The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Jacobs Alan;

Author:Jacobs, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

What lies at the heart of this “affinity”? “Both seek knowledge for the sake of power (in Bacon’s words, as ‘a spouse for fruit,’ not a ‘curtesan for pleasure’), both move in a grandiose dream of days when Man shall have been raised to the performance of ‘all things possible.’ ” What we now call magic and what we now call science find their place “among the other dreams of power which then haunted the European mind”—including those of Machiavelli.

It has often been said of Bacon that he advocated “putting Nature on the rack” in order to extract her secrets by torture. As Peter Pesic has argued in a series of essays, this is not quite right: it was Leibniz who spoke of “the art of inquiry into nature itself and of putting it on the rack—the art of experiment which Lord Bacon began so ably.” But Bacon often wrote of nature as Proteus, the shape-shifting god, and noted that if you wished to get the truth out of Proteus, “the only way was first to secure his hands with handcuffs, and then to bind him with chains.” Human “art”—by which Bacon means something like “ingenuity”—“endeavours by much vexing of bodies to force Nature to its will and conquer and subdue her.”18 This is what Lewis means by “dreams of power”: not submission to an ordained place within a God-made cosmos, but the pursuit by the world’s apex predator of “all things possible.” We are back within the realm of force, to which all of us are subject, as described in the Iliad.

The third and last chapter of The Abolition of Man begins with the idea of the human “conquest of Nature”:

“Man has Nature whacked,” said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. “No matter,” he said, “I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.” . . . I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?19

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