Intellectual History Review, 2014 Vol. 24, No. 1, 39 57, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2013.

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From scientia operativa to scientia intuitiva: Producing particulars in Bacon and Spinoza
Daniel Selcer*
Duquesne University

This essay compares two seemingly irreconcilable notions of scientia that bookend the seventeenth century: Bacons scientia operativa and Spinozas scientia intuitiva.1 I argue that attention to the way these philosophers frame the basic objects of their investigations natural particulars or singular things together with their accounts of forms and essences, reveals unexpected convergences between operationalist and natural light epistemologies. Famously holding that scientia and potentia humana coincide, Bacon identies knowledge with productive power, and therefore associates scientia either with a causal account of the nature of things or an experimental capacity to induce particulars on the basis of such an account.2 One target of this approach is the epistemological tradition associated with Scholastic metaphysics and natural philosophy. While beginning with what is present to the senses, that tradition ultimately grounds scientia on the immediate and purely rational grasp of axiomatic rst principles from which the necessary structure of particular things may be demonstratively inferred.3 Bacon replaces intuitivelygrounded knowing with a system of experimental exploration, inductive method and naturalhistorical 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 Cartesianism as to the Scholastic realism that both Baconians and Cartesians attack. Yet for Spinoza, I will argue, though grounded in a Cartesian account of intuition, scientia requires and even radicalizes Baconian operationalism, transforming it into a metaphysical principle nearly unrecognizable by, yet clearly indebted to, Baconian methodological reection. In short, this paper seeks to establish a Baconian genealogy for Spinozas account of intuitive knowing. Bacon and scientia operativa In the Novum organum (1620) and associated texts, Bacon demands that philosophy dispense with its pretensions to build systems of a priori knowledge and instead focus on the production of operative knowing, scientia operativa in the language of the Cogitata et visa (1607).4 Not simply a replacement of metaphysical speculation with natural observation, Baconian scientia operativa involves the deliberate production of natural particulars and the transformation of concrete bodies or natures through a method involving encyclopedic enumeration, synoptic tabular reection and experimental practice. Bacon thus identies the apprehension of practical rules for the operation of a simple nature with knowledge per se, or, as he describes it in the Novum

*Email: selcerd@duq.edu
2013 International Society for Intellectual History

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organum, with the induction of the form that describes a thing as a particular locus of causal power. The bee-like Baconian natural philosopher is to engage natural histories both to formulate theoretical accounts of the structures of the world (thereby producing rigorous interpretations of nature grounded experimentally), and to use those theoretical results to return to the level of particular things.5 This return to the particular, for Bacon, necessarily involves a capacity to produce or to operate in new ways. Recent work by Corneanu, Giglioni, Jalobeanu and others has focused scholarly attention on the nuances and philosophical implications of Bacons experimental practices, as well as on the textual and rhetorical modes through which he communicates, records, manipulates and reimagines them.6 These projects aim, among other things, at re-reading Baconian science (and the legacies of early-modern experimentalism it spawned) from the ground up. Rather than beginning with characterizations of Bacons master concepts, and then twisting them as necessary to t the so-called practical works, this scholarship allows philosophical notions to emerge along unexpected paths, from what appear to be teeming forests of experiment.7 This approach has transformed our understanding 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 like Spinoza, who, while operating in a milieu pervaded by experimentalism, is still far less directly committed to its practice than many of his contemporaries (at least as far as the surviving textual evidence suggests).8 The turn to Spinoza later in this essay will involve attention to the few accounts of 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 Spinoza philosophically, we rst need a somewhat broad conceptual characterization of Bacons account of 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 maker s knowledge tradition of early modernity. This position, elaborated most extensively by PrezRamos, involves the retrospective inscription of Bacon under a rubric rst theorized by Vico in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710). For Prez-Ramos, Bacon stands as an extreme example of a style of thought that postulates an intimate relationship between objects of cognition and objects of construction, and regards knowing as a kind of making or as a capacity to make.9 From this perspective, truth and especially the truth of formal knowledge in the Baconian schema establishes that to know something (a natural phenomenon) amounts to being able to (re)produce that very phenomenon on any material substratum susceptible of manifesting it.10 To interpret Baconian scientia in terms of maker s knowledge, then, is to understand the conditions for formal, natural-philosophical knowledge to coincide with criteria for the production of particular things.11 An obvious objection to the maker s-knowledge interpretation is its seemingly transhistorical anachronism. Not only does ascribing maker s knowledge to Bacon involve the transposition of an 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 or conditions for its articulation. In this respect, Prez-Ramos presents his argument for maker s knowledge under the banner of what appears to be a type of methodological Platonism: maker s knowledge is an idea-type or archetypal warrant that depends on claims about an unchanging human cognitive apparatus, recurrent stimuli and pattern of thought deployed by various thinkers throughout the ages.12 This view risks turning Baconian scientia into nothing more than a particular instance of a universal conceptual form and thus, perhaps ironically, 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 the idea-type rhetoric, Prez-Ramos does not present maker s knowledge as a notion utterly

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unmoored from specic texts, concerns and historico-institutional situations. To the contrary, he carefully describes its modalities in works by Plato and Aristotle (where it is subject to examination 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 maker s-knowledge principle 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 understand how to make or reproduce the nature whose form it is, and consequently, that forma is inseparable from the production of opus need not be attached to a theory of idea-types. Indeed, it has been articulated by other scholars who are not committed to Prez-Ramoss historiographical apparatus: Rossi, Funkenstein and Kusukawa. Rossis long project to interpret Baconian knowing as a non-reductive adaptation of epistemological strategies derived from emerging early-modern technologies, the mechanical arts associated with them and the tropology of humanist rhetoric stands in close alliance with Prez-Ramoss core assertions about the character of Baconian scientia. In a late text, Rossi is even willing explicitly to endorse Prez-Ramoss association of Bacon with maker s knowledge.14 Funkenstein, too, developed a reading of seventeenthcentury natural philosophy, including Bacon (but not focused on him), that identied an important operationalist shift in both formal epistemologies and the uses of experimental practice. Funkenstein called this an ergetic ideal of knowing which led to the conviction that only the doable at least in principle is also understandable.15 Committing herself neither to PrezRamoss idea types, Rossis claims about Bacon and the mechanical arts nor Funkensteins ergetic ideal, Kusukawa, too, has independently suggested that the maker s-knowledge attribution is fruitful.16 Even Prez-Ramos himself, in later work, manages to separate his argument about the connection between forms and maker s knowledge from the original idea-type framework in which 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 factum principle, he does so in work that emerges out of reection on both classical and seventeenth-century shifts in philosophical, scientic and cultural practices. Thus, while the notion of a maker sknowledge tradition may be anachronistic in one sense it is not a Baconian actor s category in another, it is historically embedded: Vico develops his account of maker s knowledge through an implicit reection on, among other things, the Baconian operative epistemology.18 A more difcult set of conceptual objections to the maker s-knowledge thesis has been raised by Gaukroger in an inuential discussion of the Baconian relationship between method, truth and works that parallels Prez-Ramoss reading. Emphasizing, like Prez-Ramos, that the Baconian attempt to understand form is not treated as an end in itself, but as the means to transforming nature for human purposes, Gaukroger develops a reading of Baconian scientia in which a truth-claim must satisfy the criterion of being informative (i.e., provide a causal explanation), but to do so it must be demonstrably productive (i.e., generate something material and useful).19 This is quite different, Gaukroger claims, from the truth criterion for early-modern practitioners of maker s knowledge. Maker s knowledge, Gaukroger argues, is a strategy for generating true and certain 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 mind here is the Hobbesian argument that maps the construction of geometrical gures onto the production of political actors, institutions and concepts: the objects of geometry and politics alone, Hobbes argues, are susceptible to certain demonstration, since they are entirely the result of human making.21 Maker s knowledge, then, would be a strategy for arranging domains of inquiry according to a hierarchy of certainty, where the criterion for perfect demonstrative knowing (scientia in the Aristotelian sense) is that the knower is the maker of the objects to 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 for skepticism in this regard, for example), but in making natural philosophy informative and productive.22 In other words, since Bacon is fundamentally committed to locating truth in the sphere of inductive natural philosophy, it is wrong to describe his position as belonging to a putative tradition of maker s knowledge.23 In the background of Gaukroger s argument against a maker s-knowledge interpretation of Bacon is a view that maker s-knowledge epistemologies, in the end, are philosophically vacuous. 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 incoherent account of knowledge.24 It is obvious, rst, that making an artifact does not magically impart the artisan with a more perfect form of cognition. Second, recourse to a maker s intention or plan in order to avoid the former objection is insufcient, since if having intentions or plans imparts maker s knowledge, then, in order to know, makers need not actually make, but only intend to make maker s knowledge would then be divorced from making, and fall into contradiction. 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 actually 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 Gaukroger s critiques contribute importantly to the discussion, since they demonstrate that maker s knowledge, conceived on Vicos model, has several serious deciencies when it comes to giving an account of Bacons notions of scientia and forma. At the same time, it seems to me that, in some respects, Prez-Ramos and Gaukroger have been talking past one another. If maker s knowledge consists in the claim that the activity or power of making grants the maker special cognitive access to what gets made (as with Hobbes and Vico), then Gaukroger is undoubtedly right to insist that Baconian science is not maker s knowledge. Baconian scientia operativa does not consist in the injunction to generate particulars through experiment simply so that they may be known, but so that something may be done. Yet Prez-Ramoss point is not that operational power grants the Baconian natural philosopher special, certain access to the true forms of simple natures. His claim, rather, is that what it means to know a Baconian form is, at the most general level, to be able to give an account of the operations whereby it may be induced in a particular a 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 as maker s knowledge at all, even though they are not so far apart on the form/work or contemplation/operation distinctions in Bacon. At this point it is most useful to move away from the interpretive debate over the maker s knowledge thesis and toward an account of Bacons stance on the relationship between form and operationality. Here, I will argue, lie the genealogical roots of Spinozas account of formal intuition. In what follows, then, while mindful of Gaukroger s critique, I will accept PrezRamoss 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 immediate effect of practical action. Since (1) I take Gaukroger to have demonstrated that it is problematic to refer to Bacons position as maker s knowledge; (2) at least among Bacon scholars, Funkensteins ergetic ideal has already been swept up in the wake of Prez-Ramoss terminology and (3) the operatio terminology around which both analyses turn is, I will show, a key locus for 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 of instances: 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 continuous latent processes of dynamic change and latent congurations of static structure that describe them. He then formulates middle axioms or tables that dene the operations of various 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 rening these axioms through experiment, only then may the practitioner of Baconian scientia rise to the formulation of general axioms, abstracted from particulars in a proper and systematic way. The latter, in turn, allow a judgment that denes a form.27 This form, as Bacon puts it, will be the true difference, or natura naturans, or source from which a given nature arises [ fontem emanationis]. It is the law according to which individual bodies carry out pure individual acts.28 The discovery of the form is, Bacon insists, the work and aim [opus et intentio] of human scientia.29 Such a form, of course, bears little resemblance to what the term denoted for the inheritors of Aristotle or Plato. When I speak of Forms, Bacon writes, I mean nothing other than those laws and determinations of pure act which regulate and constitute any simple nature [] for I never withdraw or abstract from the things themselves or the operative part [ parte operativa].30 A Baconian form is thus, as both Joy and Prez-Ramos have suggested, something like an adaptation of an Aristotelian intrinsic efcient cause, where this 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 than some describable regularity in causal operation, rather than the broader structure of natural necessity, as in Descartes).31 Gaukroger also takes this lawlikeness of form to be important to its exposition, insisting that it is another way for Bacon to articulate the sense in which forms play an explanatory 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 the discovery of such forms, but will demand a return to the work and aim of human power.33 He will descend from the height of inductively discovered forms or better, emerge with them from the 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 concrete bodies.34 In short, the ultimate result of the Baconian interpretation of nature is the production and transformation of particular things, unfolding in mechanics according to the law of their 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 natural histories. Bacon, Boyle and Spinoza It may be difcult to imagine an early-modern philosopher further removed from Bacon than Spinoza. Rather than a political insider calling for a wholesale purication of natural philosophy and maneuvering for massive government funding to establish some version of the research institute Bacon so frequently allegorized, Spinoza was a generally despised and marginal gure living quietly 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 by trade; a Cartesian by training; an incisive critic of the pretentions of religious orthodoxy and a direct 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 to what we now historiographically but somewhat anachronistically identify as the unfolding of early-modern ontological (if not methodological) naturalism.35 Spinozas relatively extensive

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correspondence with Henry Oldenburg reveals his familiarity with Bacons Novum organum, and shows that he considered the Baconian project to have altered ways of knowing the natural world as profoundly as had the Cartesianism dominant in Spinozas own continental milieu.36 The Spinoza-Oldenburg correspondence became a slow motion debate-by-proxy with Robert Boyle, 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 positions taken by Spinoza and Boyle (qua Baconian), as touchstones for the broader points of view they 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 commentators interested 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 and Hall facetiously put it in their unfortunately classic 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 between Spinoza and Boyle in more interesting ways, focusing on their divergent paths through the emerging 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 between Spinoza and Baconianism. One thing to be demonstrated in this regard is the inextricable connection between Boyles corpuscular philosophy and his attempt to reconstitute a meaningful vocabulary for a new metaphysics of immanence. To be sure, Boyle manages to avoid the dogmatic articulation of rst principles for which he relentlessly criticized the periods systematic philosophies: Gassendis rehabilitated Epicurean atomism, for its evasion of the problem of the origin of bodily motion and its illegitimate faith in the spontaneous emergence of order; Descartess identication of corporeality with extension, and his related insistence on the innite divisibility of matter; and the Scholastics 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 a thinker who is concerned above all to articulate a corpuscular philosophy, even while remaining methodologically committed to experimentalism.40 This philosophy is a structured discourse that develops 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 the content of Boyles conceptual program will be discussed shortly, but a commitment to asserting such 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 an Attempt to make Chemical Experiments Useful to Illustrate the Notions of the Corpuscular Philosophy (containing A Physico-Chymical Essay and The History of Fluidity and Firmness, which both engage Boyles niter experiments), does exactly what its title claims. It uses accounts of experiments and their observables to illustrate Boyles broader position on the nature of matter and the principles through which it should be understood including his rst steps toward a theory of qualities and forms. That theory would be developed at length in Boyles The Origin of Forms and Qualities (According to the Corpuscular Philosophy) Illus trated by Considerations and Experiments (1666), whose full title repeats the characterization of the experiments he relates as illustrative. Within the text, he explicitly casts the book as a less hastily-assembled and thus more denitive account of the Physico-Chymical Essay to which Spinoza had already responded.42 In Origin of Forms, Boyle offers an explicitly deationary yet curiously metaphysical account of 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 that what he means by form is not a Real Substance distinct from Matter, but only the Matter itself of a Natural Body, considered with its peculiar manner of Existence, which I think may

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not inconveniently be called either its Specical or its Denominating State, or its Essential Modi cation, or, if you would have me express it in one word, its Stamp.43 Invoking what appears to be a deliberate critical appropriation of Aristotles ta kath hauta sumbebkota ( per se or propria accidenta for the Scholastics), a form is, on Boyles account, nothing more than a convention of essential accidents, which for him means qualities that discriminate one set of bodies from another.44 Form, then, is a way of describing a specic disposition of accidents or primary qualities 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 most of the Scholastic doctrines of substantial form that adapted it), unlike Aristotles, Boyles forms are purely dispositional: they describe a particular concatenation of accidents, rather than a way of putting matter to work through a principle of activation that embodies a function or a purpose. These strangely metaphysical inclinations in the project of a committed experimentalist may help to cast Spinozas side of the conversation in a new light. Against the stereotypical picture of Spinoza as a reective, metaphysical hermit unconcerned with the merely material realm, the letters clearly portray a philosopher deeply steeped in practices of experimentation (even if removed from the standards for such practice then emerging in London and Paris). At the same time, Spinoza and Boyle profoundly disagree about the precise status and purpose of experimental procedure. Where Boyle set out to see what he could do to niter what observables he might 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 the nature of niter. The aim of experiment, for a surprisingly Baconian young Spinoza, is the discovery of true natures or forms. Later, as we shall soon see, Spinoza also identies this discovery with giving an account of activity and operation, thus in one sense rendering Spinozas objections to Boyle more Baconian than Boyles allegedly archetypal Baconianism. In the early correspondence, Spinoza objects to the kinds of conclusions Boyle draws from his experimental results. He claims that since Boyle has failed denitively to demonstrate the form of niter, the chemist has actually demonstrated nothing.45 In the subsequent letters to Oldenburg, Spinoza begins to articulate his own account of what it would mean to produce a form or dene an essence an account that would become signicantly more complex in his later work. In the correspondence, Spinoza argues that scientic knowing is the demonstration of the nature of a thing, and this means showing that whatever is assigned to that nature is absolutely necessary to constitute its essence, i.e., it is that without which niter could not be conceived.46 Thus to know some natural thing is demonstratively to explicate its nature or kind; to provide a demonstrative proof of such an explication is to show that the elements dening that nature or kind constitute the essence of the thing; to constitute the essence of a thing is to be that without which the thing cannot be conceived. Spinozas chain of embedded epistemological conditions moves from the general back into the particular. Scientia in its rst step requires the certain demonstration of a collective nature shared by all entities of the kind to be explained (both in their genus and differentia). It is thus a deduction that satises the classical Aristotelian conditions for science (provided its premises are irreducible and its conclusion a universally valid inference).47 Whatever terms dene that nature must, further, make the thing what it is, i.e., constitute its essence. Again, in accordance with the classical Aristotelian view, Spinoza claims that what it means to constitute the essence of a thing is to render it conceivable. While Spinoza advances this position in the 16611663 portion of the correspondence, his Renati des Cartes Principiorum philosophiae (1663) offered a more operational account of essence tied directly to the existence of a thing. There, Spinoza claims that what constitutes a things 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 means essence 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 Cartesian formula on metaphysical grounds, since, he now holds, singular things can neither be nor be conceived without God, and nevertheless, God does not pertain to their essence.49 Singular things are modal expressions, that is, they are in and are conceived through something else: substance, or what is in itself and conceived through itself.50 To put this in the language of the debate with Boyle, in the Ethica Spinoza denies that the essence of a singular thing can be a sufcient condition 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 a determinate set of primary qualities or affections (Boyle would specify bulk, shape and motion; Spinoza would be satised with motion, rest, speed and slowness) requires a natural world as such for its existence. For Boyle, this world would simply be the eld in which concretions 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 body must also exist (though he is committed to a necessitarian relationship between substance and modes). Therefore, in the Ethica Spinoza must reject both his early view of essence from the Oldenburg/Boyle letters (essence as that which renders a thing conceivable) and the Cartesian formula for essence he enunciated in 1663 (given the essence, the thing is given). He replaces these views with a more comprehensive denition of essence that combines ontological and epistemological conditions: I say that to the essence of any thing belongs that which, being given, the thing is necessarily posited and which, being taken away, the thing is necessarily also taken away; or that without which the thing can 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 criterion and the quasi-Aristotelian criterion with the dependence of the reality and conceivability of essence on the givenness of the thing. To relate this to the discussion with Boyle, Spinoza holds that whatever properties or causes are assigned to the essence of niter (it may turn out to be homogeneous or heterogeneous, consisting of xed or volatile parts, expressing specic behaviors under articially produced experimental circumstances, and so on), they must designate both that without which niter may neither be nor be conceived, and that which may neither be nor be conceived without niter. In other words, under this denition, essence can no longer designate a formal account of what a thing is (Aristotle), let alone an independent substantial form through which 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. For Spinoza, it follows that the essence of a thing will be nothing other than its drive to persevere in existence, or what he calls conatus.52 The result is that the essence of a thing is its causal or operational power, insofar as it is organized by the disposition of the parts of the thing and the 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 as the idea of that same thing with respect to nature as such (i.e., in the innite intellect of God).54 In both cases, 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 connection to his theory of conatus. Nonetheless, I want to link Spinozas seemingly fully metaphysical account 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 of Bacons major denitions of form:
The form of any nature is such that if it be in place, the given nature invariably follows. Thus it is constantly 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. Thus it is always 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 the primary qualities that structure it), the nature (a concrete individual body performing purely individual actions) is necessarily given. That is, the formal laws describing the rules for actions of individual bodies do not transcend their operation, but instead must be understood as fully immanent to them. It simply makes no sense to consider this form to be somehow realized independently 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 (Bacons afrmare becomes Spinozas ponere) by the form, 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 is an event synonymous with it. For a form to depart is not for it somehow to cease to inform a given concrete nature, but for that nature to be destroyed, in the sense that it is not what it was. The absence of the form is the abnegation of a body in which it no longer inheres.56 Thus, like the Spinozist account of essence that, I argue, derives from it, the Baconian account of 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 same time, Bacon and Spinoza differ with respect to the criterion of conceivability. For Spinoza, a thing can neither be nor be conceived without whatever belongs to its essence, and whatever belongs to its essence can neither be nor be conceived without the thing. In the Baconian framework, on the other hand, it might seem to be possible to give an account of forms apart from the things in which they inhere. This, however, is an illusion predicated on the isolation of contemplation (knowledge) from operation (power). It is thus an error against which the whole Baconian edice is geared. Knowledge of forms will be generated neither through syllogistic argument nor a 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 by chemical experiment that for the parts of a uid, small size is the only essential quality (whereas the Cartesians held that such parts must also be round and smooth). Spinoza objects: No one will ever be able to conrm [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 to innity, and consequently also the Forces required to move them.57 In what amounts to a minor aside, Spinoza articulates one of the major differences between his view and Boyles. While both agree on the innite divisibility of the material continuum (just as both agree that it is the motion of bodies and the micro-level disposition of their parts that produce observable effects), Spinoza claims that this kind of basic natural-philosophical tenet cannot be the result of an experimental investigation. It must instead be established axiomatically or deductively, on the basis of a system of denitions and a coherent sense of logical inference. The primacy Spinoza accords to logical rather 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 must be proffered logically if we are to formulate experiments at all. He thus claims that through experimentation we may generate some fact or set of facts about the behavior of some particular body or 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 is clear that, in accord with the Hobbesian practice of axiomatic construction, the denitions on which Spinozas system rests are not dogmatic presuppositions, but genetic elements meant to describe the conceptual production of metaphysical gures without the assumption that those gures must be real.59 Second, that one proceeds deductively rather than experimentally does not preclude empirical falsication. Although, as far as I know, Spinoza never addresses the idea, there is in principle nothing about the metaphysics he advances that he ought not be willing to revise if presented with experimental evidence irreconcilable to it. That said, it is clear that against Boyle and the Baconian tradition more generally, Spinoza reserves a wide space 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 epistemology does not, in fact, remain free from experimentation. Instead, Spinoza will argue that certain forms of knowing are irreducible to empirical investigation even while involving it. To explain this, the remainder of this essay will discuss the element of Spinozas system seemingly at the greatest remove from Bacon: intuitive knowing. While I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of Spinozas third kind of knowledge (which supplements sensible imagination and reason), approaching it in light of Spinozas debt to Bacon will yield a surprising conclusion.60 I suggest that Spinozas most raried form of knowing scientia intuitiva, associated with beatitudo and amor Dei intellectualis is, like scientia operativa, a way of grasping and mobilizing the power of what Bacon designated simple natures and, at least in part, what Boyle usually called concretes.61 Spinoza denes scientia intuitiva as the kind of knowledge that proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.62 At rst glance, this appears to be utterly irreconcilable with the Baconian approach. How could a way of knowing that proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God have anything to do with singular things, let alone concrete bodies or simple natures? For the moment, consider that Spinoza presents a naturalized metaphysics 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 intuitiva will mean precisely to grasp bodies and ideas as natural things to understand them as the modes of substance or the parts of nature that they are. Thus, Spinozist scientia intui tiva effectively doubles Baconian scientia operativa: rst, knowledge of singular things as entities embedded in and emerging from chains of causal determination is its necessary but not sufcient condition; second, it generates adequate knowledge of the essence of things, which means understanding 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 To know 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 Spinoza consistently describes as power or a determination to exist and operate [existere et operare].65 Throughout his corpus, though especially in the Ethica and Tractatus politicus (post. pub. 1677), Spinoza uses operare in this precise existential formula, in several closely connected phrases dealing with the determination of modes, or in variations of both. In each case, it describes the external determination and the internal essence or power of nite things. English translators of Spinoza (Curley

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always, Shirley occasionally) render operare as to produce an effect. While this translation is certainly valid and even maintains the implicit connection between Spinozas vocabulary and a standard Scholastic translation for Aristotles energeia, it obscures the obvious connection to Spinozas Baconian intellectual roots. If this connection is signicant, then it makes sense to understand Spinoza to hold that the essence of a singular thing is a potentia operativa that may be grasped through scientia intuitiva. To know a singular intuitively is to grasp it through its operational 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 the idea of the body: on the basis of his more general ontological identication of the order and connection 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 thus perceives whatever happens in the body. Yet the perceptive power of the mind does not relate to the body alone, since bodies, for Spinoza, never exist in isolation: following Descartes, Spinoza embraces 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 body is immersed and through which it is determined, is to imagine it. Imagination (a rst kind of knowledge) gives us accounts of bodies impacting bodies, forcing them to careen in new directions, shattering them, absorbing them or joining together with them in the production of prodigious effects. Imagination likewise provides an account of human cognition in which the ideas of these bodies connect, disconnect, contradict, intensify and undermine one another. But Spinoza also insists that were I to know something only imaginatively, my ideas would be inadequate, confused and fragmentary.68 If I enter into the right series of encounters, on the basis of my imaginative grasp of the causal order of singular things, I begin to notice commonalities and shared 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 engineer encounters 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 any early-modern geometry textbook, notiones communes are synonymous with axiomata ideas of what is common to all things, or the certain things in which all bodies agree.70 With reason (a second kind of knowledge), we form law-like axioms and produce a unied account of the rules and structures governing the motion of matter and the logical framework of language and thought, one that rests on our active and deliberate experimental production of corporeal (and ideational) impacts. Thus, reason is not an abstraction by which one contemplates some thing in 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 Spinozas 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 experimental border of imagination and reason. To reason, for Spinoza, is certainly not to leave the imaginative realm of sensation, language, memory and experiment behind. It is to do something new with the materials those forms of knowing provide.71 The real interpretive difculty lies with scientia intuitiva (a third kind of knowledge), which, again, proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things.72 This denition is obscure, and there is little consensus about what it means. To elucidate it, we must answer three questions: What is an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God? What is an adequate knowledge of the essence of things? And how may one proceed from the former to the latter? The formal essence of certain attributes of God signals something less mysterious than it may 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 the human mind perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and Spinoza argues that we grasp the 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 God does not involve a philosophical-mystical ascension or dissolution of the self in the divine, but grasping the nature of thought and corporeality. Spinozas seemingly obscure denition thus tells us that in scientia intuitiva, we proceed from a rational understanding of the nature of extension and thinking one constituted through an axiomatic system that emerges from careful, imagistic observation of the common order of nature, and a subsequent practice of engineered experimentation to adequate knowledge of the essence of things. What could this mean? The adequate idea of an actually existing singular thing, Spinoza argues, necessarily involves the conception of the attribute of which that thing is a mode.74 Without veering further into Spinozas technical language, this means that to understand a body one must grasp it as a singular expression of corporeal nature: it is a way in which corporeally expressed or interpreted substance may 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 are embedded in chains of nite causes; one must also know them sub specie aeternitatis, as expressions of substance or parts of nature.75 Thus, adequate knowledge of the existence of a singular thing means understanding the precise sense in which that thing is in God as well as the way it is individuated or singularized, i.e., through its operational capacity, or the conative force by which it perseveres in existing. Scientia intuitiva therefore uses rational accounts of thought and extension to move knowing back down to the level of the very singular things from whose affective encounters with our body our imaginative account of the world rst derived, with those singulars now reconceived 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, that is, to experiment, a new kind of knowing is generated. While never ceasing to live the life of the imagination, experimentation nevertheless also allows the formation of a set of rules or principles, that is, axiomatic claims. These axioms are irreducible to the outcome of the experiments from which they are derived, since they rely on observing commonalities among many situations, both deliberately engineered and seemingly fortuitous. These axioms ground the production of rational accounts of the nature of the formal essence of certain attributes of God; that is, they generate an account of physical laws and logical principles that described the macro-level operation of corporeal nature and its rational structure. Spinozas scientia intuitiva, I suggest, is simply the 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, as causal forces expressing the power of substance. Thus, Spinozas contention is that when the human mind moves from an imaginative and initially inadequate engagement with singulars and their differentia to the rational formation of axioms that express their commonalities, and then, further, to broader adequate accounts of the nature of extension and thought, it is capable of scientia intuitiva: a grasp of that from which Aristotle held reason emerged, but about which he insisted it could never give an account, and what Baconian scientia operativa held out as a promise. That is, Spinozas scientia intuitiva is knowledge of the essences of singular things, framed as an account of their operational power, or what Bacon held to be the key to the production or transformation of natural particulars. Even when the Baconian genealogies of Spinozas account of operational power and its relationship to knowledge become evident, the differences between their approaches to metaphysics and natural philosophy remain, of course, exceptionally stark. Unlike Bacon, Spinoza gives no 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. Bacon insisted that what was required for the successful prosecution of scientia operativa was the expurgation 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 for scientia intuitiva as operational knowing is nothing more or less than the existence of an unlikely community of those who strive in common to produce an effect both singular and rare.

Notes
1. 2. See Gaukroger, Unity of Natural Philosophy, for the early modern debate over the sense of scientia. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.3), 65. Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, identies what I designate operationalism with a makers knowledge tradition, rst articulated by Vico but already present in many seventeenth century thinkers. Prez Ramoss thesis will be critically examined in more detail in what follows. See Garber, Philosophia, Historia, Mathematica. Bacon, Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (Cog. & Vis.), 589 620. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.95), 153. Corneanu and Vermeir, Idols; Giglioni, Mastering; Jalobeanu, Early Modern Baconians; etc. 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 delib erately organized experimental practice. There is an extensive literature on Spinoza in relation to early modern physical theory, Cartesian mech anics, and the history of scientic methodology, but treatments of Spinoza and experimental philos ophy are relatively rare. Most are connected directly to the Spinoza/Oldenburg/Boyle conversation discussed here. For the broadest consideration, see Gabbey, Spinozas Natural Science. Work dealing with the Boyle connection includes Buyse, Spinoza, Boyle, Galileo; Daudin, Spinoza et la 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 Von Duuglas Ittus somewhat fragmentary and informal but extensive and rigorous blog entries on Spino zas lens grinding practices in relation to his optical experiments and metaphysics, gathered at Spino zas Foci. Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, 48. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms, 115. Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, 150. Ibid., 48, 54, 56, and 61 62. Ibid., 54 62 and 150 196. 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 a series of distinct ways in which operational knowing works at different levels of Baconian inquiry. The maker s knowledge thesis blurs the functions of mechanical history, experientia literata and what Weeks dubs philosophical mechanics (i.e., the descent down the scala intellectus from the gen eration of an axiom to its experimental renement). Essentially, Weeks charges that maker s knowl edge language minimizes the extent to which Bacons intermediate works play a role in the discovery of forms, rather than simply standing as their operational products. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 178 and 297 299. Funkenstein associates the ergetic with the sense of ergon denoting work, deed or what is made rather than the Aristotelian inection of the term toward function or the being at work of a substance. He insists that the ergetic ideal is fundamentally opposed to the contemplative. Compare, however, Bacons insistence on the inseparability 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 prescriptions for true and perfect action and contemplation as amounting to the same thing [] for that which is most useful in operating, is most true in knowing. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.3 and II.4), 65 and 205.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

D. SELCER
Kusukawa, Bacons Classication, 56 57. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms, passim. Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, 194 195; Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 297 298. Gaukroger, Bacon and the Transformation, 140 141 and 155 158. Ibid., 158 159. For the account of the axiomatic specicity of geometry and politics as a priori sciences, 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 con structible in Theology and the Scientic Imagination, 81 and 327 338. Craig develops a powerful reading of Hobbess constructivist political theory in relationship to ergetic principles in his disser tation, Axiomatic Politics. Gaukroger, Bacon and the Transformation, 159. Gaukrogers point about certainty runs into difculty with respect to Bacons characterization of true and perfect precepts for operation and the discovery of form, which include being certain along with being unrestricted and disposed for action. Though the certainty Bacon calls for is clearly neither perfect demonstrability in the Aristotelian sense, nor axiomatic determinability in the Hobbesian, it does play a central role in both formal knowing and operational power. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.4), 205. Gaukroger, Vico and Makers Knowledge, 40. Ibid., 40 43. It is true that Prez Ramos does occasionally make overly broad statements that might lead to this interpretation, such as the claim that to know, in brief, means to make, but these are not representative of 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 the core interpretive idea. Kennington, review of Prez Ramos, 414 415. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, I.24), 73. On judgment in Bacon, see Jaquet, Le problme du jugement. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.1 2), 201 202. Ibid. (NO, II.1), 201. Ibid. (NO, II.17), 255 7. Prez Ramos, Bacons Forms, 107; Joy, Scientic Explanation, 85. Also see Prez Ramos, Bacons Idea of Science, 106 114. On the history of laws of nature and the Cartesian origins of their construal in terms of structural necessity, see Henry, Metaphysics and the Origins. Gaukroger, Bacon and the Transformation, 140 141. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.1), 201. Ibid. (NO, II.1), 201. On latent process and latent schema, see Ibid. (NO, II.1), 205 213. 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 emphasis on 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 cri tique of various ancient and Renaissance naturalisms, see The Refutation of Philosophies chapter in Rossi, From Magic to Science, esp. 51 59. Given Spinozas clear commitment to an ethical and pol itical 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., Nourissons 1886 Spinoza et le naturalisme contemporain and, much more recently, Machereys Spinoza, la n de lhistoire, or indeed, the entire line of French Spinoza scholarship with roots in the work of Math eron). For a set of recent essays exploring and problematizing this attribution, see those collected by Charles Ramond in Spinoza: Nature, Naturalisme, Naturation, especially Moreau and Ramond, Le naturalisme de 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 philosophi cal naturalism more generally, see Ramond, Spinoza et la pense moderne, 79 110. Spinozas most explicit engagement with and critique of Bacons Novum organum can be found in his rst letter to Oldenburg. Spinoza, Collected Works (Ep. 2), 164 168. Jaquet treats this in the Trois erreurs de Bacon chapter of Expressions de la puissance, 179 194. The Spinoza/Oldenburg/Boyle letters relevant to this essay are Ep. 5 7, 11, 13 14 and 16. Later letters connected to Boyle are exchanged, but most concern the problem of miracles. Spinoza, Collected

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

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38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

Works, 172 190, 197 200, 207 215 and 216 218. For an account of the geographic, institutional, and epistolary contexts of the correspondence, see Buyse, Spinoza, Boyle, Galileo, 45 49. Hall and Hall, Philosophy and Natural Philosophy, 242 243. Also see Daudin, Spinoza et la science exprimentale. See especially Duffy, Science and Philosophy; Guillemeau and Ramond, Conception de lexpri ence; Macherey, Spinoza, lecteur de Boyle; and Yakira, Boyle et Spinoza. Cf. Jaquet, Expressions de la puissance, 179 194. The implications of this position have been explored at length by Anstey, Philosophy of Robert Boyle. Also see Sargent, The Difdent Naturalist. See Chalmers, Lack of Excellency. For a radically different view, compare Anstey in Philosophy of Robert Boyle and Boyle and the Heuristic Value of Mechanism, which maintain that Boyles exper imental and philosophical works are inextricably linked. In Boyle on Science, Pyle also critiques Chalmers. Chalmers replies to both Anstey and Pyle in Experiment Versus Mechanical Philosophy. Boyles Certain Physiological Essays is located in Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 2, 36 204. Some Specimens occupies ibid., 84 204. A Physico Chymical Essay is located at ibid., 94 114. Origin of Forms is in ibid., vol. 5, 282 492. Spinoza is actually reading the Latin translation commissioned by Boyle, Tentamina quaedam physiologica (1661). Boyle, Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 5, 325. Ibid., 335; Aristotle, Metaphysics V.30, 1025a.30 34; Aquinas, Summa theologicae, Ia, q3, a6, sed contra and IIa, q2, a6, sed contra. Aristotles essential accidents are those properties usually or necess arily associated with or demonstrated through a subject, without belonging to its essence, denition or form: in Aristotles example, the angles of a triangle being equal to two right angles; for Aquinas, a human beings capability for laughter or delight. Essential accidents differ from accidents in the more 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, or nding oneself stranded on an island due to a storm or pirate attack. As Polansky has demonstrated, when specically con ceived 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 well as form. Polansky, Aristotles De anima, 40n14. Boyle pushes this notion to its logical extreme: in natural 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 Baconian early modern English context, see Witmore, Culture of Accidents, esp. 111 129. Spinoza, Collected Works (Ep. 6), 173 188. Rather than insist, as he soon would in Origin of Forms, that the observables produced by his experiments do allow him to dene the form of niter, Boyle replies via Oldenburg that his aim in Certain Physiological Essays was only to demonstrate the insuf ciency of the Scholastic doctrine of substantial forms. Ibid. (Ep. 11), 197. Ibid. (Ep. 13), 208. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I.2, 70b17 32. Spinoza, Collected Works (PPC, IIA2), 264 265. Ibid. (E, IP10CS), 455. Ibid. (E, ID5 and ID3), 409 and 408. Ibid. (E, IID2), 447. Ibid. (E, IIIP7), 499. Ibid. (E, IIP13S IIP14), 457 463. Ibid. (E, VP28 29), 609 610. Bacon, Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11 (NO, II.4), 201. As an anonymous IHR referee pointed out, this association of the departure of form with the destruc tion of the informed body shared by Bacon and Spinoza may be an inheritance from Aristotle (though not from Scholastics who argued for the separability of form). Consider its congruence with the wild De anima analogy from the end of the activity of the soul of an organism: Suppose that the eye were an animal sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance of the eye which corresponds to the account, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name no more than the eye of a statue or of a painted gure. Aristotle, De anima, II.1, 412b.20 24. See Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IVP39S), 569 570 for Spinozas account of death as the replacement of one form with another, such that a body may die without becoming a corpse. Spinoza, Collected Works (Ep. 6), 182. Noting that Spinoza seems to use comprobare and conrmare with distinct senses in the correspondence (the former as to make more probable and the latter as to make certain), Curley suggests that the disagreement over the capacity of experiments to produce

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scientia may stem from the equivocal use of these terms. See Curleys discursive Glossary Index in Spinoza, Collected Works, 630 631. Spinoza, Collected Works (Ep. 2), 167. Given the extent to which Spinoza is inuenced by Hobbes early in his career, it should be unsurprising that this position echoes Hobbess own response to Boyle. The Dialogus physicus (1661) was written in response to Boyles New Experiments Physico Mechanical (1660), an exchange classically analyzed to great effect by Shapin and Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump. It is possible, but very unlikely, that Spinoza could have read Hobbess Dialogus, as it was printed in London less than 7 months before Spinozas letter and there are no direct indications of his familiarity with it. Hobbess text does not appear in the inventory of Spinozas library (yet neither does the Novum organum, which he certainly read, given his paraphrases and 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. I take this to have been denitively demonstrated by Garrett, following Gueroult. Garrett, Meaning in Spinozas 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. There is an enormous literature on intuition in Spinoza. For a good account in relation to the question in this essay, see Garrett, Scientia Intuitiva and Carr, Spinozas Distinction. This terminology can be found throughout Certain Physiological Essays and Origin of Forms. Works of Robert Boyle, vol. 2 (Certain Physiological Essays), 25, 49, 56, etc.; ibid., vol. 5 (Origin of Forms), 312, 356, 361, etc. Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP40S2), 478. The Dutch translation of the Ethica was posthumously published simultaneously with the Latin, with no denitive manuscript surviving as the source for either. Where the Latin has to adequate knowledge of the essence of things (ad adaequatam cogni tionem 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 to lead to an emendation of the Latin is not supported by the recently discovered alternative Latin manu script copy (not the basis for either published version; Spinoza, Vatican Manuscript, 155). Neverthe less, given the language of essentia formalis Spinoza uses earlier in the sentence and throughout the early propositions of Part II, the sense of this reading remains plausible. See, for example, Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP8), 452 453. Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP40S2), 478. Garrett does attribute a form of makers knowledge to Spinoza, but connects it to the genetic structure of Spinozas denitions, not Spinozas operationalism. With respect to Bacon, he recognizes the poten tial difculties Gaukroger points out about Prez Ramoss position, but suggests that whether or not this is actually what Bacon had in mind, philosophers like Spinoza operating in the wake of Hobbes would have been likely to read Bacon that way. Garrett, Meaning in Spinozas Method, 83, 83n27 and 219n47. 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. Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP7 13S), 451 458. Ibid. (E, IIP17 31), 462 472. Mornos alternative explanation is offered in terms of a theory of con stitutive relationality. I see no disjunction between a dynamic, plenist physical theory and the ontology of relations he proposes. Morno, Spinoza: An Ontology of Relations? Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP29C), 471. Manning points out that Spinozas characterization of ima ginative 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, see Jaquet, Le rle de limagination. Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP29S), 471. Ibid. (E, IIP37 39), 474 475. On epistemological shifts in kind, see Tosel, Transitions thiques. Spinoza, Collected Works (E, IIP40S2), 478. Ibid. (E, ID4 and IIP1 2), 408 and 448 449. Spinoza usually cites IA4 in support of this oft repeated claim. Ibid., 410. Though this argument is made in full at E, 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.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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