On Bacon and Newton by Francois-Marie Arouet De Voltaire:
The most singular, as well as the most excellent, of all [Bacon's] works, is that which is now the least read, and which is at the same time the most useful; I mean his “Novum Scientiarum Organum.” This is the scaffold by means of which the edifice of the new philosophy has been reared; so that when the building was completed, the scaffold was no longer of any use. Chancellor Bacon was still unacquainted with nature, but he perfectly knew, and pointed out extraordinarily well, all the paths which lead to her recesses. He had very early despised what those square-capped fools teach in those dungeons called Colleges, under the name of philosophy, and did everything in his power that hose bodies, instituted for the cultivation and perfection of the human understanding, might cease any longer to mar it, by their “quiddities,” their “horrors of a vacuum,” their “substantial forms,” with the rest of that jargon which ignorance and a nonsensical jumble of religion had consecrated.
This great man is the father of experimental philosophy.
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