The configuration of the world, at least prior to the Fall, explained Bacon in his De principiis, ‘was the best of which matter (as it had been created) was susceptible’. Employing the light of natural reason with which he had been endowed, Adam had been able to perceive the essential natures of God’s creation and bestow upon each species its own unique name. But this was not all: Bacon, in fact, suggested elsewhere that the prelapsarian may even have been able to perceive—likewise through the use of his natural reason—the moral fabric of the universe. Here, two sides of the same coin become evident: the moral dimension of nature, on the one hand; and the capacity of man to recognize it, on the other.

In the initial instance, it is telling that, when Adam and Eve transgressed the moral law, the order of nature itself degenerated. As curious at it may be, it should be remembered that the Bible, even if only metaphorically, had situated the definitive knowledge of good and evil within a tree. The possibility that Bacon identified the lex moralis—at least to some degree—with the leges naturae, should thus not be overlooked. For, even some of his earliest works, such as Of the Colours of Good and Evil (1597), suggest that a ‘universal knowledge of the nature of things’ alone was sufficient to guarantee the verity of moral judgments. There are numerous other instances scattered throughout Bacon’s more mature writings that likewise hint at a close identification of the moral with the natural orders.

Where a recognition of good and evil was concerned, Bacon argued that, in his once ‘pristine and primitive purity,’ man had possessed a certain natural capacity whereby he could perceive the ‘colours’ of morality. Yet, of this capacity—man’s ‘light of nature’—there now remained only ‘a sparkle of [that] puritie of his first Estate’. Bacon referred to this ‘relic’ as a certain ‘instinct’; a universal motion or appetite of material nature towards the good. He employed the term lumen naturae, then, in at least two senses: foremost, as man’s natural reason, but also as nature’s own intelligence (as residing in its percipio and appetitus). As a result, even nature’s light had once been able to recognize the double nature of the good.

It is to this somewhat complex union of the moral and the natural orders in Bacon’s philosophy that this paper thus proposes to attend; to offer a working thesis through the provision of a clarification of Bacon’s thought on this issue.