Primary Source: Francis Bacon

"Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed..."

Book I, Novum Organum(1620)

This is not assigned reading, but I thought I'd post a link the to the source of yesterday's quote from Francis Bacon. Novum Organum (trans. roughly as the "New Instrument") was Bacon's attempt to go beyond the deductive and observational philosophy of Aristotle and introduce a new method of inquiry based on inductive reasoning and experiment. As a primary architect of the "scientific method," Bacon viewed the systematic accumulation of knowledge about nature's laws as a path to greater power over nature. He is thus credited (or blamed, depending on one's perspective) for helping to start the "scientific revolution" of the seventeenth century, and the technological revolutions which followed. Bacon's vision of organized research also laid the foundation for the Royal Society in England and, much later, the American Philosophical Society in the United States.