Bacon grasped the empirical aspect of Aristotle’s thought: that knowledge ultimately comes to the knower via the senses, which supply the raw data that reason sorts and disentangles in order to arrive at the truth. “There are two modes of acquiring knowledge,” he wrote, “namely by reasoning and experience. Reason draws a conclusion … but does not make it certain [but] the mind may rest on the intuition of truth when it discovers it by the path of experience.” It’s a sentence that might have been written by John Locke or even David Hume.
