Assault on the scholastic 'form' framework

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was the earliest effective campaigner, though his assault was not direct. The thrust of his message was that life could be improved if only we tried to extend our knowledge of the world - a political call in essence.

But he added to it his idea of how such new knowledge had best be acquired.

The object of such effort, Bacon continued to assume, would be the grasping of forms.

But he began the undermining of this fundamental concept by attacking the notion that forms were straightforwardly graspable by the intellect.

The forms of substances, at any rate (such as the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, of water, of air), he claimed were too 'perplexed' to be accessible in any immediate way, and he proposed instead a roundabout route involving a study of the thing's or a stuff's properties (as we should call them today) which would have to be undertaken if their forms were to be grasped.

With the next generation of thinkers (Robert Boyle and friends), however, it became clear that the Scholastic notion of a form could not usefully be distorted in this fashion, and it was effectively discarded.

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