Laws of Nature and Nature’s Use and Manipulation According to Roger Bacon (ca. 1220-1292)

The idea of a general legality in nature is found in the writing of Roger Bacon already in the thirteenth century. Bacon moved towards a new conception of nature by rendering natural regularities into laws. He wrote of the law of reflection, the law of refraction, the law of the gravity of water and the laws of stars. He explained dissenting phenomena by appealing to the law of universal nature, which overrules the laws of particular natures when necessary. In this paper I ask whether Bacon suggested ways by which the knowledge of the laws of nature can foster man’s control of nature and its manipulation. Indeed, the search for laws belongs, according to Bacon, to the practical part of science, since their application can enhance human lives. Specifically, he argued that according to the laws of reflection and refraction, a mirror can be shaped, so that one group of soldiers will appear as multiplied, and thus would terrify the enemy. He also suggested using the laws for the production of powerful weapons, such as consuming, unquenchable fire, defeating sounds, blinding flashes and poisons. Did the use of the laws of nature as suggested by Bacon bring him close to the early modern idea of dissecting nature, controlling and manipulating it? I argue that for Bacon the discovery of laws resulted in the idea of the usefulness of the knowledge; he did not, however, entertain yet the idea of a planned experiment in which nature is “forced” into “unnatural” situations.