Faculty Psychology & Internal Processes 

 

Bacon  was very well versed in his studies of language and its functions, in relation to the new science of psychology. In his attempts to purify langauge, he implemented his theories surrounding the function of our minds. He believed that the major sections of academic knowledge were correlated with the various components of the mind, for example history being the product of memory and poetry being the product of imagination. His five functions of the mind, which became known as faculty psychology are known as: 

 

1. Understanding: The faculty that allows us to comprehend 

 

2. Reason: The faculty that allows us to analyze and generalize

 

3. Imagination: The faculty that appreciates fiction

 

4. Appetites: The faculty that encourages us to acquire 

 

5. Will: The faculty that moves us to act 

 

Since we possess these faculties of the mind, we in turn are able to use them to perform the following functions, known as Bacon's Internal Process: 

 

- to inquire and invent: "we seek to discover ideas and how things work; we propose hypotheses and link ideas and objects that are similar to one another. 

 

- to examine and judge: "we take ideas and objects apart to analyze them; we assess their worth; we employ standards of scientific and artistic merit" 

 

- to recall ideas and maintain custody over them: "we remember ideas and objects; we relieve events; we retain knowledge and methodologies of computation and analysis" 

 

- to transmit thought in language: "We dress ideas in words to make them comprehensible to others; we make comparisons to make our ideas clearer to others" 

 

In relation to rhetoric, Bacon believed that its role was to recall and thus explain what had been discovered by the other arts, through the faculty of the mind.

 

"The invention of speech or argument is not properly an invention: for to invent is to discover that which we do not know"