HKB
by contemplation an over-large scope, do | Markku Peltonen, Cambridge 1996) offer too great a restraint to natural and | comments on Bacon's separation of lawful knowledge, being unjustly jealous | divinity and natural philosophy that every reach and depth of knowledge | (quotations in Briggs' text are from wherewith their conceits have not been | THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING): acquainted, should be too high an | elevation of man's wit, and a searching | A longstanding commonplace in Bacon and ravelling too far into God's secrets; | scholarship has been the notion that an opinion that ariseth either of envy | the Baconian advancement of learning (which is proud weakness and to be | depends upon a strict separation of censured and not confuted), or else of a | divinity and natural philosophy. In deceitful simplicity. For if they mean | a number of memorable passages Bacon that the ignorance of a second cause doth | indeed warns his readers of the dire make men more devoutly to depend upon the | consequences of confusing divinity providence of God, as supposing the | with natural science: to combine effects to come immediately from his hand, | them, he says, is to confound them. I demand of them, as Job demanded of his | This is supposedly what Plato and the friends, WILL YOU LIE FOR GOD AS MAN WILL | scholastics did, and what Bacon FOR MAN TO | explicitly designs the new learning | to overcome. Even the acceptable | hybrid "divine philosophy," when it | is "commixed together" with natural | philosophy, leads to "an heretical | religion, and an imaginary and | fabulous philosophy" (III, 350). | According to this emphatic strand of | Baconian doctrine, religion that | joins with the study of nature is in | danger of becoming atheistic, or an | enthusiastic rival of the true | church. Natural philosophy that | traffics unwisely with divinity | collapses into idolatry or fakery. | | Bacon's exemplum of these abuses in a | modern proto-science is the divine | philosophy of the Paracelsian school, | which seeks "the truth of all natural | philosophy in the Scriptures." The | Paracelsians mirror and reverse the | heresies of pagan pantheism by | seeking what is "dead" (mortal or | natural) from among the "living" | (eternal) truths of divinity, when | "the scope or purpose of the Spirit | of God is not to express matters of | nature in the Scriptures, otherwise | than in passage, and for application | to man's capacity and to matters | moral or divine" (ut 485-6). If we | take Thomas Sprat at his word, the | Royal Society was founded on | generally similar principles.