The Idols of the Theatre are not innate, nor do they steal into the understanding from the secret channels of the mind, but are plainly impressed and received from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from bad rules of demonstration. For so many are the modes of building systems of philosophy, and so various and divergent the ways of collecting and digesting the things which conduce to them, that they are not only several, but also, for the most part, discordant.
— Francis Bacon
Early Modern
Empiricism, scientific method
