How was Bacon's natural philosopher to achieve certain knowledge about natural things, and how was he to put it to use? The obvious (but unhelpful) answer is that he was to follow a novel procedure: but just what was this procedure, and was it novel? Like his aspirations for natural philosophy, Bacon's proposed procedures were utterly novel for natural philosophers but they were not novel in any absolute sense.

This study attempts to provide a historical explanation of the origin and nature of the natural philosophy of Francis Bacon. It is not a critical assessment of the worth of his proposals, in the manner characteristic of philosophers of science, nor is it concerned to situate Bacon with respect to one or more traditions of philosophy in the Renaissance – a venerable strategy in the historiography of ideas, which implies location itself to be much the same as explanation. It is, instead, rigorously local in its attentions. Its premise is that the origin and nature of Bacon's natural philosophy can be explained satisfactorily only with careful attention to his context. In jure non remota causa, sed proxima spectatur, Bacon remarked of the law, and the maxim is useful in historical practice, too. This study looks to the concrete and the proximate, and necessarily begins with a strong biographical element.

‘He was a great reader of books’, Bacon's chaplain recalled, ‘yet he had not his knowledge from books alone, but from some grounds and notions within himself.’ A truly satisfying historical explanation of Francis Bacon's natural philosophy must include an answer to why and how it was that Bacon became involved in writing natural philosophy. Only by seeking out these ‘grounds and notions’ can we fully appreciate why he wrote it in the particular (and peculiar) manner in which he did.

Having surveyed a number of questions related to the notion of rationality, I turn now to the issue of their pertinence to literature, my primary goal being to identify a number of distinct avenues of literary-critical enquiry. Clarifying the basic orientations and assumptions of several different approaches to literary phenomena will make it possible to define the particular aims of the analyses presented in the rest of this study, as well as to identify topics for future research.

The question of the relation between concepts of rationality and ‘literature’ is complicated by the vagueness of the latter term. Literary scholars have never been able to agree over the boundaries of their object domain, which remains extremely open-ended, embracing whatever items a variety of traditions happen to have preserved under the rubric of ‘literature’. The term evokes any number of multi-faceted items as well as a broad range of phenomena that are in one way or another thought to be significantly related to them. As a result, the literary field is an ontological auberge espagnole, for it houses past and present agents, actions, and events, mental states and attitudes, types of physical artefacts, institutions and conventions, symbolic inscriptions and utterances – as well as the aesthetic qualities of any of the above. It is not uncommon for literary critics to debate over angels, demons, and vampires.

Emile Zola's characterization of Lazare Chanteau in La joie de vivre (1883–4) provides an excellent context for a discussion of the rôle of plans in the constitution of an agent's rationality. Quite simply, Lazare is someone who cannot ‘make up his mind’, and this incapacity has many undesirable consequences for him. Taking up and abandoning a number of different large-scale career projects, Lazare fails to carry any one of them to completion and ends up an abject failure. At first glance, then, the story of this character's failures would appear to stand as a simple and straight-forward illustration of an equally simple and uncomplicated norm: given certain types of goals – such as Lazare's desire to be a great composer – the ability to organize one's actions in function of complex, temporally extended planning is a necessary condition of rational agency. This first appraisal of the story's significance in relation to the theory of agent's rationality is certainly not wholly incorrect, but once we have explored it in more detail, it will become apparent that Lazare's transgression of norms of rational planning and deliberation is much more complex than this first impression allows.

At the centre of the story of Lazare's inconstancy is his inability to devote himself to a single career (and in this respect, Lazare has a direct literary antecedent in Richard Carstone of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–3)).

Having come by 1590 to the conviction that problems of knowledge were a proper part of a statesman's concerns, Bacon soon made substantial elaborations upon this general principle. In 1592 and 1595, he argued not just for the consideration by statesmen of knowledge per se but specifically that a ‘properly’ reformed and organised natural philosophy could transform the commonweal of England.

It would be pleasant indeed to know precisely when it was that Bacon first came to the particular convictions he expressed at this time, but such specific information is beyond our recovery. Nonetheless, we can recover considerable information about Bacon's activities in the early 1590s, and it is sufficient to answer a related and pressing question. Why was it that Bacon chose to make these declarations about natural philosophy when he did? In other words, what local concerns prompted him to write? Since amid the documents of these years are Bacon's earliest surviving statements about natural philosophy, we need to address these queries if we are to understand what Bacon was saying.

Theodore Dreiser's novel, Sister Carrie (first published in 1900), offers a valuable occasion for reflecting on models of rationality and irrationality, particularly by virtue of its complex depiction of a character named Hurstwood. Of particular interest is the narration of the episode relating this figure's robbery and flight to Montreal, and it is aspects of this episode that figure at the centre of my selective analysis of the text in this chapter. As I have stated above, my aim in turning to this and other literary texts in the present study is to explore issues in the theory of rationality, not to contribute to a hermeneutic understanding of an artist's life and works, or to an aesthetical evaluation of literary documents. My oriented and selective discussion of aspects of the text, then, will be followed by an assessment of some of its implications for contemporary hypotheses about rationality.

I shall begin with a discussion of a passage that is justly famous for its enigmatic and thought-provoking depiction of the break-down of intentional control. Hurstwood, it may be recalled, is the middle-aged manager of a bar catering to a middle- and upper-middle-class clientele. The narrator has introduced him to us as ‘an interesting character after his kind’, adding that Hurstwood is ‘shrewd and clever in many little things’. He has risen to his managerial position ‘by perseverance and industry, through long years of service’ (p. 43). Always fastidious in his dress, Hurstwood enjoys extending affable greetings to the establishment's distinguished customers.

In this opening chapter I delineate a number of issues related to concepts of rationality and irrationality, and identify some of the assumptions and questions that are carried forward into the rest of this study. My goal is to formulate the issues as explicitly as possible in an effort to clarify the lines of enquiry that could potentially be taken up in analyses of literary phenomena. The question of the relevance of the issues surveyed in this chapter to literature will remain open until chapter 2. I hope that it is clear that my goal in the present work is not to provide a detailed treatment of all of the issues broached in this initial survey of topics.

A very basic background assumption that subtends the full range of particular theories of human rationality and irrationality holds that an important subset of human behaviour may be accurately characterized as purposeful action. In other words, it would be pointless to raise the issue of rationality in relation to any entity or events deemed to be devoid of intentionality and purposiveness. Thus, anyone who lends credence to some notion of human rationality may be expected to think that the latter two notions may rightly be applied to human beings, and anyone who does not lend any credence to intentional attitudes, or who thinks they play no effective rôle in human life, can hardly deem the notion of rationality necessary.

During the 1590s and throughout the remainder of his life, Bacon argued for legal reform. Just like the phrase itself, campaigns for ‘legal reform’ can mean very different things: their proponents can be hoping for changes in specific laws, or for changes in the administration of justice and governance, and even for changes in what is understood by ‘The Law’. For Bacon, legal reform meant change of all three sorts, and for a very specific end.

As to the first sort of legal reform, changes in particular laws, one could argue that Bacon was hardly unique. As they have been whenever lawyers and men of affairs have congregated, such considerations were staple fare in lawyers' conversation in Elizabethan times, and Members of Parliament were routinely concerned with repealing, amending or drafting legislation.

In 1590, Francis Bacon was thirty years old, and deeply engaged in the vocation which he always had desired for himself: statesmanship. Explaining what he understood by statesmanship is the aim of this preliminary chapter, which concerns the establishment in the highest reaches of mid-Tudor government of men with a particular conception of the role and purpose of a royal councillor: namely, the notion of a ‘commonwealth’ statesman. Just why we should interest ourselves in such a theme is not immediately obvious: certainly, no previous study of Bacon's philosophy has done so. Yet these men included members of Bacon's family and kin, devoted to serving the Tudor dynasty and fully accepting a ‘commonwealth’ notion of themselves and their work. It was, after all, in their company and amid their values that Francis Bacon grew up.

A programme for statecraft, which incorporated a variety of reforming proposals into long-term state planning (as we might call it) had been learned by Bacon's father, his uncles and their colleagues when junior officials of the Crown under Thomas Cromwell and his successors.

In the last three chapters I have explored some ways in which readings of literary narratives can help us to clarify, challenge, and improve concepts of rationality emerging within a range of disciplines, including philosophy, the social sciences, and psychology. Various narratives, I have argued, usefully illustrate the short-comings of reductionist models of agency and atomistic conceptions of rationality, and in each case I have stressed the relevance and value of an agential perspective on rationality. Yet it may be objected here that although these hypothetical revisions of atomistic concepts of rationality are a step in the right direction, they still do not go far enough. At the heart of the agential conception of rationality – or so the objection would run – is an essentially ‘individualist’ prejudice, the result being a failure to account for supra-individual social realities: if we grant that individual beliefs, desires, intentions, and actions should be evaluated in the larger context of the agent's long-term reasons and interests, we should conclude as well that the latter should be viewed in a larger framework, namely, the interpersonal and social context where they are situated. Otherwise, we would be forced to allow that an agent and her actions could be rational even when they contribute to an essentially irrational social action or situation.

This is a difficult and important issue. In keeping with the approach adopted in the rest of this study, I shall address myself to this problem by seeking connexions between theoretical and narrative sources.

Franz Kafka was not Jean de La Fontaine, and his stories do not end with tidy statements of a moral. None the less, I shall conclude the present study by drawing a few lessons from a reading of ‘The Burrow’, a fable that conveys a remarkable characterization of a small and limited creature's reasonings.

At the outset of the narrative, the owner of the burrow reviews the various calculations that have gone into the design of his dwelling: ‘I have completed the construction of the burrow and it seems to be successful.’ Now that the construction is finished, there are brief moments of tranquility and confidence when the animal relaxes and enjoys the advantages of his dwelling. Most of the time, however, the animal frets anxiously over the possible flaws in the construction. For example, although the burrow's single entrance is cleverly concealed, it could still be found by hostile creatures, who might enter the burrow and take its owner by surprise. The animal ponders possible ways of increasing the overall security of the dwelling, but confronts the fact that many of the construction's basic structural features are the best that he can devise. Others could only be altered at the cost of great risk and protracted labour, with only a minimal – and perhaps wholly imaginary – advantage to be gained.