This paper examines the concept of objectivity traceable in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy. After some historical background on this concept, it considers the question of whether it is not an anachronism to attribute such a concept to Bacon, since the word ‘objectivity’ is a later coinage and does not appear anywhere in his writings. The essay gives reasons for answering this question in the negative, and then criticizes the accounts given of Bacon's understanding of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Julie Robin Solomon. It argues that this understanding is most directly and fully expressed in his discussion of the idols of the mind. In this connection, the paper notes Bacon's critical attitude to sixteenth-century scepticism and its relevance to the idea of objectivity implicit in his comments on the idols. In conclusion, the paper argues that Bacon was not a pure empiricist and describes the place assigned to theories and hypotheses in his natural philosophy.

While the study of Newton's religious views has been continuously expanding, it has not been brought to bear directly on Newton's career as an ‘experimental philosopher’. Historical perspectives on his optical experiments in particular affirm the historiographic separation between the religious and scientific aspects of his work. In this paper I examine the practical implication of Newton's theology of dominion on his early experiments on light and colours. While his predecessors had made experiments to collect evidence, I show that Newton conceived experimental research as a discipline of the practical understanding of the structure of light and the origins of colours. His conception of experimental reasoning followed his practical reflections on human beings as agents who belonged to God's dominion and who were created to serve its divine ends. These reflections suggested, more specifically, that the aim of natural philosophy was the discovery of divine rules that instrumentally constrained and facilitated human conduct in general, and perceptual judgement in particular. I show, moreover, that Newton's endeavour to subordinate experiment to divine worship had been foreshadowed by Boyle's writing on the theory and practice of the experimental philosophy.

Throughout his life, Newton searched for the machinery through which God creates, designs and sustains the world. He believed that the Creator is a God of Dominion who continuously preserves His creation through secondary mechanical causes or through direct, voluntary actions. God periodically intervenes in order to restore the pure and divine state of creation, deteriorated due to material interactions in a natural process of decay. The restoration, whether through matter or through chosen souls, is pure and simple, flowing equably along God's eternal duration. As time passes, a process of decay and corruption causes these pure states to deviate from the original divine path and they gradually begin to flow along distorted and distracted ways. Newton's youthful method of fluxions, though dealing with abstract mathematics, has a crucial role in revealing true knowledge about the God of creation and sustenance. The mathematical method captures and reveals the most fundamental truth about the mechanism of perception and the natural decline of all processes in Nature. This simple method is analogous to the simple creed, which God reinstills throughout history in religious founders and prophets assisting humans to worship God properly.

The introduction into the laboratory of the magic lantern and the arts of projection marked a change from putatively individual and mechanical to obviously collective and skillful perception in nineteenth-century German sciences. In 1860 Karl Friedrich Zöllner introduced an astro-photometer to astronomers who, by practising with it, became aware of their own tacit and ubiquitous skills. Zöllner was a showman who was aware of the personal skills involved in magic-lantern projection. Like showmen, nineteenth-century astronomers could also control and calibrate their vision with this instrument. Photometrists such as Zöllner were not only aware of subjectivity, but developed techniques to manipulate, control and to employ it in scientific judgements. This view stands in contrast to that of the scientists described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, for whom ‘machines offered freedom from will – from the willful interventions that had come to be seen as the most dangerous aspects of subjectivity’. But with Zöllner's successful programme of instrumental subjectivity, acts of willful intervention were at the very centre of astronomical judgement.