CHAPTER II 

 FRANCIS BACON 



Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), himself a man of most varied 

 and active experience, stated that " the interpreter of the arti- 

 fices of Nature is Experience, who is never deceived. We must 

 begin from experiment and try to discover the reason " ; and 

 Bernardino Telesio (1508-1588), led by the study of nature to 

 react against the traditional doctrines of Scholasticism, believed 

 that " the construction of the world and the magnitude and nature 

 of the bodies in it are not to be investigated by reasoning, as 

 was done by the ancients ; but they are to be apprehended by the 

 sense and collected from the things themselves." These two 

 intellectual tendencies thus clearly expressed by so diverse men 

 as da Vinci and Telesio were combined in the work of Francis 

 Bacon (1561-1626). 



The first insisted upon the primacy of experience as the method 

 for the attainment of knowledge in the interpretation of nature ; 

 the second with his motto iwji ratioue scd scnsit, criticised the 

 method of purely intellectual deduction which was one of the 

 chief epistemological instruments of the scholastic logic ; and 

 the third related these two canons, both in his scientific practice 

 and in his philosophical theory, in such a way that for him the 

 great problem of experience became the investigation of the 

 method of knoivledge. 



There is a peculiar necessity in scientific and in educational 

 investigation for the individual to develop in himself a breadth 

 of mind which enables him to see the large problems which under- 

 lie the more obvious and easily grasped details, to look at pro- 

 cesses and the materials involved, in their proper perspective, and 

 to emphasise, somewhat more consciously than hitherto, the 

 problem of method. Both by nature and by force of circum- 



