Volume 12, Number 6 · March 27, 1969
Bacon and the Menace of English Lit
By Frances A. Yates
Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose
by Brian Vickers
Cambridge, 315 pp., $7.50
The Eloquent "I": Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose
by Joan Webber
University of Wisconsin, 198 pp., $8.50
Francis Bacon's reputation has suffered strange vicissitudes. From being the admired father of the experimental method, dear to nineteenth-century progressives, he has been assigned a position of very limited importance by some, though not all, modern historians of science. These extreme oscillations are themselves an indication of the intrinsic power of this great figure, and those favoring the extreme of contempt have not succeeded in accounting for the undoubted fact that the early members of the Royal Society looked to Bacon as the inspiration of their efforts. Brian Vickers takes another way in to the solution of this apparent anomaly. From his study of Bacon's prose style which was geared to the rhetorical purpose of persuasion, he concludes that Bacon's enormous influence 'is not to be explained by the actual detailed content of his scientific programme. .but rather by the terms in which it was formulated and the imaginative eloquence with which these were transmitted.' That is to say, the real significance of Bacon lay in the persuasive power of the language in which he urged the advancement of knowledge.
Review, 2695 words
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