2. Bacon’s human empire of knowledge

The concept of a united scientific pursuit of the truth originates with Francis Bacon, who contended that understanding nature was key to understanding ourselves, and was convinced “the entire fabric of human reason… is badly put together… like some magnificent structure without any foundation.”²

He believed the globe of all knowledge could be faithfully explored through a common scientific method of induction, with which to turn “with united forces against the Nature of things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds, and extend the bounds of human empire.”

His hope was that by trying “the whole thing anew upon a better plan… to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations”, his common methodology would allow all scientific efforts to chart with equal efficacy the natural world and the human mind.

In this fashion, Francis Bacon’s new instrument of science laid the groundwork for an inclusive scientific enterprise, from the natural to the social sciences, which was to exert an incredible influence on the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover. — Francis Bacon

“Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover.”, Francis Bacon —Sylva Sylvarum (1670); Illustration by Internet Archive Book Images

3. The Republic of Letters meets for a cup of Joe

Using Bacon’s new way of thinking, natural philosophers came to believe the Universe ran like clockwork — stars and human minds alike. We ultimately have Isaac Newton to thank for this grand idea, but what made his insight possible was the unique progressive environment of the English coffeehouse.

The 17th century saw the rise of this now ubiquitous establishment, a cosmopolitan hotbed of scientific, political and philosophical ideas informed by free and reasoned debate across a wide demographic of the population. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls this emergent space a bourgeois public sphere, “a sphere of private people come together as a public”³ wherein authentic public opinion could manifest itself and depart from the views of the public authority (church, state, ruling class, and law enforcement). In this fertile proving ground, men of letters found a receptive audience for their remarkable thoughts.

Had it not been for a fateful coffeehouse discussion in January of 1684 between three intellectual giants, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and Edmund Halley, over exactly what equation governed the motion of astronomical bodies, Halley would not have bothered to ask Newton eight months later on a whim whether he had a solution to the problem; Newton would not have sent Halley his brilliant proof — none other than the outline of his universal laws of motion, scrawled on a manuscript criminally gathering dust in a Cambridge drawer for several decades. Halley would not have insisted it be developed further and widely disseminated. Serendipitously, the Principia Mathematica was born.

Isaac Newton, child at heart playing with his pebbles on the shores of a great ocean, had seemingly stumbled upon the entailing physical laws of nature…

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. — Isaac Newton

And from that point on, in theory, everything in the universe, from nature to culture, could be known.

As the child and the artist plays, so too plays the ever living fire…. Such is the game that Æon (life, cosmic time) plays with itself…. it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore… the ever new awakening impulse to play calls new worlds into being. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Mid-17th century English coffeehouses — Image credits: World History Archive

4. Dark were the dungeons of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment dream — intellectual unity in the pursuit of knowledge to hasten the liberation of humanity from superstition and inequity — comes to a close in the dark depths of a dungeon cell with the death of the last luminary of this period, Nicolas de Condorcet, in 1794.

Condorcet’s chief contribution to the sciences is his development of political and social choice theory through the application of mathematical methods to the social sciences — he believed the processes which had achieved such tremendous successes in physics and mathematics could bridge the gap to culture; using mathematics to predict social activities would, he foresaw, lay the foundations for an egalitarian system within whose laws human rights for all would be enshrined.

His final work, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit, composed while in hiding during the dark years of the French revolution, sets forth the idea of progress as the bridging of the natural and social sciences to unshackle humankind from its sordid past. In it can be seen the influences of Bacon and Newton and the ultimate aim of Enlightenment thought — unifying all knowledge. But the sleep of reason continued to produce monsters unabated. Judged by the radicals of the Terror as lacking in revolutionary zeal, Condorcet was eventually caught, imprisoned, beaten, and forever silenced.

Alone in a sea of madness, the fire in his mind dims, the light flickers, and the dream dies with him.