The intellect can’t make much progress by darting about at random. We need to organize facts into proper, well-arranged tables of discovery, almost like living maps of our investigations, so the mind can work with ready-prepared, digested material.
- Francis Bacon, 1620
A list enables the greatest number, range, or set of sets of ideas or things to be mentioned in a maximally brief, compact, simple, precise, parsimonious, direct, synoptic, and simultaneous (parallel) way.
- Patrick Gunkel, 1992
Today, I’m excited to announce that I’ve made a new plain language translation of Francis Bacon’s 1620 book Novum Organum available for purchase.
The translation is a plain language rendering of Thomas Devy’s 1902 English translation, which is publicly available on Project Gutenberg.
To do the translation, I ran the Devy text through ChatGPT and had Claude double-check everything several different ways, including Devy’s footnotes.
The translation is available at a discount on IngramSpark, full price on Amazon.com, and who knows where else.
The translation includes an introduction and appendix I wrote. These front and back matters contextualize Patrick Gunkel’s science of ideas as a furtherance of Bacon’s original vision.
I haven’t made a leap of logic or a loose interpretation here—Gunkel saw himself directly following Bacon with ideonomy and lamented that modern science, by not adhering more closely to Bacon’s original vision, had strayed in an erroneous direction.
This means that Gunkel’s challenge to modern science is absolutely monumental.
In fact, I was most compelled to execute this translation project because I wanted to know with certainty whether Gunkel’s critique was fair or whether it was a hallucination.
I couldn’t be bothered to sit down and concentrate on Devy’s 1902 translation, which retains much of the stilted, clause-ridden Latin phrasing of the original, however, so I decided instead to translate the entire work into plain language for my own use and make the entire text available to everyone else at the same time.
So is there, in fact, a missing link between Bacon’s vision and our science of today?
The answer, as I detail below, is yes—there is a significant missing link.
No—Gunkel was not hallucinating.
To explain, I’ve modified the introductory material I wrote for the book somewhat to stand on its own and included it below:
Novum Organum: The New Tool
Influential American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan once remarked that nature seemed random to early human beings, but once they began to understand that rules were involved it became easier to sort things out.
What must it have been like to live in a day when these rules were hidden from human knowledge?
Published in 1620, before Isaac Newton discovered the secret of gravity and launched our modern world, Novum Organum provides remarkable insight into the minds of men—and yes, they were basically all men—at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), the pioneering English philosopher and statesman who wrote Novum Organum, embodied the growing realization among Scientific Revolution-era scholars that was highlighted by Sagan’s insight around 360 years later.
Bacon was convinced that nature was not random.
He was convinced that with enough concentration and effort, human beings could figure out nature’s rules and make stupendous discoveries.
In Novum Organum, Bacon proposed a method to do just this.
The word “organon” is a Greek word meaning “tool.” And “novum,” of course, means “new.”
So with the title Novum Organum, Bacon was proposing a “new tool” for obtaining knowledge.
The cover of his book, reproduced below, shows ships sailing through the Pillars of Hercules (a.k.a. the Rock of Gibraltar) at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea.
They are headed for the New World, which had been discovered around 130 years earlier—a land that Bacon believed symbolized a prosperous, rational, science-driven future for humanity.
Bacon was so inspired by the New World, in fact, that he began writing a treatise called The New Atlantis that was set in the New World, knitting together the Platonic myth of an advanced civilization and the prospects of his new scientific method.
We cannot attribute all scientific progress to America, but here we are in 2026, and in the light of history it does appear that the United States has produced some of the world’s most significant and exciting scientific breakthroughs, though we are still a far cry away from the social and educational utopia of Bacon’s vision.
Bacon’s World
Bacon was writing at a time when the education system of the Late Middle Ages still held sway, where Aristotelian writings were married with Church theology to ensure that power remained in the hands of the elite even at the cost of progress.
Bacon politely inquired whether the old system could remain in place while, at the same time, space might be made for a new system.
His point was that people had been saying the same thing for thousands of years but had not really discovered anything new about how the world worked.
The true nature of concepts like “heat” still eluded understanding.
Novum Organum formed the second part of a massive project Bacon held in his mind called the Magna Instauration, or the Great Foundation. It was only fractionally complete during his lifetime.
Indeed, the Novum Organum breaks off abruptly at the end as Bacon turned his efforts to other works.
But what Bacon provided to humanity—though incomplete—nevertheless has proven foundational to the advancement of scientific progress in the ages since.
Despite Bacon’s existing influence and political position, his own contemporaries saw little value in Bacon’s ideas.
Bacon had in mind the creation of what could be considered the first massive, coordinated scientific project—something like the Human Genome Project or Apollo Moonshot: to pull together, organize, and validate all existing natural knowledge.
But he couldn’t convince anyone to help him.
It wasn’t until 1660—over 30 years after Bacon’s death—when Bacon’s ideas inspired groups of physicians and naturalists to found the Royal Society in London. Six years later, Sir Isaac Newton analogized the falling of an apple to the falling of the moon and developed his theory of gravity.
“Looking back,” says the English philosopher C.D. Broad, “we can see that [Bacon] was right, and we may be tempted to think that it was obvious. But it was not in the least obvious at the time; it was, on the contrary, a most remarkable feat of insight and act of rational faith in the face of present appearances and past experience.”
Why Reprint This Book Now?
A parallel experience to Bacon’s was no doubt had by Patrick Gunkel, the self-taught American genius who synthesized the insights of Bacon and hundreds of other thinkers and writers in order to invent, totally on his own, a science of ideas in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Gunkel was convinced that Bacon’s ideas, as articulated within Novum Organum and visualized in The New Atlantis, were never fully realized or understood.
Gunkel was not denying the success of the Scientific Revolution.
However, Gunkel believed that Bacon saw a more holistic world in which the inductive method could be extended to ideas themselves rather than simply stopping at what could be investigated in the material world.
This is visible in the general structure and outline of Bacon’s work, but is most noticeable in Book I, Aphorism 127 of Novum Organum, where Bacon writes:
Some people might ask—not as a criticism, but simply as a question—whether our method is meant only to improve natural philosophy (the study of nature) or if it also applies to other sciences like logic, ethics, and politics. The answer is: we intend it for all of them. Just as ordinary logic, which uses syllogisms, applies to every science and not just natural philosophy, so too our inductive method covers them all.
For example, we can make histories and “tables of invention” not only for natural things like heat, cold, light, and plant growth, but also for human feelings like anger, fear, and shame; for social examples from civil life; and for mental activities like memory, composition, division, and judgment.
Gunkel had a singular, profound insight when reading Bacon.
We believe the state of current scientific progress represents “the best of all possible worlds,” but if we never completely understood Bacon, that means the Scientific Revolution must have never been as broad-based as its founder intended.
The reason?
Because we never identified ideas themselves as natural objects that could be subject to scientific investigation in the same way as physical phenomena.
“Whatever the reason may have been,” Gunkel wrote, “this omission has had as its tragic consequence that for almost four centuries now science as we know it has remained profoundly imbalanced and only half-complete: like a monstrous human being the right half of whose body is shapely, vigorous, and total, while the left half is diminutive, fragmentary, grotesque, and paralyzed.”
Gunkel’s essential idea was that although induction had been used to puzzle out many of nature’s rules in the physical world, these insights could work just as well in the world of ideas and help clarify a world of thought that had been considered, for all human history, too subjective to research.
Gunkel’s vision was vast and unsettling.
Like Bacon, Gunkel had in mind a massive research project to reconfigure knowledge.
Also like Bacon, Gunkel could never convince a single person to participate on his project while he was still alive.
For one thing, Gunkel invented a method that relied upon and anticipated the successful future development of artificial intelligence in order to function. For another, Gunkel had great difficulty communicating his vast vision to others.
For example, in an introduction to a talk Gunkel gave—this may have been at MIT, but it also may have been in Austin, Texas—Gunkel wrote: “The origin of modern science can be traced to the proposals of Sir Francis Bacon that science be refounded upon the basis of universal experimentation and induction, and that such research be pursued systematically in special institutions.1 In a book published in 1620 [i.e., Novum Organum], Bacon also urged that the new science have the equivalent of an Ideonomic character. Unfortunately this second great suggestion of Bacon's was largely ignored in the subsequent history of science.”2
The problem, here, is that Gunkel was putting the cart before the horse in a way.
He was describing “the ideonomic character” of Bacon’s ideas, but because Gunkel was still in the process of articulating ideonomy itself, the logic seems circular.
Gunkel died in 2017 without a successor.
If his vision is ever to improve humanity in the singular way Bacon’s vision did, others will have to understand and develop it further.
Cool cover, yeah?
Anyway, there’s no pressure to buy this plain language translation.
This project mainly came out of my attempt to understand related primary source material as well as test of my ability to put something into print.
However, if you do end up ordering the book, please know that any profit will go toward the 501(c)(3) I have created.
The personal expenses I’m bearing at this time include web hosting, domain ownership, subscription costs for research, and an investment of misc. costs to obtain the materials that I’ve been posting as well as various application fees to make the nonprofit legitimate.
1) Bacon developed this institutional vision most fully in his utopia New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1627), whose research college “Salomon’s House” became the acknowledged model for the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 and chartered in 1662. Early fellows such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and the Society’s historian Thomas Sprat explicitly named Bacon as their inspiration. The “special institutions” imagined here were thus realized within four decades of Bacon’s death, and they remain the template for the modern research laboratory and national academy of science.
2) In Gunkel’s ideonomy materials, so far as we can gather at the present time, Francis Bacon’s work and influence is discussed in four locations. This quotation comes from the Orange Volume (p. 44 in the electronic text). Additional references can be found in the Green and Pastel Green volumes.