3 - Creating modernity's others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England: antiquarian and philological inflections

Summary

Introduction

Francis Bacon has a secure place in the pantheon consecrated by intellectual historians to the makers of modernity. As we have discussed in Chapter 2, Bacon's bold heralding of the charter for his Natural Philosophy insistently proclaims the need for a decisive break with the past if the quest for genuine knowledge is to be placed on its proper course. An essential part of Bacon's scientific program, we recall, is the necessity of direct experience and the exercise of individual reason in the pursuit of true knowledge, and the concomitant distrust of traditional authority, mediated by texts and testimonies: “First, then, away with antiquities, and citation or testimonies of authors, and also with disputes and controversies and differing opinions – everything, in short, which is philological” (Bacon 1968 [1857–74] IV: 254). By oft-cited pronouncements such as these, Bacon created – or portrayed himself as creating – the kind of gap between the past and the present that is constitutive of the advent of modernity, in this instance between a supernaturalist worldview resting on traditional authority and a naturalist worldview resting upon the exercise of reason.

In the preceding pages, we have traced some of the linguistic inflections of Bacon's proclaimed epistemic break in science, and followed them as they were extended and transformed through the work of John Locke and others.