The Advancement of Learning (full title: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human) is a 1605 book by Francis Bacon which introduces and popularizes the scientific method of observation, skepticism and testability.
The Advancement of Learning (full title: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human) is a 1605 book by Francis Bacon which introduces and popularizes the scientific method of observation, skepticism and testability.
Bacon (a Protestant) lived during a period of great social turmoil as well as the expansion of scientific and social knowledge.in 1605 Bacon sent a draft to his friend Tobie Matthew who was in Florence where he was baptized as a Roman Catholic. Two years later, in 1607 Matthew returned to England, where he was imprisoned for his alleged "Papist views" [1]
The book is addressed as a plea to the first Catholic monarch of England King Charles I and is in two parts or books, each with separate chapters:
Bacon refutes the claim of Herod the Great that knowledge causes anxiety, discontent and rebellion by distinguishing
This work inspired the taxonomic structure of the highly influential Encyclopédie by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, and is credited by Bacon's biographer-essayist Catherine Drinker Bowen with being a pioneering essay in support of empirical philosophy. [2]
The following passage from The Advancement of Learning was used as the foreword to a popular Cambridge textbook: [3]
So that as Tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye, and a body ready to put itself in all positions, so, in the Mathematics the use which is collateral, an intervenient, is no less worthy, than that which is principle and intended.
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