Francis Bacon — "The greatest errors are not in the want of power, but in the will."
The greatest errors are not in the want of power, but in the will.
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More from Francis Bacon
"For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self."
"It is a thing that ever accompanies great parts, that those that have them are not soon satisfied."
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
"For the sense is a thing infirm and erring, and the mind is a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance."
"Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom."
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.