Bacon, Francis

(1561–1626)

English statesman, essayist, and writer on scientific method.
Bacon is remembered for his groundbreaking discussions of systematic experiment, observation, and induction in works such as The Advancement of Learning. He is also unfortunately remembered for corruption in office, leading to his dismissal from the royal service. Nevertheless, his place in the history of science remains secure.
His Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral presents fifty-eight essays that cover a wide range of topics; some, such as “Friendship,” being of a general kind, and others, such as “Gardens,” being particular. The thirty-fifth essay is “Of Prophecies.” Bacon explains that he is not talking of biblical prophecies, which are in a class by themselves. He quotes several from classical literature, such as a passage in which the dramatist Seneca foretells that the bonds of the ocean will be loosed, the whole world will be opened up, and new worlds will be discovered—a prophecy, one might think, of the discovery of America. Most of Bacon’s more recent examples are concerned with royalty. He recalls the English king Henry VI as foretelling the reign of a boy who unexpectedly became Henry VII. He mentions, interestingly, the prophecy of the death of the French king Henri II from a wound sustained in a tournament, a prophecy that made Nostradamus famous, though Bacon quotes a different source.

• As a child, he says, he heard the prophecy
  
• When hempe is spun
  
• England’s done.
  

“Hempe” was taken to refer to the initials of five successive monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, her consort Philip, and Elizabeth I. After them, it was feared, disaster would befall England. It did not happen. What did happen was that Elizabeth was succeeded by James Stuart, who united the crowns of England and Scotland, so that the realm was known as Britain, and in that sense only, England was done.
Bacon is thoroughly dismissive. Prophecies of the kind he is talking about “ought all to be despised.” Despised, but not simply ignored, because they can do harm among the credulous, and governments should take note of them and consider censorship. What is it that gives them their undeserved credence? First, selectivity. People notice them when they are fulfilled, or seem to be, and forget any number of similar ones that are not. This covers the case of dreams that supposedly come true. Secondly, a prophecy may echo a known conjecture, and when this is eventually fulfilled—more or less—it may be seen in retrospect as more exact than it was. When Seneca wrote about new worlds beyond the ocean, Greek authors had already speculated along those lines (Plato, for instance, in his account of Atlantis), and Seneca was not really doing any more; the application of his words to America was a product of later geography. Thirdly, many alleged prophecies cannot be documented as having been made before the happenings they are alleged to predict. They were made up afterwards.
Most of this criticism is sensible. Pseudo prophecy after the event is all too familiar.

The concoction of bogus sayings by Merlin is notorious. Seneca perhaps deserves better than Bacon allows. The argument from selectivity is more dubious. It does not dispose, for instance, of the anticipations of the Titanic disaster by Morgan Robertson and others. Moreover, while a prophecy picked out as successful may be only one among many that are not successful, that one may be so accurate and specific that it makes the notion of chance difficult to sustain. In the classic case of Nostradamus, it is true that only a few of his quatrains are clearly predictive, but each contains several interlocking forecasts with unique details—even personal names—that rule out ambiguity. These quatrains, some of which compress as many as five or six connected forecasts into four lines, are too complex to explain as mere lucky hits among hundreds that are not lucky.
Bacon does not discuss astrology in this essay. Elsewhere, he describes it as “pretending to discover that correspondence or concatenation which is between the superior globe and the inferior.” He is thinking of the traditional system, with Earth at the center of the universe and everything else circling around it. He admits that in his own time astrology is “full of fictions,” but he suggests that it might be given a rational basis in observed physical laws. If so, it could supply foreshadowings of natural phenomena, wars, revolutions, and other great events and indicate favorable times for various undertakings.