen his
philosophy and knowledge of the world. She rose early and insisted
that he give her the lessons very early in the morning. Descartes
hated the cold. He did not survive even his first winter in Sweden.
Catching some kind of infection, he died in February 1650, seven
weeks before his fifty-fourth birthday. It was a sad end for someone
who believed that he would live at least a hundred years.
Bacon and Descartes had lofty ideals for science. They differed
in their ideas about how science could advance, but were passionate
that it should. Bacon’s vision was of science as a shared, state-
funded enterprise. Descartes was more content to work things out
by himself. Both wanted other people to take on and develop their
ideas. Both men also believed that science is a special activity,
superior to the humdrum of ordinary life. It deserved to be singled
out in this way because science adds to our stock of knowledge
and our ability to understand nature. Such understanding could
improve our lives and the public good.

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