elevation of man's wit, and a searching | A longstanding commonplace in Bacon
and ravelling too far into God's secrets; | scholarship has been the notion that
an opinion that ariseth either of envy | the Baconian advancement of learning
(which is proud weakness and to be | depends upon a strict separation of
censured and not confuted), or else of a | divinity and natural philosophy. In
deceitful simplicity. For if they mean | a number of memorable passages Bacon
that the ignorance of a second cause doth | indeed warns his readers of the dire
make men more devoutly to depend upon the | consequences of confusing divinity
providence of God, as supposing the | with natural science: to combine
effects to come immediately from his hand, | them, he says, is to confound them.
I demand of them, as Job demanded of his | This is supposedly what Plato and the
friends, WILL YOU LIE FOR GOD AS MAN WILL | scholastics did, and what Bacon
FOR MAN TO | explicitly designs the new learning
| to overcome. Even the acceptable
| hybrid "divine philosophy," when it
| is "commixed together" with natural
| philosophy, leads to "an heretical
| religion, and an imaginary and
| fabulous philosophy" (III, 350).
| According to this emphatic strand of
| Baconian doctrine, religion that
| joins with the study of nature is in
| danger of becoming atheistic, or an
| enthusiastic rival of the true
| church. Natural philosophy that
| traffics unwisely with divinity
| collapses into idolatry or fakery.
|
| Bacon's exemplum of these abuses in a
| modern proto-science is the divine