SIR FRANCIS BACON 



the minds of speculative men, long occupied in verbal 

 disputes, to the discovery of new and useful truths. 

 By so doing he at once gave to the inductive method 

 an importance and dignity which had never before 

 belonged to it." 



Bacon's two great works are the " De Dignitate et 

 Augmentis Scientiarum " and the " Novum Organum 

 Scientiarum," in which he proposed to substitute Induc- 

 tion for the syllogism that the scholastics had so long 

 used and abused. He maintained that the only way 

 to arrive at the verities in nature is to observe and 

 study nature, not only in the phenomena that present 

 themselves to our notice, but in those that we are able 

 to discover by the way of experimentation. It is not 

 sufficient only to have eyes to perceive ; it needs an 

 art to direct the observations; it needs one still more 

 difficult rightly to interrogate nature. To arrive at 

 this double goal he created methods for which he 

 makes rules without number to be used in all the 

 pursuits of science. 



In the method of investigation contained in the 

 " Novum Organum " and other works of Bacon no 

 reference is made to the necessary use of deduction. 

 He was so anxious to decry the old philosophy of 

 scholasticism and to substitute for it the new induc- 

 tion that he lost sight of the fact that it was the long 

 perverted a-priori reasoning from inadequate premises 



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