Novum Organum

What It Is

A Latin treatise of 1620, written by the Lord Chancellor of England in the last years before his political disgrace. The title is a provocation: Aristotle's works on logic were known as the Organon, the instrument, and Bacon is announcing a replacement.

It is the second part of a six-part project, the Great Instauration, which he never finished. What he did finish is an attack on the way Europe had been reasoning for two thousand years, and a proposal to reason differently.

It is written in numbered aphorisms, 130 in the first book and 52 in the second. Bacon chose the form deliberately. Continuous prose, he thought, lulls a reader into agreement; a broken text makes you stop and check.

Why It Matters

The Idols are the reason to read it. Bacon sorts the mind's failures into four kinds and gives each of them a name that has stuck. It is the first serious account of how thinking reliably goes wrong, and it remains the best short catalogue of cognitive bias ever written, three and a half centuries before psychology got round to the subject.

The second reason is institutional. Bacon made knowledge a collective enterprise, something done by many people over generations rather than by a genius in a room. The Royal Society claimed him as its founder. The Encyclopedie put him at the head of its family tree. The modern research laboratory is a Baconian idea.

The third reason is the one now under attack. Bacon wanted knowledge for power over nature, for what he called the relief of man's estate, and he said so in terms that have made him the defendant in every argument since about what technological mastery costs. You cannot have the twenty-first century's confidence or its unease without him.

Before You Read

Shorter than it looks. Book I is a couple of hours, and it is the part that matters.

Book II is Bacon putting his method to work at length, on a single scientific problem. It is technical, laborious, and unfinished. Read Book I closely and go through Book II selectively unless you want to watch the machinery turn.

Book I is one of the sharpest things ever written about how minds go wrong. Book II is Bacon showing his working. It is honest of him, and it is very slow.

Which Translation to Read

• Michael Silverthorne, edited by Lisa Jardine (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2000), published as The New Organon — recommended. A modern English that keeps the snap of the aphorisms without sounding contemporary, and Jardine's introduction places the book inside Bacon's career, his politics and his ambitions for the state. The obvious choice for a first reader. The cost: the notes are sparse. You get the text with little help through the technical thickets of Book II. View on Amazon →
• Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Open Court, 1994). The most helpful edition if you want to follow the argument rather than admire the prose, with substantial editorial commentary on what Bacon is actually claiming. The cost: less elegant English, and harder to find.
• Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (The Oxford Francis Bacon, volume XI, Clarendon Press, 2004). The critical edition, with the Latin facing the English and an apparatus that settles textual questions nobody else addresses. The cost: it is priced for libraries and built for scholars.

Take Silverthorne to read Bacon, Urbach and Gibson to understand him, Rees for the Latin. One warning: the free editions circulating online use the Victorian Spedding, Ellis and Heath translation of the 1850s, which is serviceable but 170 years old, and Bacon's technical vocabulary has drifted a long way since.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the aphorisms one at a time. They are built to be stopped at, and reading them in a rush is a way of failing to notice how many of them are about you.

Read the Idols twice, and then read a week of your own news with them in hand.

Keep a note of where Bacon is wrong. He never accepted Copernicus. The man who told Europe how to do science was not much good at doing it himself, and the point of him is not his results. It is that he changed what a result was for.