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and the experiments he arranged were primitive. Further, he was no mathe- 

 matician and he therefore was unable to employ the deductive reasoning 

 inherent in that science. Nevertheless Bacon has done an everlasting service 

 to the development of natural science, primarily through his activities as a 

 critic. It has already been mentioned how during the Renaissance ancient 

 culture in general and in the realm of science, primarily Aristotle, was treated 

 with unbounded respect. This uncritical and slavish attitude, which threat- 

 ened to ruin all chances of further progress, Bacon combats with all the 

 severity of which he is capable; he throws overboard all respect for antiquity, 

 whose culture he considers to have led only to intellectual decay and vain 

 disputes. He maintains that the peoples of antiquity were really children in 

 comparison with his own age, which possessed far more of that experience 

 which to him was the one foundation of knowledge. And in this insistence 

 upon experience as the sole source of knowledge lies his other great service 

 to the development of science and in particular to that of natural research. 

 He realized more clearly than any of his contemporaries the necessity of 

 extending the knowledge of nature by accumulating the results of obser- 

 vations of its objects and of experiments carried out with its powerful forces, 

 and though he himself could give expression to his ideas only in clumsy 

 efforts, nevertheless these ideas, through their intrinsic theoretical truth, 

 exercised great influence in his day and have done so down to the most recent 

 times. Even in our own day one of the pioneers of research into the problem 

 of heredity, Johannsen, has openly acknowledged his debt to Bacon's 

 Organum as the source from which he obtained a clearer idea as to the objects 

 and means of natural research. And it is certainly no mere accident that the 

 country which gave Bacon birth should have led the way in the great pioneer 

 work that has been done in promoting the development of biology. 



What Bacon thus theoretically conceived and insisted upon was brought 

 to practical realization independently of him by Galileo, the creator of modern 

 physics and astronomy, and hence also the founder of the whole of modern 

 natural research and its conception of natural phenomena, so fundamentally 

 removed from Aristoteleanism. 



Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 at Pisa, where his father held a good 

 post. At an early age he displayed mathematical and mechanical gifts, studied 

 at Pisa, first of all medicine and later mathematics, and when still quite 

 young was made professor of that science, first at Pisa and then at Padua. 

 In the latter city he worked as a teacher for eighteen years with brilliant 

 success; finally the university could find no hall large enough to seat all his 

 audience. And the results of his scientific work were still more brilliant; 

 especially after he had constructed a telescope and with it had begun to study 

 the heavenly bodies, his astronomical discoveries followed one another in 

 rapid succession: the globular form of the moon, the satellites of the planet 



