Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
public schools in an effort to ban Bible reading. The legal backdrop for this
certainly was the establishment clause, but only a reading of this clause
driven by a metaphor of
separation
could give rise to such an interpretation
of the law. Similarly, while Merton was certainly right to recognize a general
symmetry between Calvinist thought and empirical science, this relation-
ship was put into effect because a rhetorical figure of enormous influence
selected the specific symbolic lines of association that would guide its inter-
pretation in the next generation.
Bacon was able to catalyze this relationship because, like Jefferson, his
distinctive prominence in public life and distinctive discursive talents were
exercised at an opportune moment. In Bacon we find a person who was at
once a dominant political figure, a formidable late-Renaissance writer, an
interested follower of the new science at the time of its rising, and a person
imbued with sympathy, both by his mother and his Cambridge professors,
for Calvinism.
55
In this regard, when his personal physician, William Har-
vey, wrote that Bacon “writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellor,” he was
perhaps saying more than he meant.
56
With one foot in the broader realm
of public life and the other in the technical realm, Bacon was more capable
than any of his contemporaries of doing what rhetoric does best, of “adjust-
ing ideas to people and people to ideas,” to use Donald C. Bryant's well-
worn definition of this activity.
57
Even if we were to suppose that there was some latent potency within
English Calvinism that would have inevitably established science's place in
this changing society, how this was activated would still depend upon how
it was expressed. As Bacon formulated this relationship, it was the value
Protestantism shared with science by virtue of its disciplined devotion to
reading the plain meaning of revelation that drew it into this religious orbit.
There is nothing in Bacon's scientific advocacy that explicitly sustains Mer-
ton's speculation that scientific work satisfied the Puritan believers' need for
signs of their predestined place in the covenant of grace. What we do find
is something even more enduring: the idea that there is an inherent moral
fidelity in what science does that sets it apart from other forms of secular
inquiry. Notably, as we continue to move along the symbolic trajectory that
will lead up to evolutionism two centuries later, we will see that this appar-
ently secular ideology still appeals to similar moral justifications when it
seeks to place science at the vanguard of historical progress. The radical
empiricism that is still held up as a warrant for science's special role in his-
tory continues to be tied, much as Bacon's Protestant version of this was,
to the belief that this movement has ushered in the final phase of history.
