Francis Bacon — "To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child."
To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.
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More from Francis Bacon
"For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages."
"Ambition is like a choler, which makes an ill digestion, but a good appetite."
"For as the eye of the mind, through the too great subtilty of the object, may be dulled and not able to perceive it, so through the too great subtilty of the medium it may be deceived and not able to …"
"It is a sad fate to be a man of sense, in a country of fools."
"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."
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.