From the Woods of Experience to the Open Fields of Metaphysics: Bacon's Notion of "Silva"

In the annals of both philosophy and science, Francis Bacon is usually portrayed as one of the most vocal advocates for the need to apply a method to the study of nature. And yet both in his methodological writings and in the actual samples of natural history he produced in the course of his life, Bacon insisted that the investigator should be able to cope with particulars, contingencies and anomalies without projecting hastily drawn conclusions and untested notions of order onto a material that, by its very nature, resists being ordered. In this article, I argue that Bacon viewed lack of order as both heuristically productive and socially beneficial. His well-known pronouncements on method should be read against the background of his recurrent pleas for a direct experiential involvement with nature. On more than one occasion, Bacon emphasized the need for the human mind to be – temporarily – lost in experience. He represented this form of experimental alienation through the symbol of the forest, the silva. Bacon's silva alludes to a pre-linguistic stage of experience in which the mind is kept as far as possible from notiones and verba (read idola) and allowed to explore the copious array of natural particulars and resemblances that constitutes nature.