Bacon’s actual legal experience was not so much in pleading factual cases in court as in conducting examinations on behalf of the government. His most original remarks on natural philosophy are those that urge the examination of nature “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.”92 So certainty is attained because nature will be made to yield up her secrets by torture.
