Empiricism

Bacon's Insects

Mill's use was inherited from Francis Bacon, who compared empiricists to ants, “merely collecting and using,” and contrasted them with dogmatists or “spiders” who “spin webs out of themselves.” But according to The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, published in 1905, Bacon's preferred insect was the bee, which gathers “flowers from the garden” and then “by her own powers transforms and digests them; and the real work of … [science] is similar” (p. 288). The empiricist tendency to which Bacon metaphorically objected, then, was the mere aggregation of “findings” as opposed to the kind of intellectual work that does something creative with them—although it is equally opposed to dispensing with empirical data in favor of philosophy, dogma, and religion.

Innate Ideas

Next is a claim that differentiated the 17th- and 18th-century British empiricists from the continental rationalists. Locke, for example, argued that the mind is originally a tabula rasa and that all ideas are the result of experience literally imprinting itself on this blank sheet. This is in contrast to Gottfried Leibniz, for example, who believed that the mind is more like a block of marble, with innate ideas already threaded into it and ready to be sculpted by whatever experience brings. This distinction is clearly very different from the one between spiders, ants, and bees. It refers not to any methodological alternatives but rather to a view about the nature of the mind. Moreover, it is clear that the two distinctions are independent of each other; it would not be any more inconsistent for Bacon's ant to believe in innate ideas than for the spider to believe in tabula rasa. This observation anticipates a problem (which is typical of positivism as well as empiricism); the views associated with the label do not necessarily need to belong together. The ant, for example, is an empiricist in Bacon's sense, but not necessarily in Locke's sense.

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