Author: rob@007computer.com

Thanks to Christina Waldman for pointing out Brian McClinton critiques writers with a bias against Bacon
“Saving Bacon 4“

Brian McClinton’s letter, Sept. 27, 2005, in Prospect Magazine, Nov. 20, 2005.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/7095-letters.

27th September 2005

In his travesty of the character and ideas of Francis Bacon, Terence Kealey describes him as an “unusually unpleasant” man “who collected… many bribes.” On the contrary, JG Crowther demonstrates (Francis Bacon: The First Statesman of Science, 1960) that Bacon was “fundamentally incorruptible.” Indeed he was almost alone among leading politicians in not paying James I for his offices and promotions. Nieves Mathews in Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (1996), argues that he was completely innocent of the charges of bribery and that writers such as Macaulay were themselves guilty of slandering Bacon’s reputation and unfairly influencing later generations.

The best judges of Bacon’s character are those nearest to him. To his apothecary Peter Boener he was “a noteworthy example… of all virtue, gentleness, peacefulness, and patience.” To his editor Rawley, “if [ever] there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern times, it was upon him.” Aubrey tells us that “all that were great and good loved and honoured him.”

As for his ideas, Kealey completely misrepresents his whole philosophy. Bacon’s lodestar was not power, as he suggests, but truth. He spells it out himself in his beautiful Proem: “For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth.”

In other words, Bacon’s “method” is as provisional as that of Popper, who completely misrepresents him. If modern science is based upon the presumption of error and fallibility, then Bacon remains its true trumpeter. Nor did he rely only on induction, as Kealey implies, for he insisted on a continual interchange between theory and experiment. When he wrote that “knowledge itself is power” he meant not worldly success or useful technology but the proof of scientific theories: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule” (Novum Organum). In short, only by making nature act in a certain way—exercising power—can we be sure that we understand how it does act, and only by knowing that can we control it. Bacon realised that science could be useful for the good of mankind but he also believed in knowledge and work for their own sake as “pledges of truth.”

Finally, Kealey goes off the rails altogether in his paean to private funding of science. It was the co-operative and collaborative nature of scientific discovery that concerned Bacon, not the issue of the state’s role.

Frankly, it is a puzzle why so many writers in England persistently misrepresent one of the world’s greatest geniuses. Most of them would improve their scholarship if they read Bacon himself instead of parroting his unreliable commentators.

Lisburn, Northern Ireland
Academic journals

26th September 2005 Letters.

A book by Don Elfenbein

UPDATE: June 1, 2023:

PDF – THE PLAY THAT SOLVES THE SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP MYSTERY

Video by the Francis Bacon Society

Video presented by guitaoist

Bacon and Shakespeare Parallelisms Pt. 3: 41/885 Examples

Bacon and Shakespeare Parallelisms Paperback – August 24, 2016
by Edwin 1835-1908 Reed (Author)

The Martyrdom of Francis Bacon by Alfred Dodd

From :  Alfred Dodd’s Book

The Martyrdom of Francis Bacon

pp. 30-35
Chapter II

His Birth, Life and Labours, 1561-1621

(special thanks to Gerald Francis Bacon)

Pallas Athena was the Goddess of Wisdom and was supposed to preside over the whole of the intellectual and moral side of human life. She was the patroness of the useful and elegant arts such as weaving (felling), imparting to her devotees the peuculiar Masonic Virtues of Prudence, Courage, Preserverance. She protected the State from outward enemies. The Britannia on our English coins is taken from Pallas. She was credited with being the inventor of musical instruments. The Olive wreath denoting Peace was her emblem. She was a Creator and Preserver.

She was depicted in Greek Art with a Helmet on her head. She held the Spear of Knowledge in her right hand, poised to strike at the Serpent of Ignorance writhing under her foot. The large Helmet denoted that she waged invisibly a silent war against Sloth and Ignorance. She was usually placed on the Greek Temples with a Golden Spear in her hand. When the morning rays of the sun glinted on the weapon, causing it apparently to tremble, the common people were in the habit of saying smilingly : “Athena is Shaking her Spear again.” She was thus known as “the Spear Shaker” or ” the “Shaker of the Spear.”….

Read more…>

By SirBacon.org

Bacon and Shakespeare on Love by Edwin Reed

Pages 5-30

In a lecture on Francis Bacon’s essays, recently delivered in our American Cambridge by an instructor of Harvard university, the audience, when the essay of Love had been read, was convulsed with laughter by the quizzical injunction addressed to it. “Fancy Bacon writing ‘Romeo and Juliet!'” Lord Tennyson, had he been present, would undoubtedly have been in full sympathy with the spirit of the occasion, for he also, referring to the same essay, once asked, ” Could Bacon, holding such sentiments, have written ‘Romeo and Juliet?’ ” Tennyson’s own answer to the question was this : “any man who believes that he could have done so is a fool.” Indeed, the opinion among cultivated people on both sides of the Atlantic, that the greatest with one possible exception the world has produced, and according to Macaulay, the “possessor of the most exquisitely constructed intellect ever bestowed on any children of men” was incapacitated by a constitutional defect in his character to write the garden scene in the famous play is so general that we are brought face to face with a new problem, not in authorship alone, but in psychology itself. The question is not one of intellectual power, of style of writing, of differences in poetry and prose as expressions of thought, but of the heart, of pure feeling. Read more…>

Also, for a Happy Valentine’s day…

LOVE AND BUSINESS by Robert Theobald

from the book Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light

Bacon and Shakespeare Parallelisms Paperback – August 24, 2016
by Edwin 1835-1908 Reed (Author)

“I have just had a letter from a man who wants my opinion as to whether Shakespeare’s Plays were written by Bacon. I feel inclined to write back, “Don’t be a fool, sir!’ The way in which Bacon speaks of love would be enough to prove that he was not Shakespeare. ” I know not how, but martial men are given to love. I think it is but as they are given to wine, for perils commonly asked to be paid in pleasures.’ How could a man with such an idea of love write Romeo and Juliet?

And yet even Tennyson might have paused before shutting off the claims for Bacon with such resolute incredulity, not to say unexpressed incivility. For he himself had found in Bacon qualities which are at first sight as incompatible with an unromantic view of love, as he supposed Shakespeare to be. Tennyson had been on one occasion speaking of Lord Bacon, and said,

“That certain passages of his writings, their frequent eloquence and vivid completeness lifted him more than those of almost any other writer.”

And of the Essays he said,

“There is more wisdom compressed into that small volume than in any other book of the same size that I know.” (Life, II. 76, 415).

Clearly, then, any unfavourable impression derived from one or tow passages in a small Essay may be corrected and perhaps even vindicated when a larger view is taken. What more could he say of Shakespeare’s wisdom than this?

The objection which Tennyson expressed so energetically is one that is often raised when the Baconian theory is under discussion.

Read more…>