Read the following snippets from Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. Can you see why the poet and Anglican priest
John Donne wrote just a few years later that "the new learning calls all in doubt"? By new learning, he meant the turn to empiricism, and its skeptical approach to received knowledge, as well as its determination "begin in doubts" rather than handed-down certainties (such as religious beliefs or the Scholastic philosophy of Aristotle and his medieval and Renaissance followers.Sir Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning (1605), from Book I:
Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men. should make a stand thereupon and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to make progression.
And to speak truly, ANTIQUITAS SAECULI JUVENTUS MUNDI. These [12] times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.2. Another error induced by the former is a distrust that anything should be now to be found out, which the world should have missed and passed over so long time….
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8. Another error is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients; the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
This idea that empirical (one might use the word "scientific" today) learning will lead to real progress in human life and in understanding of nature posed a great challenge to the hierarchical civic and religious order of the Renaissance. Today, do we still think, along with Bacon, that empirical science leads to progress, that life and our understanding of it will continue to improve and progress?
TO SUMMARIZE THIS SECTION ON THE RENAISSANCE WORLD VIEW: