Bacon's unfinished masterwork of method — written in Latin as the second part of his Great Instauration and here presented in Joseph Devey's nineteenth-century English translation. Cast as 130 aphorisms in Book I and 52 in Book II, it demolishes the Aristotelian syllogism as an instrument for discovering new truths, catalogues the four 'idols' that corrupt the human understanding, and proposes in their place a patient method of induction — climbing from particular observations to axioms of increasing generality — that would become the founding charter of modern experimental science.
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