Bacon’s Hints: The Sylva Sylvarum’s Intimate Science

Through an analysis of Bacon’s last natural history, this essay sketches a less familiar Baconianism, one that deemphasizes inductive method; that does not lead inevitably toward ideals of objectivity; and that nurtures a mode of doing science that is maculately intimate. It begins by locating the Sylva in the context of Aristotle’s Problems and Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magick. Bacon, it shows, takes the experimental ethos and compositional engine of the latter (hands-on, process analysis) and runs them up against the philosophized mundane phenomena of the former (e.g., thirst, perspiration), in order to craft the conditions for readers to recognize their own ontological and epistemological grip on fundamental physical principles. The Sylva is not, then, the miscellany it was long considered to be, but a painstakingly ordered training manual. To bear out this claim, the essay surveys some of the text’s seventeenth-century imitators. What emerges is a Baconian practice in which practitioners have been taught not to misgive or deny but to trust their lived experiences, which, be they never so private, are always broadly shared and thus philosophically freighted.