Bacon’s Inductive Method

Throughout the Middle Ages God was regarded as being transcendental, but during the Renaissance, the perception of the transcendental character of God was gradually lost among philosophers. Moreover, there arose a pantheistic philosophy of nature, which regarded God as inherent in nature. At the time when the Middle Ages came to an end and the Modern Age began, a philosopher proposed a new methodology with which to study nature. His name was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). According to Bacon, previous studies, based on metaphysics, were “sterile and like a virgin consecrated to God, producing nothing,” mainly because they employed Aristotle’s method.

Aristotle’s logic was a method for the sake of logical proof. With such logic, one might persuade others. With it, however, one could not obtain truths from nature. Thus, Bacon advocated the inductive method as the logic for finding new truth. He named his own discourse on logic New Organon, in contrast to Aristotle’s Organon.

Asserting that traditional studies, which were based on Aristotle’s logic, had been nothing but logical arguments of useless words, Bacon held that in order to obtain sure knowledge, we must first eliminate those prejudices to which we are liable, and then directly explore nature itself. Those prejudices he called the four Idols (see “Epistemology”). After eliminating these Idols, we will be able to observe nature with a clear mind and make observations and experiments. In that way, we can find universal essences existing within individual phenomena.

Inductive methods before Bacon had sought to derive general laws from a small number of observations and experiments; Bacon, however, tried to present a true inductive method in order to obtain sure knowledge by collecting as many cases as possible, even attaching importance to negative instances.