Question

Historiographers of early modern European science have long struggled to reconcile Francis Bacon’s explicit rejection of Renaissance natural magic with his implicit reliance on its operational taxonomies. While Bacon famously castigated practitioners of alchemy and natural magic for their secretiveness and lack of methodical rigor, recent scholarship suggests his methodological reform did not discard their empirical apparatus so much as recontextualize it. Natural magicians operated under the doctrine of micro-macrocosmic correspondence, positing that occult affinities between celestial and terrestrial entities could be manipulated for utilitarian ends. Bacon systematically stripped these operational procedures of their mystical cosmology, reinterpreting what magicians viewed as 'sympathetic resonance' as deterministic, physical interactions governed by latent corpuscular configurations. Crucially, however, Bacon retained the magical tradition’s core teleological ambition: the imperative to master nature for human welfare, a stark departure from the contemplative stance of scholastic Aristotelianism. Thus, rather than marking an absolute epistemic break, the Baconian program represents a structural translation, subsuming the manipulative ethos of natural magic within a regulated, public institutional framework. Consequently, scholars who interpret Bacon’s vitriolic anti-magical rhetoric as evidence of complete conceptual alienation risk conflating an ideological strategy of legitimation with an accurate record of intellectual genealogy.

Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage regarding Francis Bacon's relationship to the tradition of Renaissance natural magic?