Francis Bacon’s Birthday

Bacon has been called the father of materialism, empiricism, and the scientific method. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive and careful observation of events in nature, often referred to as the Baconian method. Bacon expressed the greatest self-evident advantage of science in his famous aphorism "scientia potentia est" (“Knowledge is power”). Bacon believe that the main goal of science was to make people more powerful and prosperous. He introduced the methods of enumeration and exclusion into natural sciences, exceptions being the more important of the two. With this method he established that the movement of the tinies part of a body was the form of warmth. In his theory of knowledge he emphasized that true knowledge derived from experience. This philosophical position is referred to as empiricism. He did not only proclaimed empiricism, but was very a consistent empiricist throughout his life.