Francis Bacon — "To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action."
To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action.
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More from Francis Bacon
"The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men."
"Money is a great servant but a bad master."
"The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain."
"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."
"The greatest errors are not in the want of power, but in the will."
About Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
English philosopher whose Novum Organum (1620) laid out the inductive method that became the foundation of modern empirical science. Closely associated with Galileo Galilei (contemporary scientific revolutionary). For an intellectual contrast, see Aristotelian scholasticism, the syllogistic, deductive philosophical tradition that ruled medieval universities — Bacon's Novum Organum literally means 'new instrument' — the explicit replacement for Aristotle's Organon. The entire scientific revolution turned on which logic was correct: deduction from authority or induction from observation.
The standard scholarly entry points to Francis Bacon's work: Lisa Jardine (Queen Mary University of London, Renaissance scholar) — Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974); Jonathan Marwil (Michigan, intellectual historian) — The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (1976); Perez Zagorin (Rochester, historian of ideas) — Francis Bacon (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Francis Bacon.