5 - The instauration of learning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
Summary
And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor'd by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), PrefaceWhence, our First Enquiry ought to be, how Man's Nature came to be so Disabled from performing its Primary Operation, or from Reasoning rightly … Divines will tell us that this mischief happens thro' Original Sin.
John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696), sigs. aiv–a2r.… we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support … It is essential not to have faith in human nature.
Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and HistoryThe striking frontispiece of the 1620 edition of Bacon's Great Instauration bears a text from the apocalyptic book of Daniel that reads: ‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia’ – Many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. As Charles Webster has ably demonstrated, the turbulent decades between Bacon's death in 1626 and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 witnessed a remarkable marriage of Puritan millenarianism and a Baconian promotion of knowledge and learning.
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- The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science , pp. 186 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007