Introduction

'Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.' Bacon's fifty-eight Essays treat of truth, death, adversity, friendship, love, ambition, studies, riches, revenge and gardens in sentences as terse as proverbs, and became a model of English prose. The Novum Organum declares war on Aristotle's logic; its very title answers the Organon, Aristotle's logical works. Bacon shows that four kinds of 'idols' in the human mind, of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theatre, keep us from the truth, and urges that knowledge be drawn from facts by observation, experiment and induction. From here the idea that 'knowledge is power' spread across the world.