Studies in Philology

Abstract:

This essay traces how Francis Bacon's late-career observational methods and poetics of natural history in the Preparation for an Experimental and Natural History (1620) evolve from the more imaginative poetics of the Advancement of Learning (1605). In enacting his project, Bacon recognized and sought to balance the tensions between flattering fictions and empiricism and, as a way of mediating between them, imagination and sensory experience. Bacon's late-career poetics attempts to control narrative and desire by restraining the imagination and making language and matter indistinguishable to the point that his written natural history "is used as the primary matter of philosophy, and the basic stuff and raw material of true induction." The resulting elision of thought, writing, and matter compels him to abandon the Advancement's myth of Orpheus taming the beasts and humanist tropes like the Erasmian treasure house of speech to describe his Great Instauration's impacts on civilization. Bacon's unrealized ideal is to free the natural philosopher to move seamlessly from written natural history to action without imaginative mediation. However, he cannot abandon fiction as a means of mythologizing his project for readers even as he seeks to excise all vestiges of the imagination from his poetics of natural history.