The Great Instauration

Bacon’s brainchild is his Great Instauration, a project he conceived for the step-by-step restoration of a state of paradise upon earth, but coupled with the illumination of mankind. In other words, whereas mankind was innocently ignorant in the original paradise, in the future paradise all human souls will have reached a state of knowledge of truth. Such illumined knowledge will be one based on experience or practice of the truth, which truth (as all great Masters teach, including Bacon) is love—for it is one thing to speak of love and believe in it, but quite another to really know the truth of it.

A worldwide state of illumination or golden age is an ancient dream and prophecy of all great sages who ever lived on earth, for which they laboured. Bacon’s great gift to the world was his ability to see this anew and to both devise and inaugurate a particular scientific method by which it might be more certainly achieved, suitable for the approaching era. This new method he referred to as an art—the Art of Discovery; whilst the Great Instauration itself he conceived as being comprised of six stages of work, leading to a final stage of rest and enjoyment of the results of the labour—the state of paradise.

Bacon planned his Great Instauration in imitation of the Divine Work—the Work of the Six Days of Creation, as defined in the Bible, leading to the Seventh Day of Rest or Sabbath. He saw his own work, which is itself built upon that of Jesus Christ, his exemplar, as being like the light of the First Day, which would inaugurate and illumine the unfolding of the rest. He also understood that the Seven Days of Creation constitute an eternal archetype for a cyclic occurrence, associated for instance with the seven-day cycle in which the solar wind or ‘breath’ from the Sun bathes the Earth with its light-energy, and then switches polarity for the next seven days, and so on. The Six Days Work of the Great Instauration, and its Seventh Day, is therefore also cyclic, just like life itself, with each cycle building upon the previous one, so that knowledge and ability steadily increases in cycle after cycle, and with there being smaller cycles within greater cycles.

All good teachers practice what they teach, and so Bacon left not just an idea for posterity but also a practical example, a working model for the rest of us to study, learn from and, if necessary, develop further. He provided us with examples of each of the individual parts or stages of the Great Instauration, which he symbolised as individual volumes, seven in all. These volumes may be seen illustrated in the frontispiece engraving to the 1640 edition of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, as well as on the title page illustration to the same publication. In some instances there is in fact one particular original volume published for the part of the Great Instauration it illustrates, such as the 1623 De Augmentis Scientiarum to illustrate Part 1, the 1620 Novum Organum to illustrate Part 2, and the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies to illustrate Part 4; but for Part 3 several publications comprise Bacon’s example of a Natural History, and not all of them were published in his lifetime.

It should be emphasised that by ‘Natural History’ Bacon means a history or factual record, suitably organised, that embraces natural, human and divine nature, not just nature in the sense of our corporeal world. That is to say, the Great Instauration concerns the acquisition of all knowledge (Bacon’s stated goal), for entirely philanthropic or charitable purposes, and therefore includes knowledge of the human psyche and human ethics as well as knowledge of the nature and operations of divinity within all manifest life, physical and metaphysical. All too often Bacon is called materialistic and utilitarian (in a materialistic sense), which is a travesty of the truth and a point of view which misses the point of the Great Instauration.

Moreover, it should be noted that Bacon’s examples were made as starting dissertations, providing inspiration and guidance as well as material to get things going. They were not intended as dogmatic examples that have to be repeated ad infinitum without change. He foresaw his method, like the whole project, as evolving, and designed it accordingly.

Bacon’s method, his six stages, can be summarised as (1) a survey of the state of things together with a plan of action, (2) the discovery, acquirement or development of a method, (3) the collection of a history—a data bank—on which to draw, (4) the presentation of the data to the eyes and heart by means of suitable drama and illustrated examples, (5) the drawing out of temporary axioms or ideas of truth derived from the experience of the drama, and (6) the development of final axioms or certainties as a result of putting the ideas into action—the test being that ‘truth prints goodness’; therefore only if the action and its result is truly good, on all counts, will we achieve illumination and the state of paradise.

As shown in the title page illustration to the 1640 edition of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the six parts or ‘volumes’ of the Six Days’ Work are organised into two sets of three, which cross-relate to each other as well as being related to the symbolism and meaning of the Six Days of Creation:-

However, in the frontispiece illustration to the 1640 edition of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, the six parts or ‘volumes’ of the Six Days’ Work are organised into three sets. The first set is comprised of volumes 1 and 2, stacked lying down, one on top of the other, on the end of the table to Bacon’s left. The second set consists of volumes 3 to 6, stacked upright on the bookshelf. The third set is the single volume, the mystical seventh, in which Bacon is shown writing. This whole arrangement relates to Bacon’s Pyramid of Philosophy, wherein the second set of volumes forms the Pyramid, which has History as its base, Poesie (the Ladder of the Intellect) as its middle, and Philosophy as its upper part. The first set provides the survey or plan and the method by which the pyramid is built. The apex or capstone is the seventh volume (the third set), which signifies knowledge of the ‘Summary Law of Nature’, which law Bacon identified as Love, or Divine Charity—‘the work which God maketh from the beginning to the end’.

Pervading all this, as an invisible presence, is Divinity—the Wisdom of God that is inspired into the human heart or recorded in books of wisdom such as the Bible—the Wisdom that inspires, guides and teaches us. Bacon urged us to become proficient in discovering and reading both Great Books—the Book of God’s Word (Divinity) and the Book of God’s Works (Philosophy), the latter being but the handmaiden to the former, the mistress. The role of the handmaiden is to serve her mistress. Since the mistress is love, or the wisdom that is love, then the handmaiden’s service can only be an act of love, the love of love, which is charity. Only by this means can the Great Instauration be achieved.

To Bacon, philosophy and science are two words for virtually the same thing, like mind and soul, but with this difference: just as the soul signifies the shining or illumined mind (i.e. Sol, ‘Sun’), so science signifies the knowledge that the love of wisdom (i.e. philosophy) becomes when put into practice. Hence Bacon’s ‘Second Philosophy’ is also called by him the ‘Active Science’, emphasising his intention that such a ‘new’ philosophy, based upon his method, will be an enlightened one, and is nothing less than philanthropy, or charity.

Bacon’s ‘temple’, which is to be constructed in the human mind according to his principles and method, and on which he has made a start, is his ‘Pyramid of Philosophy’. A pyramid is a ‘pyre’ of flame—a temple of light.

Bacon’s Pyramid of Philosophy has history for its base, upon which is built, layer upon layer, first physics, then metaphysics, and finally the crowning knowledge of the supreme law of love. Physics is concerned with material and efficient causes, and metaphysics with formal and final causes. These causes are laws. The formal causes are what Bacon, like Plato, calls ‘Forms’, which are the living Ideas (i.e. Angels) of God that lie behind all Creation. The final causes are the greatest of those living Ideas (i.e. Archangels), of which the supreme cause (the Summary Law of Nature) is divine Love. Bacon urges us to discover and know these causes, and most of all the supreme cause, so that we may do good by practising them. Therefore, because love is an emotion, he urges us to study emotions.

Bacon’s Pyramid of Philosophy is a true pyramid—that is to say, it has a triangular base, with three sides joined together at the apex in a single point. In terms of Platonic solids it symbolises the element fire. Each side represents one of the three main aspects of truth to be researched, practised and known—Divine, Human and Natural—which correspond to the Hermetic description of the three ‘Heads’—God, Man and Cosmos.

The apex of the pyramid represents the summary (or supreme) law of life—the law of Love, which is divine Charity or Goodness.

© Peter Dawkins, FBRT, 1999

Ref:

¹ Eccles. 3:11 — ‘(No man can find out) the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.’

* The Corpus Hermeticum quotations are from The Way of Hermes, translated by Clement Salaman, Dorine van Oyen and William D. Wharton (London: Duckworth, 1999).

The Francis Bacon Research Trust