Introduction of Francis Bacon（中英对照）
Excerpt of the Chapter VII of < A History of Western Philosophy>Written by BERTRAND RUSSELL, Audio file < 307 Francis Bacon > delivered by BiHui.
摘自伯特兰·罗素所著《西方哲学史》第七章，音频文件< 307 Francis Bacon >已由必辉提供。
FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626), although his philosophy is in many ways unsatisfactory, has permanent importance as the founder of modern inductive method and the pioneer in the attempt at logical systematization of scientic procedure.
He was a son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and his aunt was the wife of Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley; he thus grew up in the atmosphere of state affairs.
He entered Parliament at the age of twenty-three, and became advir to Esx. None the less, when Esx fell from favour he helped in his procution. For this he has been s
everely blamed:
Lytton Strachey, for example, in his Elizabeth and Esx, reprents Bacon as a monster of treachery and ingratitude. This is quite unjust. He worked with Esx while Esx was loyal, but abandoned him when continued loyalty to him would have been treasonable; in this there was nothing that even the most rigid moralist of the age could condemn.
In spite of his abandonment of Esx, he was never completely in favour during the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth. With James's accession, however, his prospects improved. In 1617 he acquired his father's office of Keeper of the Great Seal, and in 1618 he became Lord Chancellor. But after he had held this great position for only two years, he was procuted for accepting bribes from litigants. He admitted the truth of accusation, pleading only that prents never influenced his decision. As to that, any one may form his own opinion, since there can be no evidence as to the decisions that Bacon would have come to in other circumstances. He was condemned to a fine of £40,000, to imprisonment in the Tower during the king's pleasure, to perpetual banishment from court
and inability to hold office. This ntence was only very partially executed. He was not forced to pay the fine, and he was kept in the Tower for only four days. But he was compelled to abandon public life, and to spend the remainder of his days in writing important books.
The ethics of the legal profession, in tho days, were somewhat lax. Almost every judge accepted prents, usually from both sides. Nowadays we think it atrocious for a judge to take bribes, but even more atrocious, after taking them, to decide against the givers of them. In tho days, prents were a matter of cour, and a judge showed his "virtue" by not being influenced by them. Bacon was condemned as an incident in a party squabble, not becau he was exceptionally guilty. He was not a man of outstanding moral eminence, like his forerunner Sir Thomas More, but he was also not exceptionally wicked. Morally, he was an average man, no better and no wor than the bulk of his contemporaries.
After five years spent in retirement, he died of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken full of snow.
Bacon's most important book, The Advancement of Learning, is in many ways remarkably modern. He is commonly regarded as the originator of the saying "Knowledge is power," and though he may have had predecessors who said the same thing, he said it with new emphasis. The whole basis of his philosophy was practical: to give mankind mastery over the forces of nature by means of scientific discoveries and inventions. He held that philosophy should be kept parate from theology, not intimately blended with it as in scholasticism. He accepted orthodox religion; he was not the man to quarrel with the government on such a matter. But while he thought that reason could show the existence of God, he regarded everything el in theology as known only by revelation. Indeed he held that the triumph of faith is greatest when to the unaided reason a dogma appears most absurd. Philosophy, however, should depend only upon reason. He was thus an advocate of the doctrine of "double truth," that of reason and that of revelation. This doctrine had been preached by certain Averroists in the thirteenth century, but had been condemned by the Church. The "triumph of faith" was, for the orthodox, a dangerous device. Bayle, in the late venteenth century, made ironical u of it, tting forth at grea
t length all that reason could say against some orthodox belief, and then concluding "so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing." How far Bacon's orthodoxy was sincere it is impossible to know.
Bacon was the first of the long line of scientifically minded philosophers who have emphasized the importance of induction as oppod to deduction. Like most of his successors, he tried to find some better kind of induction than what is called "induction by simple enumeration." Induction by simple enumeration may be illustrated by a parable. There was once upon a time a census officer who had to record the names of all houholders in a certain Welsh village. The first that he questioned was called William Williams; so were the cond, third, fourth, . . . At last he said to himlf: "This is tedious; evidently they are all called William Williams. I shall put them down so and take a holiday." But he was wrong; there was just one who name was John Jones. This shows that we may go astray if we trust too implicitly in induction by simple enumeration.
