1. See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform: 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 22–23. Webster observes that “investigations conducted into secondary causes, and with utilitarian ends in mind, would incur no risk of transgression, but instead glorify God, and restore man’s dominion over nature.” Despite Bacon’s own caveats, however, Webster correctly characterizes his approach as “fundamentally historical and eschatological. Man’s dominion over nature was sacrificed at the Fall; but the Bible gave many instances of the restoration of knowledge under God’s grace.”
2. See Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114. “His ability to name the animals provided proof of his encyclopedic knowledge. The tradition of the rabbis, Augustine, and Chrysostom that this event demonstrated Adam’s superior wisdom was accepted virtually by all.”
3. See Charles Whitney, Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 106. “The goal of Bacon’s science is the discovery of forms.”
4. See also Alvin Snider, Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, and Butler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 32. “For Bacon Adam’s imposition of names functions as the archetypal stance of scientific inquiry and taxonomic analysis. His consummate skill as philosopher and naturalist emerges in his command of a language that facilitates, not impedes, philosophical enquiry.”
5. Antonio Perez-Ramos, Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 91–92.