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1. For a quick survey of Bacon's political life see the essay, 'Lord Bacon', in T. H. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman Green, 1877), pp. 346-414.
2. See J. W. N. Watkins, 'The Popperian Approach to Scientific Knowledge', in G. Rodnitzky and G. Andersen (eds.), Progress and Rationality in Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978).
3. Francis Bacon, 'On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning', Bk v, ch. II. in Joseph Devey (ed.), The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon (London: Bell and Sons, 1911), p. 183 All page references for Bacon's works are to Devey's edition unless otherwise indicated.
4. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Bk I, Aph. 82. In the following, references to Novum Organum have been placed in this form within the text, indicating the book number and the aphorism numbers in Devey's edition.
5. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Bk v, ch. II, p. 188.
6. Bacon, Preface to Novum Organum, p. 381.
7. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Bk I, preface, p. 45.
8. It is difficult to determine what Bacon means by 'form' or 'nature'. In Novum Organum one comes across phrases like 'forms' of 'true specific differences' or 'nature engendering nature' or 'source of emanation'. We can offer no better definition than the statement that in the ease of 'investigation of the form of heat' the given 'nature' is heat.
9. Emphasis added. Notice that for Bacon, heat is the motion of small particles, not of the atoms or molecules. Bacon does not subscribe to these later idols and he makes his disapproval of the concept of atoms explicit: 'This method will not bring us to atoms, which takes for granted the vacuum, and the immutability of matter (neither of which hypotheses is correct), but to real particles such as we discover them to be.' (II. 8)
Earlier we read: 'Hence men cease not to abstract nature till they arrive at potential and shapeless matter, and still persist in their dissection, till they arrive at atoms; and yet were all this true, it would be of little use to advance man's estate.' (I. 66)
10. See T. S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1970), p. 104, for another interesting hypothesis derived from the 'idol' of corpuscularism.
11. Ibid., pp. 134-5
12. Macaulay, Essays, p. 381.
13. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Bk v, ch. II. p. 186.
14. Raja Rammohan Roy, 'Letter on English Education to Lord Amherst, Governor-General in Council (1827)', in J. C. Ghose (ed.), The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy (Bhowanipur, Calcutta: Oriental Press, 1885), vol. I, pp. 472-3.
15. Benjamin Farrington, Francis Bacon: The Prophet of Industrial Science (London: Macmillan, 1973). See preface.
16. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, preface, Bk I, p. 30.
17. Dr William Rawley, his private secretary, recounted: 'Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen years of age, as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself, he first fell into dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day.' (Quoted in Farrington, Bacon, pp. 23-4; emphasis added.)
18. Farrington, Bacon, p. 46.
19. Will Durant, Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947), p. 106.
20. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, preface, Bk II, p. 71. The quotations in the following paragraph are also from the same chapter in Bk II, pp 74-5
21. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Bk II ch. II, p. 82.
22. This threefold division of society seems an essential ingredient of the positivistic vision of society. Thus, as J. P. S. Uberoi, in Science and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), points out, the first official positivist St Simone envisages a similar split of society:
'(a) The first [class] to which you and I have the honour to belong, marches beneath the banner of human progress: it consists of the Scientists, the artists and of all men of liberal ideas. (b) On the banner of the second class is inscribed "No Innovation". All property owners who do not qualify for the first class which rallies to the word "Equality" comprises the rest of humanity.'
This threefold division continues to our day with the additional qualification that all third-world societies that have decided to march behind the banner of human progress have got consigned to the third class. Marx, as Uberoi points out, changes nothing in this scheme of things except replacing 'property owners' by 'political leaders' (of the west, he should have added).
23. Gregory King, Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (London, 1696; new ed., Lancaster Herald, 1810).
24. See especially Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution, chs. 9 and 10.
25. Ibid., pp. 152-3.
26. Ibid., pp. 155-6. The whole of the chapter on the 'Resolution of Revolutions' is relevant in this context.
27. Ibid., pp. 167-8.
28. Ibid., pp. 205-6.
29. Thomas Kuhn, 'Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research', in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
30. Joseph Needham, 'Science and Society in East and West' (1964), in The Grand Titration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969) Sentiments expressed in the statements quoted here are found scattered everywhere in Needham's work.
31. Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge University Press, 1954), vols. 1-7.
32. Joseph Needham, 'Science and China's Influence on the World', in Needham, The Grand Titration, pp. 55-112.
33. Lynn White, quoted in Needham, The Grand Titration, pp. 83-4.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid, p. 62. In this essay and elsewhere, Needham also gives a number of specific examples of techniques that evolved out of the current concept and theories of Chinese science.
36. See Joseph Needham, 'Human Law and the Laws of Nature', in his Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, pp. 518-83; and the essay with the same title in The Grand Titration, pp. 299-330.
37. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, p. 518.
38. See Needham, The Grand Titration, p. 65, and also 'Science and Society in East and West', ibid., pp. 190-217.
39. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, p. 518.
40. Ibid., p. 574.
41. Needham, 'Science and Society in East and West', in The Grand Titration, pp. 204-5.
42. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2, p. 582.
43. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1970); 'The Vienna Lecture' and the 'Origin of Geometry' appear as appendices in this edition.
44. Husserl, 'The Vienna Lecture', pp. 272, 292.
45. Ibid., pp. 292-4.
46. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, pp. 7-14.
47. Husserl, 'The Vienna Lecture', p. 278.
48. Ibid., p. 275.
49. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. I 6.
50. Ibid., p. 15.
51. These two and many other artefacts that the west used for acquiring control over the world were actually discovered elsewhere. For the discoverers, perhaps, these artefacts did not have the status of the 'true' arts and they did not, therefore, go about imposing their truth on others. See in this connection Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration, ch. 2.
52. See, for example, Francis Bacon, 'Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation of Ireland, presented to His Majesty in 1606', in Montagu Basil (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 1-16 (London: William Pickering, 1825-39).
53. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1938) (Reprint, Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1962), p. 37
54. Srimad Bhagavadgita, ch. 16, verses 6-20. For the text see, for example, S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948).
55. Isawasya Upanisad, verses 10-11. For the text, see, for example, S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanisads (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), p. 574 (author's translation).
56. Ibid., verse 9.