Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon
The meaning of the quote
In 1826, in a house in Baltimore, Sophia Auld began teaching an enslaved 8-year-old boy his ABCs. Her husband Hugh found out and ordered her to stop. Learning to read, he told her, would make the boy unfit to be a slave.
The boy was Frederick Douglass.
He heard every word, and years later in his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he wrote about what that moment taught him:
“From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”
Hugh Auld knew exactly what reading would do. A boy who could read could find out what was being kept from him and write his own travel pass.
So Douglass learned in secret, carrying a book on his errands and trading bread from the house to poor white boys on the street in exchange for reading lessons.
Later he saved 50 cents and bought The Columbian Orator, a schoolbook full of famous speeches about freedom. When he escaped to the North in 1838, the book went with him.
Once you understand how something works, you can act on it instead of waiting for someone else to decide for you. Francis Bacon made the same point in his book Novum Organum, 23 years after he first wrote the quote:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.”
A person who reads a loan agreement before signing can spot the fee hidden on page 4, and a patient who asks what each pill is for can catch a wrong prescription.
Douglass put what he learned to work. The speeches in his schoolbook shaped the way he spoke, and in 1841 he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket and told his own story. Within a few years he was one of the best-known speakers in America.
Action steps
You probably have a few areas where someone else knows more about your own life than you do, and that’s where they hold power over you.
- Find one gap.
Think of a bill, contract, school rule or health matter you go along with without understanding. Pick the one that costs you the most money or worry. - Close it this week.
Read the fine print, look it up or ask the person in charge until you could teach it to a friend. - Trade for what you can’t learn alone.
Douglass paid for his lessons with bread. Offer a skill or a favor to someone who knows what you need to learn.
About the author
Francis Bacon was 18 and living in France with the English ambassador when his father died suddenly in 1579. Sir Nicholas Bacon had been one of Queen Elizabeth I’s top officials and had set money aside to buy his youngest son an estate, but he died before buying it. Francis was left with only a fifth of that money.
He came home, trained as a lawyer and borrowed to get by. In 1598 he was arrested for debt.
Under King James I he climbed anyway, becoming Attorney General in 1613 and Lord Chancellor in 1618, a higher post than his father ever held. While running the courts, he argued that people should learn about nature by testing and observing it instead of trusting old books. That idea is why he is often called the father of empiricism.
In 1621 Parliament charged him with taking bribes, and he admitted it, though he insisted the gifts never changed his rulings. He was fined £40,000, sent to the Tower of London and banned from public office.
Bacon spent his last years on science. The story goes that in April 1626, riding through Highgate on a snowy day, he wondered if snow could keep meat fresh the way salt does. He bought a chicken, stuffed it with snow with his own hands, caught a chill and died a few days later.
Nearly 230 years before Hugh Auld tried to keep the alphabet away from a young Douglass, Bacon wrote the quote in Latin as “ipsa scientia potestas est” in his 1597 book Meditationes Sacrae, a short collection of religious essays.
Resources
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Book)
- Novum Organum (Book)
- Francis Bacon (Article)
- Scientia potentia est (Wikipedia)
- Sir Francis Bacon and the Ghost Chicken of Highgate (Article)
Leave feedback about this