Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles

Abstract

The two-culture society that C.P. Snow famously warned against in a lecture he delivered at Cambridge in the 1950s has come to be seen by many as the `brainchild' of the Renaissance.1 According to this historical narrative, the seventeenth century witnessed the rise of empiricism, driven largely by Francis Bacon's vision for reforming natural philosophy. Hailed as the father of modern science, Bacon is credited with liberating science from the towering shadow of Aristotle and the syllogistic method that became entrenched under the Scholastics. But his drive to access the material world untainted by the `idols' of the mind has also been seen to voice a suspicion toward language and to inaugurate the rupture between science and that arts that would grow into the deep disciplinary divisions that we know today. Hence, the success of Bacon's inductive method has absorbed much of the blame for our two-culture society, which construes the arts and sciences as worlds apart, viewing science as the exclusive domain of knowledge about the material world.