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many features of the trial by ordeal, except that parties contended in verbal rather than physical combat, with local jurymen posing questions and passing final judgment, while law judges, appointed by the king, served as neutral adjudicators. In the common law, torture was forbidden and no man was bound to accuse himself, although in practice the defendant did have to answer the charges or risk almost certain condemnation. Still, there were those in England who longed for the rigor of the continental system.
    These currents clashed in the writing of Francis Bacon, often called the godfather of experimental science. Bacon was also the last Englishman to direct treason trials where torture was ordered by the king’s Privy Council. Bacon criticized the scholastics for merely touching nature "by the fingertips," and urged a more aggressive line of interrogation. As he put it, "the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom." He urged investigators to bind nature in chains, driving matter "to extremities," causing it to "turn and transform itself into strange shapes" until—coming full circle—"it returned at last to itself." Bacon acknowledged that experimenters who forced nature in this way risked misconstruing its qualities. "When bodies are tormented by fire or other means, many qualities are communicated by the fire itself…whence strange fallacies have arisen." Yet he was confident that God’s benign superintendence would "return" nature to its true properties. Experimentation was less a form of torture than a struggle, from which both nature and experimenter emerged purified. Bacon’s natural philosophy found an uneasy echo in his jurisprudence. He condoned judicial torture, but only to discover corroborative evidence, not to extract confessions as evidence of guilt. As he acknowledged: "By the laws of England, no man is bound to accuse himself." The queen, he said, would not "make windows into men’s souls."
    The resolution of this contradiction emerged later in the seventeenth century, when the third and current phase of judicial inquiry took shape. It was then that elite jurists and natural philosophers modestly agreed that justice could depend on judgments short of certainty. Henceforth, judges and adversarial lawyers were to probe the statements of witnesses in cross-examination, with judgment on their veracity—and the guilt of the accused—to be assessed in probabilistic terms. We can still hear the echo of this new approach to proof in such phrases as "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "a preponderance of evidence." And it was under this probabilistic banner, as much as under Enlightenment humanism, that the continental states gradually abandoned torture. Not coincidentally, natural philosophers at this time began to accept the notion that scientific knowledge of nature was provisional and probabilistic.
    This grand accommodation, however, did not find favor with those who preferred swift and certain justice. Built into this new probabilistic justice were two contradictory trends, at least in the Anglo-American legal system. In a democratic vein, the courts increasingly granted lay jurors unfettered license to weigh the truthfulness of testimony. In an authoritarian vein, the courts increasingly put their confidence in expert-interpreted circumstantial evidence because it could not be dissembled. The ambition of advocates of the lie detector was to resolve this contradiction—in favor of the experts.
    Only gradually over the past three centuries have Anglo-American judges allowed jurors to hear the defendant and witnesses for the defense testify under oath in criminal cases. Judges thought they had good reasons for this hesitation. Some worried jurors might be reluctant to convict defendants who swore oaths of innocence. Others feared defendants would readily perjure themselves, damning their souls and providing an excuse for further jeopardy. As late