The Elizabethan philosopher McLuhan uses, in a 1970 lecture, as his example of a mind that could hold two incompatible pages open at once. Bacon read the book of nature and the book of scripture together without collapsing either into the other, and McLuhan treats that double reading as the practicable form of an inclusive consciousness. In this archive Bacon matters less as a historical figure than as a demonstration that the thing being asked for has already been done. Start with dialogue 64, where the passage is read out and becomes the session's agenda.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a name in McLuhan's background to the session's whole premise — his handling of the two books becomes the model for an inclusiveness that does not fuse
Bacon's move is additive rather than synthetic — he does not reconcile the two books, he sets a second beside the first, which is what makes him usable as a model rather than a precursor.
"What Bacon did was to take the book of nature, which had been the medieval image of the natural world, and to this he added the book of scripture, the sacred page."
The operative word is the gaze, not the pages — inclusiveness here is a way of attending to two things at once, so it is a discipline of perception rather than a doctrine about the world.
"He took both these pages and directed to these pages a kind of analytic gaze of comprehensive inclusiveness."
Cameron guards the example against the reading that would make it useless — Bacon's achievement is that the two books stay two, which is the constraint the rest of the session tests against the yin-yang, the Tech Body, and the two men themselves.
"When he talks about the two pages there, one of nature and one of scripture, he's not saying that those can be conflated."