New Methods: Bacon, Descartes, and Harvey

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an English lawyer and lord chancellor, argued that natural philosophy needed a wholly new method rather than incremental repair of Aristotelian logic. In the Novum Organum (1620) he proposed a systematic, inductive procedure: gathering ordered tables of instances in which a phenomenon was present, absent, or varied in degree, and reasoning upward cautiously from particulars to general laws, rather than downward from received first principles by syllogism. Bacon also catalogued the 'idols of the mind,' recurring sources of error such as habit, language, and dogma, that had to be recognized before reliable knowledge could be built. His unfinished utopian fiction New Atlantis (1627) imagined a research institution, Solomon's House, dedicated to collective, well-funded experimental inquiry, a vision that later inspired the founders of the Royal Society.