Selcer - From Scientia Operativa to Scientia Intuitiva - Producing Particulars in Bacon and Spinoza

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Fromscientia operativatoscientia intuitiva: Producing particulars in Baconand Spinoza

Daniel Selcer*

Duquesne University

This essay compares two seemingly irreconcilable notions ofscientia thatbookend the seven-teenth century: Baconsscientia operativaand Spinozasscientia intuitiva.1 I argue that attention

to the way these philosophers frame the basic objects of their investigations natural particularsor singular things together with their accounts of forms and essences, reveals unexpected con-vergences between operationalist and natural light epistemologies. Famously holding that

scientia and potentia humana coincide, Bacon identies knowledge with productive power,and therefore associatesscientiaeither with a causal account of thenature of things or an exper-imental capacity to induce particulars on the basis of such an account.2 One target of this approachis the epistemological tradition associated with Scholastic metaphysics and natural philosophy.While beginning with what is present to the senses, that tradition ultimately grounds scientiaon the immediate and purely rational grasp of axiomatic rst principles from which the necessarystructure of particular things may be demonstratively inferred.3 Bacon replaces intuitively-grounded knowing with a system of experimental exploration, inductive method and natural-historical array, all oriented by the powers of the mind and hand to transform natural particulars.Baconian operationalism is thereby also just as rmly opposed to intuitive/deductive Cartesian-ism as to the Scholastic realism that both Baconians and Cartesians attack. Yet for Spinoza, I willargue, though grounded in a Cartesian account of intuition,scientiarequires and even radicalizesBaconian operationalism, transforming it into a metaphysical principle nearly unrecognizable by,yet clearly indebted to, Baconian methodological reection. In short, this paper seeks to establisha Baconian genealogy for Spinozas account of intuitive knowing.

Bacon and scientia operativa

In theNovum organum (1620) and associated texts, Bacon demands that philosophy dispensewith its pretensions to build systems ofa prioriknowledge and instead focus on the productionof operative knowing, scientia operativa in the language of the Cogitata et visa (1607).4 Notsimply a replacement of metaphysical speculation with natural observation, Baconian scientiaoperativainvolves the deliberate production of natural particulars and the transformation of con-crete bodies or natures through a method involving encyclopedic enumeration, synoptic tabularreection and experimental practice. Bacon thus identies the apprehension of practical rulesfor the operation of a simple nature with knowledge per se, or, as he describes it in theNovum

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organum, with the induction of the form that describes a thing as a particular locus of causalpower. The bee-like Baconian natural philosopher is to engage natural histories both toformulatetheoretical accounts of the structures of the world (thereby producing rigorous interpretations ofnature grounded experimentally), and tousethose theoretical results to return to the level of par-ticular things.5 This return to the particular, for Bacon, necessarily involves a capacity toproduceor tooperatein new ways.

Recent work by Corneanu, Giglioni, Jalobeanu and others has focused scholarly attention onthe nuances and philosophical implications of Bacons experimental practices, as well as on thetextual and rhetorical modes through which he communicates, records, manipulates and reimaginesthem.6 These projects aim, among other things, at re-reading Baconian science (and the legacies ofearly-modern experimentalism it spawned) fromthe ground up. Rather than beginning with charac-terizations of Bacons master concepts, and then twisting them as necessary tot the so-called prac-tical works, this scholarship allows philosophicalnotions to emerge along unexpected paths, fromwhat appear to be teeming forests of experiment.7 This approach has transformed our understand-ing of early-modern natural philosophy, but it does sometimes encounter limits. One such limit

might be found in accounting for the impact of concepts produced by a philosopher like Bacon,who unies experimental practice with contemplative speculation, on a metaphysician likeSpinoza, who, while operating in a milieu pervaded by experimentalism, is still far less directlycommitted to its practice than many of his contemporaries (at least as far as the surviving textualevidence suggests).8 TheturntoSpinozalaterinthisessaywillinvolveattentiontothefewaccountsof experimentalism he offers, especially in his early correspondence by proxy with Robert Boyle.

Nevertheless, to give an account of the profound ways in which Baconian notions affect Spinozaphilosophically, we rst need a somewhat broad conceptual characterization of Bacons accountof the unity of speculation and operation, as well as the way it plays out in his notion of form.

One useful way this unity has been captured is by locating Bacon in the so-called makers

knowledge tradition of early modernity. This position, elaborated most extensively by Prez-Ramos, involves the retrospective inscription of Bacon under a rubric rst theorized by Vicoin De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710). For Prez-Ramos, Bacon stands as an extremeexample of a style of thought that postulates an intimate relationship between objects of cogni-tion andobjects of construction, and regards knowing as a kind of making or as a capacity tomake.9 From this perspective, truth and especially the truth of formal knowledge in theBaconian schema establishes that to know something (a natural phenomenon) amounts to

being ableto(re)produce that very phenomenon on any material substratum susceptible of man-ifesting it.10 To interpret Baconianscientiain terms of makers knowledge, then, is to understandthe conditions for formal, natural-philosophical knowledge to coincide with criteria for the pro-

duction of particular things.

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An obvious objection to the makers-knowledge interpretation is its seemingly transhistoricalanachronism. Not only does ascribing makers knowledge to Bacon involve the transposition ofan early eighteenth-century philosophical notion onto an early seventeenth-century philosopher,

but, on Prez-Ramoss account, that notion is essentially unmoored from any particular site orconditions for its articulation. In this respect, Prez-Ramos presents his argument for makersknowledge under the banner of what appears to be a type of methodological Platonism:makers knowledge is an idea-type or archetypal warrant that depends on claims about anunchanging human cognitive apparatus, recurrent stimuliand pattern of thoughtdeployed

by various thinkers throughout the ages.12 This view risks turning Baconian scientia intonothing more than a particular instance of a universal conceptual form and thus, perhaps ironi-cally, grounding the Baconian account of form on an epistemology utterly irreconcilable with it.

There are, however, at least three potential responses to this objection. First, even under theidea-type rhetoric, Prez-Ramos does not present makers knowledge as a notion utterly

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unmoored from specic texts, concerns and historico-institutional situations. To the contrary, hecarefully describes its modalities in works by Plato and Aristotle (where it is subject to examin-ation and attack), the Hippocratic corpus, Philo of Alexandria, Procluss commentary on Euclid,Cusa, Snchez, Gassendi, Mersenne, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke and Kant, as well as Bacon and Vico,of course. Each of these writers, Prez-Ramos argues, articulates the makers-knowledge prin-ciple in a unique way, emphasizing different aspects and obtaining different consequences.13

Second, the core idea for which Prez-Ramos argues that to know a Baconian form is to under-stand how to make or reproduce the nature whose form it is, and consequently, thatformais inse-

parable from the production ofopusneed not be attached to a theory of idea-types. Indeed, it hasbeen articulated by other scholars who are not committed to Prez-Ramoss historiographicalapparatus: Rossi, Funkenstein and Kusukawa. Rossis long project to interpret Baconianknowing as a non-reductive adaptation of epistemological strategies derived from emergingearly-modern technologies, the mechanical arts associated with them and the tropology of huma-nist rhetoric stands in close alliance with Prez-Ramoss core assertions about the character ofBaconianscientia. In a late text, Rossi iseven willing explicitly to endorse Prez-Ramoss associ-

ation of Bacon with makers knowledge.14 Funkenstein, too, developed a reading of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, including Bacon (but not focused on him), that identied an importantoperationalist shift in both formal epistemologies and the uses of experimental practice.Funkenstein called this an ergetic ideal of knowingwhich led to the conviction that only thedoable at least in principle is also understandable.15 Committing herself neither to Prez-Ramoss idea types, Rossis claims about Bacon and the mechanical arts nor Funkensteinsergetic ideal, Kusukawa, too, has independently suggested that the makers-knowledge attributionis fruitful.16 Even Prez-Ramos himself, in later work, manages to separate his argument about theconnection between forms and makers knowledge from the original idea-type framework inwhich he articulated it.17 As a third response to the anachronism objection, both Prez-Ramos

and Funkenstein are careful to point out that when Vico articulates his verum factumprinciple,he does so in work that emerges out of reection on both classical and seventeenth-centuryshifts in philosophical, scientic and cultural practices. Thus, while the notion of a makers-knowledge tradition may be anachronistic in one sense it is not a Baconian actors category

in another, it is historically embedded: Vico develops his account of makers knowledgethrough an implicit reection on, among other things, the Baconian operative epistemology.18

A more difcult set of conceptual objections to the makers-knowledge thesis has been raisedby Gaukroger in an inuential discussion of the Baconian relationship between method, truthand works that parallels Prez-Ramoss reading. Emphasizing, like Prez-Ramos, that theBaconian attempt to understand form is not treated as an end in itself, butas the means to trans-

forming nature for human purposes

, Gaukroger develops a reading of Baconianscientiain whicha truth-claim must satisfy the criterion of being informative(i.e., provide a causal explanation),but to do so it must be demonstrablyproductive(i.e., generate something material and useful).19

This is quite different, Gaukroger claims, from the truth criterion for early-modern practitioners ofmakers knowledge. Makers knowledge, Gaukroger argues, is a strategy for generating true andcertain knowledge in spheres of inquiry that appear immune to it, specically moral and political

philosophy.20 While mentioning Locke and Vico as well, what Gaukroger seems to have in mindhere is the Hobbesian argument that maps the construction of geometrical gures onto the pro-duction of political actors, institutions and concepts: the objects of geometry and politicsalone, Hobbes argues, are susceptible to certain demonstration, since they are entirely theresult of human making.21 Makers knowledge, then, would be a strategy for arrangingdomains of inquiry according to a hierarchy of certainty, where the criterion for perfect demon-strative knowing (scientiain the Aristotelian sense) is that the knower is the maker of the objectsto be known. None of these considerations are present in Bacon, Gaukroger claims, who is not

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concerned so much with the degree of certainty of results in natural philosophy (he has no time forskepticismin this regard, for example), but in making natural philosophy informative and pro-ductive.22 In other words, since Bacon is fundamentally committed to locating truth in thesphere of inductive natural philosophy,it is wrong to describe his position as belonging to a puta-tive tradition of makers knowledge.23

In the background of Gaukrogers argument against a makers-knowledge interpretation ofBacon is a view that makers-knowledge epistemologies, in the end, are philosophicallyvacuous. In a 1986 essay on Vico, Gaukroger argues that Vicos thesis that making something

puts one in a special cognitive relation with what one has made leads to an incoherentaccount of knowledge.24 It is obvious, rst, that making an artifact does not magically impartthe artisan with a more perfect form of cognition. Second, recourse to a makers intention or

plan in order to avoid the former objection is insufcient, since if having intentions or plansimparts makers knowledge, then, in order to know, makers need not actually make, but onlyintend to make makers knowledge would then be divorced from making, and fall into contra-diction. Third, the further step of rendering a maker cognitively omnipotent (as with an artisanal

God who knows his creation more perfectly than his creatures) also fails, since such a maker actu-ally knows nothing at all beyond his own activity. He simply makes and knows that he has made,

but this offers no particular insight into the nature of what has been made.25

Gaukrogers critiques contribute importantly to the discussion, since they demonstrate thatmakers knowledge, conceived on Vicos model, has several serious deciencies when itcomes to giving an account of Bacons notions ofscientia and forma. At the same time, itseems to me that, in some respects, Prez-Ramos and Gaukroger have been talking past oneanother. If makers knowledge consists in the claim that the activity or power of making grantsthe maker special cognitive access to what gets made (as with Hobbes and Vico), then Gaukrogeris undoubtedly right to insist that Baconian science is not makers knowledge. Baconianscientia

operativadoes not consist in the injunction to generate particulars through experiment simply sothat they may beknown, but so that something may be done. Yet Prez-Ramoss point is not thatoperational power grants the Baconian natural philosopher special, certain access to the true formsof simple natures. His claim, rather, is that what it means to know a Baconian form is, at the mostgeneral level, to be able to give an account of the operations whereby it may be induced in a par-ticulara proposition on which he and Gaukroger seem to agree fundamentally.26 The distance,then, between Prez-Ramos and Gaukroger has to do with what it means for something to count asmakers knowledge at all, even though they are not so far apart on the form/work or contempla-tion/operation distinctions in Bacon.

At this point it is most useful to move away from the interpretive debate over the makers

knowledge thesis and toward an account of Bacon

s stance on the relationship between formand operationality. Here, I will argue, lie the genealogical roots of Spinozas account of formalintuition. In what follows, then, while mindful of Gaukrogers critique, I will accept Prez-Ramoss basic insight about the intrinsic connection between knowing and operation in Bacon,while attempting to avoid sliding into the position that Baconian scientia is an immediateeffect of practical action. Since (1) I take Gaukroger to have demonstrated that it is problematicto refer to Bacons position as makers knowledge; (2) at least among Bacon scholars,Funkensteins ergetic idealhas already been swept up in the wake of Prez-Ramoss terminol-ogy and (3) theoperatioterminology around which both analyses turn is, I will show, a key locusfor Spinozas relationship to the Baconian project, I will describe the Baconian relationship

between doing and understanding as operationalism or as operational knowing.To briey review the epistemological proposal of the Novum organum in these terms: the

Baconian natural philosopher will proceed by true induction. He begins at the level ofinstances: particular sensible phenomena encyclopedically arranged in several sorts of natural

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history. He engages these particulars experimentally so as to reveal beneath their surfaces the con-tinuous latent processes of dynamic change and latent congurations of static structure thatdescribe them. He then formulates middle axioms or tables that dene the operations ofvarious families or classes of things: what they are, what they are not, their various degrees,the limits of their instantiation of a nature, their many kinds and so forth. Continuously reningthese axioms through experiment, only then may the practitioner of Baconian scientiarise to theformulation ofgeneralaxioms, abstracted from particulars in a proper and systematic way. Thelatter, in turn, allow a judgment that denes a form.27

This form, as Bacon puts it, will be the true difference, ornatura naturans, or source fromwhich a given nature arises [fontem emanationis]. It is the lawaccording to which individual

bodies carry out pure individual acts.28 The discovery of the form is, Bacon insists, the workand aim [opus et intentio]of humanscientia.29 Such a form, of course, bears little resemblanceto what the term denoted for the inheritors of Aristotle or Plato. When I speak of Forms, Baconwrites, I mean nothing other than those laws and determinations of pure act which regulate andconstitute any simple nature [] forInever withdraw or abstract from the things themselves or

the operative part [parte operativa].30 A Baconian form is thus, as both Joy and Prez-Ramoshave suggested, something like an adaptation of an Aristotelian intrinsic efcient cause, wherethis intrinsic efcient cause is reconceptualized as a structural rule for the operation of matter,and is convertible into a law of nature (and where law of nature means nothing more thansome describable regularity in causal operation, rather than the broader structure of natural neces-sity, as in Descartes).31 Gaukroger also takes thislawlikeness of form to be important to its expo-sition, insisting that it is another way for Bacon to articulate the sense in which forms play anexplanatory role with respect to causation. Lawlikeness, he claims, is the crucial connection

between our knowledge of basic structures and our ability to transform nature.32

Finally, and crucially, the Baconian natural philosopher will not rest content with thediscov-

ery of such forms, but will demand a return to the work and aim of human power.33

He willdescend from the height of inductively discovered forms or better, emerge with them fromthe latent processes and congurations of particular things in order to use them operationally.In mechanics, he will generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures; in practical

physics or natural magic, engage in the transformation, within the bounds of the possible, of con-crete bodies.34 In short, the ultimate result of the Baconian interpretation of nature is the pro-duction and transformation of particular things, unfolding in mechanics according to the law oftheir form; and transformed in natural magic according to their latent processes and schemata,subject to their own experimental investigation, and arrayable in hitherto undreamt-of naturalhistories.

Bacon, Boyle and Spinoza

It may be difcult to imagine an early-modern philosopher further removed from Bacon thanSpinoza. Rather than a political insider calling for a wholesale purication of natural philosophyand maneuvering for massive government funding to establish some version of the research insti-tute Bacon so frequently allegorized, Spinoza was a generally despised and marginal gure livingquietly in the interstices of several philosophical, religious, economic and national communities.He was an apostate Jew, born to an exile community in Amsterdam; an artisanal lens-grinder bytrade; a Cartesian by training; an incisive critic of the pretentions of religious orthodoxy and adirect opponent of its role in politics (and philosophy); a monist metaphysician and democratic

political theorist. Nonetheless, both Bacon and Spinoza are easily described as belonging towhat we now historiographically but somewhat anachronistically identify as the unfolding ofearly-modern ontological (if not methodological) naturalism.35 Spinozas relatively extensive



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correspondence with Henry Oldenburg reveals his familiarity with BaconsNovum organum, andshows that he considered the Baconian project to have altered ways of knowing the natural worldas profoundly as had the Cartesianism dominant in Spinozas own continental milieu.36 TheSpinoza-Oldenburg correspondence became a slow motion debate-by-proxy with RobertBoyle, centered on a critique of Boyles niter experiments in Certain Physiological Essays(1661).37 Most literature on the correspondence has used it to assess the merits of the positionstaken by Spinoza and Boyle (qua Baconian), as touchstones for the broader points of viewthey supposedly represent; or else to explore the general relationship dialectical or differential

between early-modern philosophy and early-modern science. In the view of older commentatorsinterested mostly in determining which of the two presents the better account of strategies for the

production of knowledge, Spinoza comes out looking much worse than Boyle or, as Hall andHall facetiously put it in their unfortunatelyclassic essay, he turns out to be a better philosopher,

but poorer for it because a worse scientist.38 More recent work has staged the difference betweenSpinoza and Boyle in more interesting ways, focusing on their divergent paths through the emer-ging naturalism of early-modern thought.39 Rather than retread old ground, in what follows I will

instead focus on the way the correspondence brings to light some surprising connections betweenSpinoza and Baconianism.

One thing to be demonstrated in this regard is the inextricable connection between Boylescorpuscular philosophy and his attempt to reconstitute a meaningful vocabulary for a new meta-

physics of immanence. To be sure, Boyle manages to avoid the dogmatic articulation ofrst prin-ciples for which he relentlessly criticized the periods systematic philosophies: Gassendisrehabilitated Epicurean atomism, for its evasion of the problem of the origin of bodily motionand its illegitimate faith in the spontaneous emergence of order; Descartess identication of cor-

poreality with extension, and his related insistence on the innite divisibility of matter; and theScholastics doctrine of substantial forms, which, for Boyle, fatally undermines their physics.

At the same time, to attend closely to Boyles Certain Physiological Essays is to discover athinker who is concerned above all to articulatea corpuscularphilosophy, even while remainingmethodologically committed to experimentalism.40 This philosophy is a structured discourse thatdevelops a vocabulary of qualities and forms, recast in a corpuscular mold that does not always

bear a clear relationship to the experimentation supposedly underlying it.41 Some elements of thecontent of Boyles conceptual program will be discussed shortly, but a commitment to assertingsuch a framework is evident even at the supercial level of his published titles. For example, the

portion of Boyles Certain Physiological Essays read by Spinoza, Some Specimens of anAttempt to make Chemical Experiments Useful to Illustrate the Notions of the CorpuscularPhilosophy (containing A Physico-Chymical Essay and The History of Fluidity and Firm-

ness

, which both engage Boyle

s niter experiments), does exactly what its title claims. It usesaccounts of experiments and their observables to illustrate Boyles broader position on thenature of matter and the principles through which it should be understood including his rststeps toward a theory of qualities and forms. That theory would be developed at length inBoyles The Origin of Forms and Qualities (According to the Corpuscular Philosophy) Illustrated by Considerations and Experiments (1666), whose full title repeats the characterizationof the experiments he relates as illustrative. Within the text, he explicitly casts the book as aless hastily-assembled and thus more denitive account of the Physico-Chymical Essay towhich Spinoza had already responded.42

InOrigin of Forms, Boyle offers an explicitly deationary yet curiously metaphysical accountof form, surprisingly congruent with the one Spinoza was developing under the rubric of essences(to be treated below). After elaborating a critique of late Scholastic ontology, Boyle claims thatwhat he means by form is not a Real Substance distinct from Matter, but only the Matteritself of a Natural Body, considered with its peculiar manner of Existence, which I think may

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not inconveniently be called either itsSpecicalor itsDenominatingState, or itsEssential Modication, or, if you would have me express it in one word, itsStamp.43 Invoking what appears tobe a deliberate critical appropriation of Aristotlesta kath hauta sumbebkota(per seorpropriaaccidentafor the Scholastics), a form is, on Boyles account, nothing more than a convention ofessential accidents, which for him means qualities that discriminate one set of bodies fromanother.44 Form, then, is a way of describing a specic disposition of accidents or primary qual-ities in a body, a disposition that has no existence outside of or beyond the body so disposed.While Boylean form shares this immanence to body with Aristotles form (but not with mostof the Scholastic doctrines of substantial form that adapted it), unlike Aristotles, Boylesforms are purely dispositional: they describe a particular concatenation of accidents, ratherthan a way of putting matter to work through a principle of activation that embodies a functionor a purpose.

These strangely metaphysical inclinations in the project of a committed experimentalist mayhelp to cast Spinozas side of the conversation in a new light. Against the stereotypical picture ofSpinoza as a reective, metaphysical hermit unconcerned with the merely material realm, the

letters clearly portray a philosopher deeply steeped in practices of experimentation (even ifremoved from the standards for such practice then emerging in London and Paris). At thesame time, Spinoza and Boyle profoundly disagree about the precise status and purpose of exper-imental procedure. Where Boyle set out to see what he could doto niterwhatobservableshemight be able to generate from it, and what conclusions he might be able to draw on their basis Spinoza understood the goal of Boyles experiments to be the unequivocal demonstration of thenatureof niter. The aim of experiment, for a surprisingly Baconian young Spinoza, is the discov-ery of true natures or forms. Later, as we shall soon see, Spinoza also identies this discovery withgiving an account of activity and operation, thus in one sense rendering Spinozas objections toBoyle more Baconian than Boyles allegedly archetypal Baconianism.

In the early correspondence, Spinoza objects to thekindsof conclusions Boyle draws fromhis experimental results. He claims that since Boyle has fai led denitively to demonstrate theform of niter, the chemist has actually demonstrated nothing.45 In the subsequent letters to Old-enburg, Spinoza begins to articulate his own account of what it would mean to produce a formor dene an essence an account that would become signicantly more complex in his laterwork. In the correspondence, Spinoza argues that scientic knowing is the demonstration ofthe natureof a thing, and this means showing that whatever is assigned to that nature is absol-utely necessary to constitute its essence, i.e., it is that without which niter could not be con-ceived.46 Thus to know some natural thing is demonstratively to explicate its nature orkind; to provide a demonstrative proof of such an explication is to show that the elements den-

ing that nature or kind constitute the essence of the thing; to constitute the essence of a thing isto be that without which the thing cannot be conceived. Spinozas chain of embedded epistemo-logical conditions moves from the general back into the particular. Scientia in its rst steprequires the certain demonstration of a collective nature shared by all entities of the kind to

be explained (both in their genus anddifferentia). It is thus a deduction that satises the classicalAristotelian conditions for science (provided its premises are irreducible and its conclusion auniversally valid inference).47 Whatever terms dene that nature must, further, make thething what it is, i.e., constitute its essence. Again, in accordance with the classical Aristotelianview, Spinoza claims that what itmeans to constitute the essence of a thing is to render itconceivable.

While Spinoza advances this position in the 16611663 portion of the correspondence, hisRenati des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae (1663) offered a more operational account ofessence tied directly to the existence of a thing. There, Spinoza claims that what constitutes athings essence is what on being taken away, takes the thing away, while whatever leaves the



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thing intact when removed from it cannot belong to its essence.48 Stated positively, this meansessence is that which being given, the thing is also given. However, while writing the Ethica

just over a decade later (post. pub. 1677), Spinoza explicitly rejects the sufciency of this Carte-sian formula on metaphysical grounds, since, he now holds, singular things can neitherbe nor beconceived without God, and nevertheless, God does not pertain to their essence.49 Singularthings are modal expressions, that is, they are in and areconceived through something else: sub-stance, or what is in itself and conceived through itself.50 To put this in the language of the debatewith Boyle, in the EthicaSpinoza denies that the essence of a singular thing can be a sufcientcondition for its existence. Something more is required for existence, namely, substance (or God,or nature, which are all synonymous for Spinoza). First, a concrete natural body expressing adeterminate set of primary qualities or affections (Boyle would specify bulk, shape andmotion; Spinoza would be satised with motion, rest, speed and slowness) requires a naturalworld as such for its existence. For Boyle, this world would simply be the eld in which concre-tions and their qualities occur; for Spinoza, it is the realm of corporeal dimensionality and motion(i.e., substance conceived through the attribute of extension). Second, Spinoza also thinks it

would be absurd to claim that if the natural world is given, a particular concrete natural bodymust also exist (though he is committed to a necessitarian relationship between substance andmodes).

Therefore, in the Ethica Spinoza must reject both his early view of essence from theOldenburg/Boyle letters (essence as that which renders a thing conceivable) and the Cartesianformula for essence he enunciated in 1663 (given the essence, the thing is given). He replacesthese views with a more comprehensive denition of essence that combines ontological and epis-temological conditions: I say that to the essence of any thing belongs that which, being given, thething is necessarily posited and which, being taken away, the thing is necessarily also taken away;or that without which the thingcan neither be nor be conceived, and which can neither be nor be

conceived without the thing.51

This more complex account supplements the quasi-Cartesian cri-terion and the quasi-Aristotelian criterion withthe dependence of the reality and conceivability ofessence on the givenness of the thing. To relate this to the discussion with Boyle, Spinoza holdsthat whatever properties or causes are assigned to the essence of niter (it may turn out to be homo-geneous or heterogeneous, consisting of xed or volatile parts, expressing specic behaviorsunder articially produced experimental circumstances, and so on), they must designate boththat without which niter may neither be nor be conceived, andthat which may neither be nor

be conceived without niter. In other words, under this denition, essence can no longer designatea formal account of what a thing is (Aristotle), let alone an independent substantial form throughwhich it is actualized (Scholastic Aristotelianism). Instead, the essence of a thing must be fully

immanent to it and bound up in the particular ways it manifests its primary qualities. ForSpinoza, it follows that the essence ofa thing will be nothing other than its drive to perseverein existence, or what he calls conatus.52 The result is that the essence of a thing is its causal oroperational power, insofar as it is organized by the disposition of the parts of the thing andthe qualities that disposition manifests.53 This essence may be conceived relationally, from the

perspective of a nite thing immersed in a broader realm of duration and extended relationships;or,sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of its cause: that is, it can be grasped asthe idea ofthat same thing with respect to nature as such (i.e., in the innite intellect of God).54 In bothcases, it remains the same essence tied to the same operational power, now conceived temporally,now eternally.

This necessarily truncated discussion of Spinozas account of essence will not, of course,satisfy those desiring a comprehensive account of its role in Spinozas philosophy and its connec-tion to his theory ofconatus. Nonetheless, I want to link Spinozas seemingly fully metaphysicalaccount of essence back to what I suggest is its Baconian inspiration. To this end, it is worth

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remembering that Spinozas mature formal denition of essence is extremely close to one ofBacons major denitions of form:

The form of any nature is such that if it be in place, the given nature invariably follows. Thus it isconstantly present when the nature is present, and universally asserts it, and inheres in the whole

of it. The same form is such that if it departs, the given nature infallibly disappears. Thu s it isalways absent when that nature is absent, and always withholds it, and inheres in it not at all.55

For Bacon, given the form (a real difference or law of operation of a corporeal thing and theprimary qualities that structure it), the nature (a concrete individual body performing purely indi-vidual actions) is necessarily given. That is, the formal laws describing the rules for actions ofindividual bodies do not transcend their operation, but instead must be understood as fully imma-nent to them. It simply makes no sense to consider this form to be somehow realizedindepen-dently of the reality of the bodies whose operations it describes. Vice versa, given the concrete

body (i.e., if the nature is present), the form must be given. Indeed, for the body to be given

is for it to be

universally asserted

(Bacon

s afrmare becomes Spinoza

s ponere) by theform, and for the form to be grasped as immanent to the body as a whole [ inest omni]. Thus,the departure of the form is not so much the cause of the disappearance of the body as it isan event synonymous with it. For a form to departis not for it somehow to cease to inform agiven concrete nature, but for that nature to be destroyed, in the sense that it is notwhat itwas. Theabsenceof the form is theabnegationof a body in which it no longer inheres.56

Thus, like the Spinozist account of essence that, I argue, derives from it, the Baconian accountof form asserts a relationship of mutual dependence between forms and the natures they inform.The former are immanent theoretical descriptions of the actual operations of the latter. At the sametime, Bacon and Spinoza differ with respect to the criterion ofconceivability. For Spinoza, a thingcan neither be nor be conceived without whatever belongs to its essence, and whatever belongs toits essence can neither be nor be conceived without the thing. In the Baconian framework, on theother hand, it might seem to be possible to give an account of forms apart from the things in whichthey inhere. This, however, is an illusion predicated on the isolation of contemplation (knowl-edge) from operation (power). It is thus an error against which the whole Baconian edice isgeared. Knowledge of forms will be generated neither through syllogistic argument nora priori demonstration, but through the experimental and natural-historical investigation of

phenomena, their tabular organization and the careful and step-wise induction of axioms.

Spinoza and scientia intuitiva

In one very non-Baconian moment, Spinoza criticizes Boyle for claiming to have conrmed bychemical experiment that for the parts of a uid, small size is the only essential quality (whereasthe Cartesians held that such parts must also be round and smooth). Spinoza objects: No one willever be able toconrm[comprobare] this by Chemical experiments, nor by any others, but only

by demonstration and computation. For it is by reasoning and calculation that we divide bodies toinnity, and consequently also the Forces required to move them.57 In what amounts to a minoraside, Spinoza articulates one of the major differences between his view and Boyles. While bothagree on the innite divisibility of the material continuum (just as both agree that it is the motionof bodies and the micro-level disposition of their parts that produce observable effects), Spinozaclaims that this kind of basic natural-philosophical tenet cannot be the result of an experimentalinvestigation. It must instead be established axiomatically or deductively, on the basis of a systemof denitions and a coherent sense of logical inference. The primacy Spinoza accords to logicalrather than empirical demonstration, of course, is one of the greatest gulfs between his position



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and Boyles. Spinoza holds that a decision, assertion or argument about materiality as such mustbe proffered logically if we are to formulate experiments at all. He thus claims that through exper-imentation we may generate some fact or set of facts about the behavior of some particular bodyor set of bodies, but these facts can never lead us to the nature of matter as such, which, instead,must be axiomatically demonstrated.58

Spinozas position, however, is not as dogmatic as it may initially appear. First, I think it isclear that, in accord with the Hobbesian practice of axiomatic construction, the denitions onwhich Spinozas system rests are not dogmatic presuppositions, but genetic elements meant todescribe the conceptual production of metaphysical gures without the assumption that thosegures must be real.59 Second, that one proceeds deductively rather than experimentally doesnot preclude empirical falsication. Although, as far as I know, Spinoza never addresses theidea, there is in principle nothing about the metaphysics he advances that he ought not bewilling to revise if presented with experimental evidence irreconcilable to it. That said, it isclear that against Boyle and the Baconian tradition more generally, Spinoza reserves a widespace for purely rational investigation, mathematical reasoning and what will turn out to be his

geometrical method of philosophizing one that Boyle associates derisively with metaphysics.At the same time, what seems to be the least empirical of all discursive spaces in Spinozas epis-temology does not, in fact, remain free fromexperimentation. Instead, Spinoza will argue thatcertain forms of knowing are irreducible to empirical investigation even while involving it. Toexplain this, the remainder of this essay will discuss the element of Spinozas system seeminglyat the greatest remove from Bacon: intuitive knowing. While I do not pretend to offer a compre-hensive account of Spinozas third kindof knowledge (which supplements sensible imaginationand reason), approaching it in light of Spinozas debt to Bacon will yield a surprisingconclusion.60

I suggest that Spinozas most raried form of knowing scientia intuitiva, associated with

beatitudoandamor Dei intellectualis is, likescientia operativa, a way of grasping and mobiliz-ing the power ofwhat Bacon designated simple natures and, at least in part, what Boyle usuallycalled concretes.61 Spinoza denesscientia intuitivaas the kind of knowledge that proceedsfrom an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowl-edge of the essence of things.62 Atrst glance, this appears to be utterly irreconcilable with theBaconian approach. How could a way of knowing that proceeds from an adequate idea of theformal essence of certain attributes of Godhave anything to do with singular things, let aloneconcrete bodies or simple natures? For the moment, consider that Spinoza presents a naturalizedmetaphysics in which singular things are corporeal or cognitive modal expressions of substance.Since he holds substance to be synonymous with God or nature, to know God adequately in

scientia intuitivawill mean precisely to grasp bodies and ideas as natural things

to understandthem as the modes of substance or the parts of nature that they are. Thus, Spinozistscientia intuitivaeffectively doubles Baconianscientia operativa: rst, knowledge of singular things as entitiesembedded in and emerging from chains of causal determination is its necessary but not sufcientcondition; second, it generates adequate knowledge of the essence of things, which meansunderstanding the causal structure that gives rise to singularity and particularity.63

This, I propose, is nothing other than a radicalized form of Baconian operationalism.64 Toknow a singular thing as an expression of substance is to grasp its essence as the striving[conatus] or force [vis] by which it perseveres in existing, a force that Spinozaconsistentlydescribes as power or a determination to exist and operate [existere et operare].65 Throughouthis corpus, though especially in theEthicaandTractatus politicus(post. pub. 1677), Spinoza usesoperarein this precise existential formula, in several closely connected phrases dealing with thedetermination of modes, or in variations of both. In each case, it describes the external determi-nation and the internal essence or power ofnite things. English translators of Spinoza (Curley

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always, Shirley occasionally) renderoperareas to produce an effect. While this translation iscertainly valid and even maintains the implicit connection between Spinozas vocabulary and astandard Scholastic translation for Aristotlesenergeia, it obscures the obvious connection to Spi-nozas Baconian intellectual roots. If this connection is signicant, then it makes sense to under-stand Spinoza to hold that the essence of a singular thing is a potentia operativa that may begrasped throughscientia intuitiva. To know a singular intuitively is to grasp it through its oper-ational capacity.

This claim can be further supported through a brief engagement with Spinozas epistemology.Spinozas ingenious solution to Cartesian mind-body dualism is the position that the mind is theidea of the body: on the basis of his more general ontological identication of the order and con-nection of ideas with the order and connection of things or causes, Spinoza argues that mind and

body are one and the same thing, understood now cognitively, now corporeally.66 The mind thusperceives whatever happens in the body. Yet the perceptive power of the mind does not relate tothe bodyalone, since bodies, for Spinoza, never exist in isolation: following Descartes, Spinozaembraces a plenist account of corporeality, so no body acts without standing in relation to a series

of other bodies.67 To grasp the world as the causal network of matter in motion, in which my bodyis immersed and through which it is determined, is to imagine it. Imagination (a rst kind ofknowledge) gives us accounts of bodies impacting bodies, forcing them to careen in new direc-tions, shattering them, absorbing them or joining together with them in the production of prodi-gious effects. Imagination likewise provides an account of human cognition in which the ideasofthese bodies connect, disconnect, contradict, intensify and undermine one another.

But Spinoza also insists that were I toknow somethingonlyimaginatively, my ideas would beinadequate,confused and fragmentary.68 If I enter into the right series of encounters, on the basisof my imaginative grasp of the causal order of singular things, I begin to notice commonalities andshared structures or properties: the agreements, differences and oppositions among singular

objects of imaginative experience.69

If I am particularly astute, I may even begin to engineerencounters in order to generate and test such commonalities; that is, I may begin to experiment.The ideas of shared properties I generate allow me to form axiomatic common notions in anyearly-modern geometry textbook,notiones communesare synonymous withaxiomata ideas ofwhat is common to all things, or the certain thingsin which all bodies agree.70 With reason(a second kind of knowledge), we form law-like axioms and produce a unied account of therules and structures governing the motion of matter and the logical framework of language andthought, one that rests on our active and deliberate experimental production of corporeal (andideational) impacts. Thus, reason is not an abstraction by which one contemplates some thingin itself and by itself, but a way of knowing what a thing shares with others, on the basis of

which one formulates the concepts or rules of shared qualities or actions. In Spinoza

s view,Boyles chemical experiments can never yield an account of the nature of corporeal substance,but at the same time no such account may be formulated unless one begins from the experimentalborder of imagination and reason. To reason, for Spinoza, is certainly not to leave the imagina-tive realm of sensation, language, memory andexperiment behind. It is to do something new withthe materials those forms of knowing provide.71

The real interpretive difculty lies withscientia intuitiva(a third kind of knowledge), which,again, proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to anadequate knowledge of the essence of things.72 This denition is obscure, and there is little con-sensus about what it means. To elucidate it, we must answer three questions: What isan adequateidea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God? What is an adequate knowledge of theessence of things? And how may one proceed from the former to the latter?

The formal essence of certain attributes of Godsignals something less mysterious than itmay appear. Spinoza holds that there is one and only one substance God, or nature and



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that all things are modes of this substance, or ways in which it is expressed. Attributes are what thehuman mind perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and Spinoza argues thatwegraspthe essence of substance, God, or nature, through the attributes of thought and extension.73 Thus,an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of Goddoes not involve a philoso-

phical-mystical ascension or dissolution of the self in the divine, but grasping the nature ofthought and corporeality. Spinozas seemingly obscure denition thus tells us that in scientiaintuitiva, we proceed froma rational understanding of the nature of extension and thinking one constituted through an axiomatic system that emerges from careful, imagistic observationof the common order of nature, and a subsequent practice of engineered experimentation toadequate knowledge of the essence of things. What could this mean?

The adequate idea of an actually existing singular thing, Spinoza argues, necessarily involvesthe conception of the attribute of which that thing is a mode.74 Without veering further into Spino-zas technical language, this means that to understand a body one must grasp it as a singularexpression of corporeal nature: it is awayin which corporeally expressed or interpreted substancemay be (the same account holds for understanding an idea and the nature of thinking). Adequate

understanding of existing singular things, then, requires more than grasping the way they areembedded in chains of nite causes; one must also know them sub specie aeternitatis, asexpressions of substance or parts of nature.75 Thus, adequate knowledge of the existence of a singu-lar thing means understanding the precise sense in which that thing is inGod aswellasthewayitisindividuated or singularized, i.e., through its operational capacity, or the conative force by which it

perseveres in existing.Scientia intuitivatherefore uses rational accounts of thought and extensionto move knowing back down to the level of the very singular things from whose affective encoun-ters with our body our imaginative account of the world rst derived, with those singulars nowreconceived on the model of the operational power that denes them.

To review, at its most immediate, knowledge results from the seemingly fortuitous encounters

of sense perception and imagination. When we begin rationally to organize these encounters, thatis, to experiment, a new kind of knowing is generated. While never ceasing to live the life of theimagination, experimentation neverthelessalsoallows the formation of a set of rules or principles,that is, axiomatic claims. These axioms are irreducible to the outcome of the experiments fromwhich they are derived, since they rely on observing commonalities among many situations,

both deliberately engineered and seemingly fortuitous. These axioms ground the production ofrational accounts of the nature of the formal essence of certain attributes of God; that is, theygenerate an account of physical laws and logical principles that described the macro-level oper-ation of corporeal nature and its rational structure. Spinozasscientia intuitiva, I suggest, is simplythe notion that this structural account of extension and thought may be returned to the level of

singular, actually existing modal entities so that they are known in their operation, that is, ascausal forces expressing the power of substance. Thus, Spinozas contention is that when thehuman mind moves from an imaginative and initially inadequate engagement with singularsand theirdifferentia to the rational formation of axioms that express their commonalities, andthen, further, to broader adequate accounts of the nature of extension and thought, it is capableof scientia intuitiva: a grasp of that from which Aristotle held reason emerged, but aboutwhich he insisted it could never give an account, and what Baconian scientia operativa heldout as a promise. That is, Spinozasscientia intuitiva is knowledge of the essences of singularthings, framed as an account of their operational power, or what Bacon held to be the key tothe production or transformation of natural particulars.

Even when the Baconian genealogies of Spinozas account of operational power and itsrelationship to knowledge become evident, the differences between their approaches to metaphy-sics and natural philosophy remain, of course, exceptionally stark. Unlike Bacon, Spinoza givesno assurances that operational knowing is within our reach. Moreover, he sees its end, not as our

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mastery and domination of nature, but the recognition that we, too, are natural things. Baconinsisted that what was required for the successful prosecution ofscientia operativawas the expur-gation of the intellect, state funding, an army of researchers and in his more fanciful moments a technocratic dictatorship. Spinoza, on the other hand, suggests that the condition forscientiaintuitivaas operational knowing is nothing more or less than the existence of an unlikely commu-nity of those who strive in common to produce an effect both singular and rare.

Notes

1. See Gaukroger, Unity of Natural Philosophy, for the early modern debate over the sense ofscientia.2. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.3), 65. Prez Ramos,Bacons Idea of Science, identies

what I designate operationalismwith a makers knowledge tradition, rst articulated by Vico butalready present in many seventeenth century thinkers. Prez Ramoss thesis will be critically examinedin more detail in what follows.

3. See Garber, Philosophia, Historia, Mathematica.

4. Bacon,Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (Cog. & Vis.), 589 620.5. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.95), 153.6. Corneanu and Vermeir, Idols; Giglioni, Mastering; Jalobeanu, Early Modern Baconians; etc.7. See e.g. Jalobeanu,Core Experiments. Jalobeanu has shown that what sometimes appears to be a dis

organized morass of supplementary material in many cases is a rigorously structured record of deliberately organized experimental practice.

8. There is an extensive literature on Spinoza in relation to early modern physical theory, Cartesian mechanics, and the history of scientic methodology, but treatments of Spinoza and experimental philosophy are relatively rare. Most are connected directly to the Spinoza/Oldenburg/Boyle conversationdiscussed here. For the broadest consideration, see Gabbey, Spinozas Natural Science. Workdealing with the Boyle connection includes Buyse, Spinoza, Boyle, Galileo; Daudin, Spinoza etla science; Duffy, Science and Philosophy; Guillemeau and Ramond, Conception de lexprience;

Hall and Hall,

Philosophy and Natural Philosophy

; Jaquet,Expressions de la puissance, 179 194;Macherey, Spinoza, lecteur de Boyle; and Yakira, Boyle et Spinoza. Also interesting are VonDuuglas Ittus somewhat fragmentary and informal but extensive and rigorous blog entries on Spinozas lens grinding practices in relation to his optical experiments and metaphysics, gathered atSpinozas Foci.

9. Prez Ramos,Bacons Idea of Science, 48.10. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms, 115.11. Prez Ramos,Bacons Idea of Science, 150.12. Ibid., 48, 54, 56, and 61 62.13. Ibid., 54 62 and 150 196.14. Rossi,Magic to Science, esp. 1 35;Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts, 146 174; Bacons Idea of

Science, 38 (though here he also points out that Prez Ramos had misquoted his earlier work). Cf.Weeks, Role of Mechanics, 136 137, 173 174 and 190 191. Both Rossi and Prez Ramos are cri

ticized by Weeks for their reliance on the makers knowledge claim since, she holds, it conates aseries of distinct ways in which operational knowing works at different levels of Baconian inquiry.The makers knowledge thesis blurs the functions of mechanical history, experientia literata andwhat Weeks dubs philosophical mechanics(i.e., the descent down thescala intellectusfrom the generation of an axiom to its experimental renement). Essentially, Weeks charges that makers knowledge language minimizes the extent to which Bacons intermediate works play a role in thediscovery of forms, rather than simply standing as their operational products.

15. Funkenstein,Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 178 and 297 299. Funkenstein associates theergeticwith the sense ofergondenoting work, deedorwhat is maderather than the Aristotelianinection of the term towardfunctionor thebeing at workof a substance. He insists that the ergeticidealis fundamentally opposed to the contemplative. Compare, however, Bacons insistence on theinseparability of speculation and operation: that which in thought [contemplatione] is equivalent to

a cause, is in operation equivalent to a rule; or his identication of the prescriptionsfor true andperfect action and contemplation as amounting to the same thing [] for that which is most usefulin operating, is most true in knowing.Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.3 and II.4), 65and 205.



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16. Kusukawa, Bacons Classication, 56 57.17. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms,passim.18. Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, 194 195; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic

Imagination, 297 298.19. Gaukroger,Bacon and the Transformation, 140 141 and 155 158.20. Ibid., 158 159.21. For the account of the axiomatic specicity of geometry and politics asa priorisciences, see Hobbes,

Opera philosophica, vol. 1 (De corpore, I.vi.7 and 12 13), 65 66 and 71 73; Ibid., vol. 2 (De homine,x.4 6), 92 94. Funkenstein explores Hobbess account of the relationship between truth and the constructible in Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 81 and 327 338. Craig develops a powerfulreading of Hobbess constructivist political theory in relationship to ergetic principles in his dissertation, Axiomatic Politics.

22. Gaukroger,Bacon and the Transformation, 159.23. Gaukrogers point about certainty runs into difculty with respect to Bacons characterization oftrue

and perfectprecepts for operation and the discovery of form, which include being certainalongwithbeing unrestricted and disposed for action. Though the certainty Bacon calls for is clearly neitherperfect demonstrability in the Aristotelian sense, nor axiomatic determinability in the Hobbesian, itdoes play a central role in both formal knowing and operational power. Bacon, Oxford Francis

Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.4), 205.24. Gaukroger, Vico and Makers Knowledge, 40.25. Ibid., 40 43.26. It is true that Prez Ramos does occasionally make overly broad statements that might lead to this

interpretation, such as the claim thatto know, in brief, means to make, but these are not representativeof the more nuanced approach he takes in the book as a whole. Prez Ramos,Bacons Idea of Science,282. Kenningtons harsh review largely takes Prez Ramoss simpler claims to be articulations of thecore interpretive idea. Kennington, review of Prez Ramos, 414 415.

27. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.24), 73. On judgment in Bacon, see Jaquet, Le problmedu jugement.

28. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.1 2), 201 202.29. Ibid. (NO, II.1), 201.

30. Ibid. (NO, II.17), 255 7.31. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms, 107; Joy, Scientic Explanation, 85. Also see Prez Ramos,BaconsIdea of Science, 106 114. On the history oflaws of natureand the Cartesian origins of their construalin terms of structural necessity, see Henry, Metaphysics and the Origins.

32. Gaukroger,Bacon and the Transformation, 140 141.33. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.1), 201.34. Ibid. (NO, II.1), 201. On latent process and latent schema, see Ibid. (NO, II.1), 205 213.35. Against the background of the classical Aristotelian distinction between artifacts and natural sub

stances, many scholars have rightly hesitated to attribute a naturalism to Bacon, given his emphasison the operative production of works. Others are willing to use the label in a general sense (e.g.,Zagorin,Francis Bacon, 62, 73, 108 and 115). For an account sensitive to the nuances of Bacons critique of various ancient and Renaissance naturalisms, see The Refutation of Philosophieschapter in

Rossi,From Magic to Science, esp. 51 59. Given Spinoza

s clear commitment to an ethical and political naturalism in addition to his ontological stance, the attribution is far more widespread. It so usual,in fact, that it has pervaded Spinoza scholarship since the late nineteenth century (e.g., Nourisson s1886Spinoza et le naturalisme contemporainand, much more recently, Machereys Spinoza, la nde lhistoire, or indeed, the entire line of French Spinoza scholarship with roots in the work of Matheron). For a set of recent essays exploring and problematizing this attribution, see those collected byCharles Ramond inSpinoza: Nature, Naturalisme, Naturation, especially Moreau and Ramond, Lenaturalismede Spinoza; Guillemeau, Le retour au naturalisme; and Ramond, Nature Naturante,

Nature Nature. For a consideration of Spinoza in relation to the problem of early modern philosophical naturalism more generally, see Ramond,Spinoza et la pense moderne, 79 110.

36. Spinozas most explicit engagement with and critique of BaconsNovum organumcan be found in hisrst letter to Oldenburg. Spinoza, Collected Works(Ep. 2), 164 168. Jaquet treats this in the Troiserreurs de Baconchapter ofExpressions de la puissance, 179 194.

37. The Spinoza/Oldenburg/Boyle letters relevant to this essay are Ep. 5 7, 11, 13 14 and 16. Later lettersconnected to Boyle are exchanged, but most concern the problem of miracles. Spinoza, Collected

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Works, 172 190, 197 200, 207 215 and 216 218. For an account of the geographic, institutional, andepistolary contexts of the correspondence, see Buyse, Spinoza, Boyle, Galileo, 45 49.

38. Hall and Hall, Philosophy and Natural Philosophy, 242 243. Also see Daudin,Spinoza et la scienceexprimentale.

39. See especially Duffy, Science and Philosophy; Guillemeau and Ramond, Conception de lexprience; Macherey, Spinoza, lecteur de Boyle; and Yakira, Boyle et Spinoza. Cf. Jaquet,Expressionsde la puissance, 179 194.

40. The implications of this position have been explored at length by Anstey,Philosophy of Robert Boyle.Also see Sargent,The Difdent Naturalist.

41. See Chalmers, Lack of Excellency. For a radically different view, compare Anstey inPhilosophy ofRobert Boyleand Boyle and the Heuristic Value of Mechanism, which maintain that Boyles experimental and philosophical works are inextricably linked. In Boyle on Science, Pyle also critiquesChalmers. Chalmers replies to both Anstey and Pyle in Experiment Versus Mechanical Philosophy.

42. Boyles Certain Physiological Essays is located in Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 2, 36 204. SomeSpecimensoccupies ibid., 84 204. APhysico Chymical Essay is located at ibid., 94 114.Originof Formsis in ibid., vol. 5, 282 492. Spinoza is actually reading the Latin translation commissioned

by Boyle,Tentamina quaedam physiologica(1661).43. Boyle,Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 5, 325.

44. Ibid., 335; Aristotle,MetaphysicsV.30, 1025a.30 34; Aquinas,Summa theologicae, Ia, q3, a6, sedcontra and IIa, q2, a6, sed contra. Aristotles essential accidents are those properties usually or necessarily associated with or demonstrated through a subject, without belonging to its essence, denition orform: in Aristotles example, the angles of a triangle being equal to two right angles; for Aquinas, ahuman beings capability for laughter or delight. Essential accidents differ from accidents in themore general sense, which occur for a subject in virtue of some other thing or event: in Aristotle,famously, discovering treasure while digging a hole for another purpose, ornding oneself strandedon an island due to a storm or pirate attack. As Polansky has demonstrated, when specically conceived in terms of natural science, essential accidents must be connected to the whole of a living

being and not just its essence, so their demonstration must derive from principles of matter as wellas form. Polansky,Aristotles De anima, 40n14. Boyle pushes this notion to its logical extreme: innatural science, form is nothing but a concatenation of properties that may be demonstrated with

respect to some body. For a broader discussion of accidents in the Baconian and post Baconianearly modern English context, see Witmore,Culture of Accidents, esp. 111 129.45. Spinoza,Collected Works(Ep. 6), 173 188. Rather than insist, as he soon would inOrigin of Forms,

that the observables produced by his experiments do allow him to dene the form of niter, Boylereplies via Oldenburg that his aim inCertain Physiological Essayswas only to demonstrate the insufciency of the Scholastic doctrine of substantial forms. Ibid. (Ep. 11), 197.

46. Ibid. (Ep. 13), 208.47. Aristotle,Posterior Analytics, I.2, 70b17 32.48. Spinoza,Collected Works(PPC, IIA2), 264 265.49. Ibid. (E, IP10CS), 455.50. Ibid. (E, ID5 and ID3), 409 and 408.51. Ibid. (E, IID2), 447.

52. Ibid. (E, IIIP7), 499.53. Ibid. (E, IIP13S IIP14), 457 463.54. Ibid. (E, VP28 29), 609 610.55. Bacon,Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.4), 201.56. As an anonymousIHRreferee pointed out, this association of the departureof form with the destruc

tionof the informed body shared by Bacon and Spinoza may be an inheritance from Aristotle (thoughnot from Scholastics who argued for the separability of form). Consider its congruence with the wildDe animaanalogy from the end of the activity of the soul of an organism: Suppose that the eye werean animal sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance of the eye which corresponds tothe account, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer aneye, except in name no more than the eye of a statue or of a paintedgure.Aristotle,De anima, II.1,412b.20 24. See Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IVP39S), 569 570 for Spinozas account of death asthe replacement of one form with another, such that a body may die without becoming a corpse.

57. Spinoza, Collected Works(Ep. 6), 182. Noting that Spinoza seems to usecomprobareandconrmarewith distinct senses in the correspondence (the former as to make more probableand the latter as tomake certain), Curley suggests that the disagreement over the capacity of experiments to produce



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scientiamay stem from the equivocal use of these terms. See Curleys discursive Glossary IndexinSpinoza, Collected Works, 630 631.

58. Spinoza,Collected Works(Ep. 2), 167. Given the extent to which Spinoza is inuenced by Hobbesearly in his career, it should be unsurprising that this position echoes Hobbes s own response toBoyle. TheDialogus physicus(1661) was written in response to BoylesNew Experiments PhysicoMechanical (1660), an exchange classically analyzed to great effect by Shapin and Schaffer inLeviathan and the Air Pump. It is possible, but very unlikely, that Spinoza could have readHobbessDialogus, as it was printed in London less than 7 months before Spinozas letter and thereare no direct indications of his familiarity with it. Hobbess text does not appear in the inventory ofSpinozas library (yet neither does theNovum organum, which he certainly read, given his paraphrasesand nearly direct quotations from it in his rst letter to Oldenburg). Hobbes,Opera philosophica, vol. 4(Dialogus physicus), 233 296; Van Rooijen,Bibliothque de Spinoza.

59. I take this to have been denitively demonstrated by Garrett, following Gueroult. Garrett,Meaning inSpinozas Method, especially 144 180. Gueroult, Spinoza, passim, but for an extremely concise and

powerful discussion, see vol. 2, 483 485. For an alternative view, see Parkinson, Denition,Essence, and Understanding.

60. There is an enormous literature on intuition in Spinoza. For a good account in relation to the question inthis essay, see Garrett, Scientia Intuitivaand Carr, Spinozas Distinction.

61. This terminology can be found throughoutCertain Physiological EssaysandOrigin of Forms.Worksof Robert Boyle, vol. 2 (Certain Physiological Essays), 25, 49, 56, etc.; ibid., vol. 5 (Originof Forms),312, 356, 361, etc.

62. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP40S2), 478. The Dutch translation of the Ethicawas posthumouslypublished simultaneously with the Latin, with no denitive manuscript surviving as the source foreither. Where the Latin has to adequate knowledge of the essence of things(ad adaequatam cognitionem essentiae rerum) the Dutch has to adequate knowledge of the formal essence of things(devenmatige kennis van de vormelijke wezentheit der dingen) (my emphases). That this ought tolead to an emendation of the Latin is not supported by the recently discovered alternative Latin manuscript copy (not the basis for either published version; Spinoza,Vatican Manuscript, 155). Nevertheless, given the language ofessentia formalisSpinoza uses earlier in the sentence and throughout theearly propositions of Part II, the sense of this reading remains plausible. See, for example, Spinoza,

Collected Works(E, IIP8), 452 453.63. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP40S2), 478.64. Garrett does attribute a form ofmakers knowledge to Spinoza, but connects it to the genetic structure

of Spinozas denitions, not Spinozas operationalism. With respect to Bacon, he recognizes the potential difculties Gaukroger points out about Prez Ramoss position, but suggests that whether or notthis is actually what Bacon had in mind, philosophers like Spinoza operating in the wake ofHobbes would have been likely to read Bacon that way. Garrett, Meaning in Spinozas Method, 83,83n27 and 219n47.

65. See, for example, Spinoza,Collected Works(E, ID7, IP26, IP27, IP28, IP29, IP32, IP33, IIP30, IIP31,IVPraef, IV29 and VP6), 409, 431 436, 471 472, 546, 560 and 599; Spinoza, Complete Works(TP,2.2, 2.3, 2.7 and 2.8), 683 685.

66. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP7 13S), 451 458.

67. Ibid. (E, IIP17 31), 462 472. Mor

no

s alternative explanation is offered in terms of a theory of constitutive relationality. I see no disjunction between a dynamic, plenist physical theory and the ontologyof relations he proposes. Morno, Spinoza: An Ontology of Relations?

68. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP29C), 471. Manning points out that Spinozas characterization of imaginative knowledge as experientia vaga is borrowed directly from the Novum organum I.100.Manning, Spinozas Physical Theory. For a contrast to Bacons account of imagination, seeJaquet, Le rle de limagination.

69. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP29S), 471.70. Ibid. (E, IIP37 39), 474 475.71. On epistemological shifts in kind, see Tosel, Transitions thiques.72. Spinoza,Collected Works(E, IIP40S2), 478.73. Ibid. (E, ID4 and IIP1 2), 408 and 448 449.74. Spinoza usually cites IA4 in support of this oft repeated claim. Ibid., 410.

75. Though this argument is made in full atE, VP21 31, much of it is already implied by IIP44 49. Ibid.,607 611 and 480 484. Also see Jaquet,Sub Specie Aeternitatis, 108 124.

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Documents

Selcer - From Scientia Operativa to Scientia Intuitiva - Producing Particulars in Bacon and Spinoza