by Sonia-Doris Andras

Created on: November 24, 2011

As Beethoven is considered to have opened the doors to Romanticism in music, Francis Bacon has been given credit for building the foundations for the modern scientific method, namely Empiricism. He centred his philosophy around the idea that real knowledge of the truth can only be attained through experience, not speculation or deduction which are very dangerous if used as sole weapons against ignorance. According to Chris Rohmann, the Baconian method is focused on humans’ gaining control over nature empirically, not adapting (and only understanding, or speculating) to it:

The Baconian method in which hypotheses are developed from empirical observation, rather than theoretical speculation, proved a milestone in the development of the scientific method. Bacon’s faith in the power of his method was reflected in his utopian novel The New Atlantis […] in which he imagined an ideal society whose prime goal was scientific discovery, from which social order followed naturally. (Bacon, Francis, 36)

Opposing Aristotle’s Organon, Bacon’s introduction of the Idols in philosophical thought is an important step in the evolution of the soon to emerge Empiricist current (it is crucial in the theories of error history as well). These Idols are present inside our conscience since birth or from contact with the world, working in a similar manner with what later researchers would call archetypes of paradigms. They are “the four main sources of error besetting the human mind in its pursuit of truth” (Flew, idols of the mind, 162), as they distort our perceptions, a flaw we must overcome by relinquishing these false assumptions by working on improving our mind:

According to Bacon, the human mind is not a tabula rasa. Instead of an ideal plane for receiving an image of the world in toto, it is a crooked mirror, an account of implicit distortions […]. He [Bacon] does not sketch a basic epistemology but underlines that the images of our mind right from the beginning do not render an objective picture of the true objects. Consequently, we have to improve our mind, i.e., free it from the idols, before we start any knowledge acquisition. (Juergen, 3.1., par. 1)

Moreover, as Anthony Flew states in A Dictionary of Philosophy, Bacon “made what was probably the first systematic attempt to expose the psychological motives and human interests that often lie behind various forms of psychological outlook” (Flew, Bacon, Francis,

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