With *Novum Organum Scientiarum*, published in Latin in 1620, Francis Bacon set himself an audacious target: to replace the deductive Aristotelian logic that had structured European knowledge for two millennia with a new 'instrument' (*organon*) of inquiry. For Bacon, scholastic philosophy is a war of empty words — Latin handled with virtuosity but teaching almost nothing about nature.

Bacon's alternative is induction. One begins with particular observations, gathers positive and negative instances into systematic tables, and tests hypotheses by experiment. That this sounds obvious to a modern reader is itself the measure of Bacon's success. To see how radical the proposal was in the early seventeenth century, one must recall the weight of the scholastic tradition still in force.

The text's most brilliant section is the doctrine of the *idols*, the obstacles to clear knowledge. *Idola tribus* are errors common to the human species (our pattern-seeking tendencies). *Idola specus* are the private biases of the individual mind. *Idola fori* are the 'idols of the marketplace', the ambiguities introduced by language itself. *Idola theatri* are the artificial stage-sets of inherited philosophical systems. The schema reads today as an archaic forerunner of modern discussions of cognitive bias.

Bacon's motto — 'knowledge is power' — marks the passage from a philosophy of method to a civilisational programme: humanity will understand nature in order to put it to work, and the result will be systematic technical progress. Both the optimism of the Enlightenment and the ecological crises of later centuries trace back to that sentence. Bacon precedes Newton, the Royal Society, and the Enlightenment, but he describes the methodological horizon within which all of them would operate.