|
| By its title, the NOVUM ORGANUM makes
| Bacon's ambition clear: to replace
| the Aristotelian organon, which has
| governed all knowledge until the end
| of the sixteenth century with an
| entirely new logical instrument, a
| new method for the progress and
| profit of human science. And the
| Chancellor proclaims that he has
| achieved his aim, if posterity
| acknowledges that, even if he has
| failed to discover new truths or
| produce new works, he will have built
| the means to discover such truths or
| to produce such works (III, 520). He
| insists that his method has nothing
| to do with the old one nor does it
| try to improve it. And he puts out
| the choice in these terms:
|
| There are and can be only two ways of
| searching into and discovering truth.
| The one flies from the senses and
| particulars to the most general
| axioms, and from these principles,
| the truth of which it takes tor
| settled and immoveable, proceeds to
| judgment and to the discovery of
| middle axioms. And this way is now in