Abstract

Bacon advocated empirical methods of pro-ducing knowledge, he obliquely praised the methods deployed by his City contempo-raries. But Bacon combated what he per-ceived as a vulgar basis for producing this knowledge by devising a hierarchical institu-tion, “Salomon’s House, ” in which gentle-men-philosophers directed the banausic motions of uncomprehending manual labor-ers. Bacon’s idealization concealed the ubiq-uity of those practices he purported to invent; in the early years of the Restoration, Royal Society members seeking to link reliable natural philosophical experiment and anti-republicanism saw Bacon’s vision as the fore-