著者

伊東 博明

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究 (ISSN:21887535)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.257, pp.18-24, 2011 (Released:2021-07-22)

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Francis Bacon is generally considered as a 'modern' thinker, whose "works were all directed at replacing the philological and literal type of culture with the techno-scientih'c one"(Paolo Rossi). But does this evaluation hold for his De safiientia velcrum, where he interpreted thirty-one mythological figures and their fables in a typically humanistic manner ? This paper is an attempt to give a possible answer to this question. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon doubted that ancient fables contained "the religious, political, and philosophical secret or mystery." This scepticism, however, vanished in his De sapientia velerumc (1609), where he said that "beneath many fables of ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and an allegory." He expounded the same view in De dignitate et augumenlis scientium (1623), a treatise that put forward his definitive views on many issues. This chronological survey indicates that the attraction of the ancient fables was too strong for Bacon to refrain from giving fantastic interpretations to them. However. Bacon also tried to escape from the humanistic and allegorical way of thinking, saying that "the truth must be discovered by the light of nature, not recovered from the darkness of the past." It is this duality that defines the singular place occupied by Bacon in the history of philosophy.