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of language), idols of the theater (preexisting beliefs), and idols of the tribe (inherited foibles of human thought): “Idols are the profoundest fallacies of the mind of man. Nor do they deceive in particulars … but from a corrupt and crookedly-set predisposition of the mind; which doth, as it were, wrest and infect all the anticipations of the understanding.” The power of beliefs to drive our observations and conclusions is profound: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises … in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.” This is a superb example of the confirmation bias, which we saw in the previous chapter is where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and either ignore or rationalize disconfirming evidence. Everyone does it.

What is the answer to the problem of the idols? Science. Bacon’s Novum Organum was part of a larger project he called Instauratio Magna, or the “Great Restoration.” (See figure 15.) This was a plan to reorganize philosophy and the sciences, starting by challenging the authority of Aristotle with the new instrument of science. With the impudence only a man of Bacon’s stature could muster, he boldly proposed that “there was but one course left … to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.” Bacon suggested, “As water will not ascend higher than the level of the first spring-head from whence it descendeth, so knowledge derived from Aristotle and exempted from liberty of examination will not rise again higher than the knowledge of Aristotle.”21

The debate over the relative strengths and roles of induction and deduction in science continued for centuries and remains with us to this day. When Charles Darwin was coming of intellectual age and developing his theory of evolution, for example, the pendulum had swung over to the side of induction, and there was much handwringing among philosophers of science over what it was and how it was used in science. Although definitions varied, induction was roughly understood to mean arguing from the specific to the general, from data to theory. In 1830, however, astronomer John Herschel argued that induction was reasoning from the known to the unknown. In 1840, philosopher of science William Whewell insisted that induction was the superimposing of concepts on facts by the mind, even if they were not empirically verifiable. In 1843, philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that induction was the discovery of general laws from specific facts, but that they had to be verified empirically. Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion, for example, was considered to be a classic case study of induction. For Herschel and Mill, Kepler discovered these laws through careful observation and induction. For Whewell, the laws were self-evident truths that could have been known a priori and verified later by observation. By the 1860s, as the theory of evolution was gaining momentum and converts, Herschel and Mill carried the day on induction as observation, not so much because they were right and Whewell was wrong, but because empiricism was becoming integral to the understanding of how good science is done. This is, in part, what caused Darwin to delay publication of On the Origin of Species—he wanted to compile copious data for his theory before going public.22

Figure 15. Francis Bacon’s Great Restoration through the Exploration of Science

Frontispiece from Francis Bacon’s 1620 Instauratio Magna, or “Great Restoration” through the Novum Organum, or new instrument of science. The ships represent the tools of scientific knowledge that carry the explorers (scientists) past the Pillars of Hercules (literally, the Strait of Gibraltar;