§40. In Salomon’s House

Isaac Newton took alchemy very seriously, even if on his own terms. He was convinced that mechanism is a dead end in natural philosophy, that some form of organic, spiritual life was indispensable to the system of nature, and that alchemy was the best idea so far about how to unravel this last big se­cret.

It would be a long discussion to go into every side of alchemy’s contri­bution to experimental philosophy, but it is impossible to overlook the alchemists’ repertory of laboratory techniques and their catalog of apparatus. Alchemists were the first and before 1600 the only masters of the laboratory in Europe. They had mastered almost all of the chemical apparatus in use at Boyle’s time, which included some eighty standardized instruments, most of which are still used in laboratories today. Alchemists invented and trans­mitted basic laboratory operations, including the safe handling of chemicals, and processes of distillation, sublimation, filtering, and crystallization. They were the first to distinguish acid from alkaline, to catalog the salts, and distill alcohol.¹³²

The new experimenters of the seventeenth century want to separate the use of these laboratory techniques from the alchemists’ chimerical goal. The transformation of alchemy into chemistry begins with the passing of the techniques and apparatus into the hands of people who had objects quite dif­ferent from the alchemists.

Bacon is alert to alchemy, but the tradition contains a lot of trash and the experimental ethics are appalling. Yet the idea—experimental control over the qualities of nature—is near to Bacon’s heart, as is the alchemists’ laboratory method, however flawed. The philosopher’s stone is doubtless unavailing, but something more realistic might come from alchemical oper­ations if the business were better managed. He wants to discredit and make unappealing the alchemists’ selfishness and obsessive privacy, and introduce Europeans to the idea of experimental research organized as a progressive corporation working for the common weal.

Bacon’s value of application, utilitas, is not what Jeremy Bentham advocates more than a century later, which was, roughly, democratic pleasure. Bacon still felt the tug of Christian morality, the morality of charity and pity. He thinks Socrates made a mistake to give up “the perambulation of the world,” as he describes natural philosophy. Without it, one falls prey, as Socrates un­wittingly demonstrates, to the insidious idea that truth is native to the human mind and not something that enters from outside. Bacon discredits this eval­uation on frankly moral, that is to say Christian, grounds. It is an alienation of the mind, slothful, proud self-flattery, ostentatious, and uncharitable. Understanding grows through questions, and questions emerge only when the mind is confronted, even painfully, by negative responses, disenchanting refutations, and unforeseen surprises.

A new Organon by itself changes nothing without new human beings in new institutions to implement the method and make it effective. Bacon's new instrument will make the mind a powerful organ for the advancement of hu­manity, but only if people submit.

Bacon severs the ancient link between science and wisdom. Science is a regimen of impersonal, objective procedures advanced by dedicated disci­ples. The new way of knowledge requires a new kind of sage, devoted not to tranquility but to investigating nature for public benefit. This sage has a Hippocratic pedigree in the ancient expectation that a physician pursue research for the improvement of the art and the cause of philanthropy. So too the sages Bacon depicts in his popular utopian tale, New Atlantis. The work recounts the accidental discovery by English sailors of the long-lost is­land continent. Admitted into the secluded kingdom, they are introduced to its people and institutions, especially Salomon's House, also known as the College of the Six Days' Work, “dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.” Its purpose is “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The College was founded long ago under their now leg­endary king and lawgiver Solamona. “He instituted that house for the finding out of the true nature of all things (whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them).”¹³⁴

The experimenters of Salomon's House had mastered optics and possessed telescopes and microscopes.

Salomon’s House is “the very eye of this kingdom.” Its members know the secrets of creation, and are able to confirm and interpret miracles and distin­guish the real works of God or nature from fraud and illusion (one of Roger Bacon’s three prerogatives of experimental science). They have consultations with the government to decide “which of the inventions and experiences we have discovered shall be published and which not,” though they also keep an oath among themselves not to share “those which we think fit to keep secret.” They conduct their own rite of divine worship, including “certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of lauds and thanks to God for his marvelous works, and forms of prayer imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of our labors, and the turning of them into good and holy uses.” They make an annual circuit of the kingdom, publishing “such new profitable inventions as we think good,” also receiving reports of any “diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempests, earthquakes, great inundations, [or] comets” that may have been visited upon the people, for which they offer nat­ural explanations, and give “counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them.”¹³⁶

In ambition, Salomon’s House resembles the Italian academies of the six­teenth century, including Galileo’s Lincei, yet the cloak of secrecy has been lifted from an organized team of publicly funded researchers.

That is the new idea in Bacon. Not just experimental experience, dis­ciplined by method—Galen was already there; rather a method that presupposes cooperative, coordinated research, and cannot be the endeavor of single person however encyclopedic, embodied in a publicly funded insti­tution honoring science and technology.