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in the French philosopher's famous method of doubt. By accentuating the
individualism that sustains scientific objectivity, this enduring view of sci-
ence has also tended to draw attention away from science's public needs. It
upholds belief in science's unique epistemic status, but it is hard to imag-
ine how it could uphold public patronage. Evolutionism, by contrast, is a
historical vision that draws
all
human beings into an understanding of the
world that stands upon scientific authority, and nothing in Descartes' writing
directly expresses this. The scientific identity now advanced by evolutionism
could only be of use to scientific practitioners if it also meant something in
the broader world in which science seeks patronage, and no active attempt
seems to be made either in the
Meditationes
or in Descartes' earlier
Discours de
la méthode
(1637) to establish a scientific role that could integrate it into exist-
ing societal roles. The view of the natural philosopher that Descartes gives us
would be of little use to scientific practitioners if their patrons did not also
esteem such an ethos on other grounds.
For this reason, Descartes' slightly older English contemporary seems a
more likely source of the ideological materials that endure within evolution-
ism. I argued in the previous chapter that evolutionism gains much of its
rhetorical force from religious patterns of meaning, and so to find a start-
ing point from which to trace its development, we should expect to find a
more explicit identification between science and faith in earlier centuries.
We happen to find just such an identification in the English society that
emerged after Bacon's death. Here the numerous advocates, patrons, and
practitioners who openly identified with the new science also tended to
link it to the sorts of religious themes that Francis Bacon had accentuated
in his scientific advocacy. In posterity, both Descartes and Bacon would be
remembered as pioneers of the new science, but Bacon provided a model
more capable of sustaining a stable relationship between science and soci-
ety. Descartes' influence undoubtedly endures in the global aspirations of
modern science, in its characteristic posture of skepticism, and in its mod-
ernism, but Bacon's influence lives on in those specific categories of histori-
cal consciousness that continue to define the scientific ethos.
This can be explained by Bacon's more active efforts to relate the sci-
entific enterprise to his own religious culture, and through this to the
social world already emerging in his lifetime. While Descartes'
Discours
also
addressed religious concerns, these came in, seemingly, only as efforts to
offset the atheistic implications of the mechanistic world he was envision-
ing.
2
But Bacon went on the offensive. He invoked religion more actively
and pervasively to create an ideological architecture capable of providing a
