rejected all existing knowledge as being unfit for making discoveries and
useless for transforming the world.”^11
With cartographers creating new continents ex nihilo and our solar
system made to reveal new planetary satellites, learned minds were open
to new realities. The late Renaissance was characterized by openness, and
“the idea of discovery [of truth] is inextricably tied up with ideas of
exploration, progress, originality, authenticity and novelty.”^12 For
centuries, learning had been limited exclusively to gathering together what
Aristotle had posited; there was almost no new knowledge, just new
commentaries about his conclusions. Realizing the supreme limitations
that this worldview had engendered, Bacon exposed the “inability of the
logic of the day to make scientific discoveries or invent new sciences”^13 in
The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The Great Instauration, New
Organon (1620).
Arguing that our process of intellectual discovery was flawed, Bacon
set about proposing a methodology to unearth new truths. This organized
approach would lead to the scientific method—where future scientists
would turn conjecture into a hypothesis, then perform systematic
observations and measurements, thus drawing conclusions, and finally
developing general theories based upon experimental outcomes, which
would lead to new hypotheses and new experiments. No one more than
Bacon emphasized methodology^14 (not even Descartes), and it was Bacon
who introduced the concept of interpretation.^15 The ancient unscientific,
mystical (even paranormal) arts of astrology and alchemy would be
transformed into the technical sciences of modern astronomy, physics, and
chemistry with the scientific method; however, the revolution in medicine
would take a century more to shake off the bonds of Hippocrates and
Galen for good in the late 19th century.
Criticizing the philosophers of old, “Bacon compared empiricists to
ants, who ‘only collect and use,’ and rationalists to spiders, ‘who make
cobwebs out of their own substance.’ With these two insects he contrasted
the bee, who both gathers its material from garden and field and
‘transforms and digests it by a power of its own.’ The business of
philosophy, he said, is to imitate the bee.”^16 Profound insight from a man
of letters, who had no scientific education, and was bereft of mathematical
understanding or laboratory organization. Somehow, he perceived there