The publication of his great educational proposal was initially overshadowed by the discovery a few days later of the Gunpowder Plot, but its influence endures. The Advancement of Learning opened with a double-length pull-out strip entitled Analysis, a visual aid for the treatise to follow. This praised ‘the excellency of learning’ and criticised ‘the zeal and jealousy’ of divines (self-appointed representatives of God), ‘the severity and arrogance’ of politicians, and the slightly vaguer ‘errors and imperfections of learned men’. Other targets included those who displayed a ‘distrust of new discoveries’; the ‘conceit that the best opinions prevail’; an ‘impatience of doubt’; a ‘mistaking of the end of knowledge’; and the ‘dogmatic delivery of knowledge’.
A second pull-out section at the start of the second volume – the one concerned with how Bacon’s improved theories of learning may be practised – again presented a shorthand view of the text to come. Here the pluses – ‘the places of learning, the books of learning, the person of the learned’ – were again outnumbered by obstacles, some of which prevail today: the ‘smallness of rewards for lecturers’; the ‘want of apparatus for experiments’; a ‘want of mutual intercourse between the universities of Europe’; and the ‘want of public appointment of writers or inquirers into the less known branches of knowledge’.
And then, in the form of a family tree, came Bacon’s approximation of what such a compendium of knowledge should look like, with the branch devoted to Human Learning providing the most useful snapshot of the range and value of academic pursuits at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The accumulation of learning, Bacon decreed, should be divided into History, Philosophy and Poesy. History is then subdivided into Natural History (‘of creatures, of marvels, of arts’), Civil History (‘memorials, antiquities, chronicles, lives and narrations’), Ecclesiastical (‘history of the Church, of prophecy, of providence’) and Literary (‘orations, letters, sayings etc.’). Poesy was concerned with poetry and the imagination (‘narrative, representative, allusive’). Philosophy was split into science (physical and metaphysical), prudence (experimental and magical), body (medicine, athletics and the ‘sensual arts’) and mind (human will and the ‘nature of good’), and reason (invention, judgement, memory and tradition).
Future encyclopaedists would perceive in Bacon’s summary a significant practical pointer for their own work, and certainly a confident mission statement – a reaffirmation that their occupation fulfilled a modern need.
The vastness of the realms of knowledge now made these categorisations, this streamlining, a necessity. Encyclopaedia Britannica was still 160 years away, but these considerations would still be valid when its publishers first met. Bacon lived at a time when our understanding of science and natural history was producing a revolution of the mind: the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler heralded a new type of precision thinking, and their number would soon be swelled by Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton. The encyclopaedia was about to turn from a mere storehouse of facts to a more contemplative whole, and it would provide the natural and facilitating companion to a complete transformation of how we viewed the world.
* Journal of the American Oriental Society, Oct–Dec 2002, vol. 122, no. 4.
* As quoted by Lauren Christos, ‘The Yongle Dadian: The Origin, Destruction, Dispersal and Reclamation of a Chinese Cultural Treasure’, Journal of Library and Information Science, April 2010, vol. 36, no. 1.
* For more detail on the Siku quanshu and other Chinese encyclopaedias see Harriet T. Zurndorfer in König and Woolf, above. The Lianshi had a medieval precedent of sorts: Horus Deliciarum was edited by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg c.1180, although it was as much a visual instruction as a textual one, the abbess painting or commissioning more than 300 miniature illuminations depicting philosophical, religious and scientific scenes. The original was destroyed in a fire in 1870, but copies remain.
* Other volumes are scattered around the world – Germany has five, Britain fifty-one, and the Library of Congress forty-one.
* The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
* A fortuitous link: After Thomas Digges died, his widow went on to marry Thomas Russell, one of the trustees of Shakespeare’s will.
* Another fortuitous link: Batman was dedicated to Henry Carey, patron of the theatre company Shakespeare wrote for in the 1590s.
* See Neil Rhodes’s Shakespeare’s Encyclopaedias in König and Woolf, above. Also J.E. Hankins, Shakespeare’s Derived Imagery (University of Kansas Press, 1953).
* Three decades later, René Descartes proposed a similar philosophy. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) argued that there was little that couldn’t be improved or solved by the systematic breakdown and analysis of a complex problem. But Descartes had doubts about the possibility of containing such knowledge between hard covers. ‘Even if all knowledge could be found in books,’ he wrote in the 1640s, ‘where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life, and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.’
* And so it proved: a lord, a viscount, legal adviser to Elizabeth and James I, Bacon is best remembered by historians of science as the great promulgator of empirical (i.e. sceptical and methodical) research. His flamboyance of mind was reflected in his manner, and this was prominently displayed at his wedding to Alice Barnham. As Dudley Carleton, one of those in attendance, recorded in a letter in May 1606, ‘Sir Francis Bacon was married yesterday to his young wench in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of fine raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion. The dinner was kept at his father-in-law Sir John Packington’s lodging over against [adjacent to] the Savoy’.
E
EPHRAIM CHAMBERS (GENTLEMAN)
By all contemporary reckonings, Ephraim Chambers should be much better known than he is. As Bacon inspired, Chambers practised. He made the first modern encyclopaedia as we know it, and his work lit the touchpaper for the Enlightenment.*
The title was a meal in itself:
CYCLOPÆDIA:
OR, AN
UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY
OF
ARTS and SCIENCES;
CONTAINING
The DEFINITIONS of the TERMS;
And ACCOUNTS of
The THINGS signify’d thereby,
In the several ARTS,
Both LIBERAL and MECHANICAL,
And the several SCIENCES,
HUMAN and DIVINE:
The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses,
Of Things NATURAL and ARTIFICIAL;
The Rise, Progress and State of Things
Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military and Commerciaclass="underline"
With the several Systems, Sects, Opinions &c. Among Philosophers, Divines,