Sir Francis Bacon is an interesting and endearing fellow in many respects. He harbored a deep-seated, skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical nature, which, to someone skeptical, nonacademic, antidogmatic, and obsessively empirical, like this author, is a quality almost impossible to find in the thinking business. (Anyone can be skeptical; any scientist can be overly empirical—it is the rigor coming from the combination of skepticism and empiricism that’s hard to come by.) The problem is that his empiricism wanted us to confirm, not disconfirm; thus he introduced the
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