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the presence of such arguments for science as just one manifestation of a
broader Puritan spur.
Rhetoric is something that will be prevalent in any society that provides
some measure of tolerance for public expression, and in this regard Bacon's
was only one among many voices who spoke on science's behalf. However,
in every age there are rhetorical figures whose creative choices are especially
fateful. For instance, while many Americans wrote about the separation of
church and state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas Jef-
ferson's advocacy of a “wall of separation” in his 1802 letter to the Danbury
Baptist Association continues to dominate such discussions. One phrase in
one letter by a single individual in one particular political moment (when
that individual happens to be a person with Jeffersonian gifts and stature)
can successfully infuse the public consciousness for centuries. This is rheto-
ric's power of “selection,” as Kenneth Burke famously described it. 46 Out of
a perhaps unlimited array of metaphors that could have been used to char-
acterize the relationship between religion and government, Jefferson's cre-
ative choice predominates for two reasons. The first of these is the writer's
commanding position in cultural memory. The second is the fact that this
selection was made at a pivotal time, a moment of opportunity— kairos as
the Greeks called it—in which a formulation of this kind was especially in
demand and therefore especially likely to gain widespread influence. Both
of these conditions hold in Bacon's case as well. His visibility in English life
was unparalleled when he began his campaign for science at age thirty, and
he undertook this just as growing social instabilities were creating an open-
ing for such reforms.
What I am suggesting here should not be mistaken for an effort to revi-
talize an obsolete “great man” theory of history. I do not mean to suggest
that science would not have taken off in the seventeenth century without
Bacon any more than I would suggest that the American policy barring the
establishment of state religions would not have come into place without Jef-
ferson's input. What I am saying is that prominent voices acting at pivotal
historical moments are likely to determine how such ideas are rendered in
subsequent generations. Such expressions become definitive in directing
the course of cultural evolution, and thus the fact that the issue of science's
relationship to religion was taken up by a figure of Bacon's magnitude at
such a critical moment in scientific history was in some sense fateful.
In terms of the cultural evolutionary model that shapes this study, we
might say that, had science been successfully promoted in the seventeenth
century through a different configuration of symbols, its public ethos might
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