Thursday, January 14, 2010
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1:01 PM
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I have taken all knowledge to be my province / From a letter to Lord Burleigh, 1592]. Bacons ambition was not merely to master all knowledge, but to reform it, especially the way by which new knowledge was to be acquired. The method was to be inductive and experimental, amassing data on important subjects, classifying them, and developing From them wider rules and hypotheses Like Paraceisus, Bacon rejected the old Aristotelian learning stil taught in the Universities, and proposed a new method, a new logic, in his Novum Orgamum. Bacon was not himself a distinguished scientist, though he dabbled in experiment, his importance is in the way he articulated what was to become the dominant mode of thought. Discovering truth Bacon eloquently argued that deductive reasoning should be replaced by inductive [ scientific] reasoning; There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. to the most general and From these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and middle axioms. And this way is now in Fashion. The other derives axioms From the the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last oF all. Tihis is the true way, but as yet untried.
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