SOURCE: “Remarkable Ingratitude: Bacon, Prometheus, Democritus,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 79-90.

In the following essay, Barbour explores the influence of Democritus on Francis Bacon's essay on Prometheus.

Despite Robert Kargon's argument that Bacon abandoned atomism, the seventeenth-century reformer never got Epicureanism off his mind.¹ More carefully than any of his contemporaries, Bacon explored the relations between the atomism, hedonism, and theology of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, which appear in a wide arrange of contexts and with an array of values in Bacon's works. At times Bacon praises the sect for their close observations of nature, or for their refusal of Aristotle; but he also scolds them for their anthropomorphisms or for their dogmatism. They succeed, Bacon believes, in looking beyond the formal bogeys of Plato and Aristotle into the particles and motions of nature, but err in idolizing the private blessings of...