Bacon, Francis Nature

Briggs, John C. Francis Bacon and the rhetoric of nature. Cambridge (MA) Harvard Univ P, 1989. 

Linden, Stanton J. Roger Bacon in the age of Francis The Mirror ofalchimy and the Mirror of Nature. Cauda Pavonis 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991) 10-13. 

Of all natural philosophers, Hippocrates best incorporated the Calvinist way of doing research. And it was to Hippocrates, in Boerhaave s words, that all the later authors owed everything that was good in their work. 30 Hence Boerhaave recommended that his students practice chemistry after the Hippocratic manner. This means that Hippocrates was Boerhaave s first and foremost role model in his academic pursuits. So even though Boerhaave presented Francis Bacon as a role model for the natural philosophy of his day (Bacon s experimental method, after all, exactly fitted Boerhaave s Hippocratic model), for Boerhaave it was a Calvinist Hippocrates who, before Bacon, made observation central to medicine, thereby establishing the right method for natural philosophy as a whole.31... 

Boyle adopted the general philosophical approach to the study of nature espoused by Francis Bacon. People who followed Bacon s ideas about the study of nature tended to regard experiments as the most reliable route to knowledge and tried to be as objective about nature as possible. They also moved away from asking teleological question such as what the end purpose of matter might be. Instead, they tried to confine their questions to how nature functioned. 

Boyle, Robert. (1627-1691). A native of Ireland, Boyle devoted his life to experiments in what was then called natural philosophy, i.e., physical science. He was influenced early by Galileo. His interest aroused by a pump that had just been invented, Boyle studied the properties of air, on which he wrote a treatise (1660). Soon thereafter, he stated the famous law that bears his name (see following entry). Boyle s group of scientific enthusiasts was known as the invisible college , and in 1663 it became the Royal Society of London. Boyle was one of the first to apply the principle that Francis Bacon had described as the new method —namely, inductive experimentation as opposed to the deductive method of Aristotle—and this became and has remained the cornerstone of scientific research. Boyle also investigated hydrostatics, desalination of seawater, crystals, electricity, etc. He approached but never quite stated the atomic theory of matter however, he did distinguish between compounds and mixtures and conceived the idea of particles becoming associated to form molecules. 

Rossi, Francis Bacon, 26 But Bacon saw the development of the mechanical arts as a new and exciting cultural event, and his reappraisal of their social and scientific significance and of their aims enabled him to disprove some of Aristotle s theories concerning the relation of art to nature. See also pp. 238—239 nn. 93—97, and Bacon s Idea of Science, 31—43. 

Peter Pesic, Wrestling with Proteus Francis Bacon and the Torture of Nature, Isis 90(1999), 81-94. 

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