| of experience.
|
| Bacon's fourth censure of the old
| logic follows from this. He agrees
| with the sixteenth-century
| dialecticians that Aristotle was
| wrong when he thought that
| understanding could skip, without the
| hard work of induction, from what is
| immediately given to the senses to
| what is posed in the first principles
| of science. Aristotle wanted to know
| the truth, but did not explain the
| method of invention. On the other
| hand, the dialecticians, giving up
| the attempt to set up the first
| principles (and thereby the
| traditional Aristotelian
| demonstrative science), gave up any
| attempt to reach the truth. They only
| retained the deductive and systematic
| form of discourse to introduce order
| into men's opinions, and maintained
| that invention could be reduced to
| the mere search for arguments, that
| is, for probable reasons invented to
| persuade or convince.
|
| Bacon, however, wants to promote the
| idea of an inductive science and