The Advancement of Learning

This was the book in which Francis Bacon, early in the reign of James the First, prepared the way for a full setting forth of his New Organon, or instrument of knowledge. The Organon of Aristotle was a set of treatises in which Aristotle had written the doctrine of propositions. Study of these treatises was a chief occupation of young men. Bacon as a youth of sixteen, at Cambridge, felt the unfruitfulness of this method of search after truth.