Bacon Publishes the Instauratio Magna and the Novum Organum
A former Lord Chancellor argues that knowledge has to come from observation, not from old books
Quick facts
- Author
- Francis Bacon
- Work
- Instauratio Magna / Novum Organum
- Published
- October 1620
- Key idea
- Induction from observation, the four Idols of the mind
What happened
In October 1620 Francis Bacon published the Instauratio Magna, a planned six-part project to rebuild human knowledge from scratch. Its centerpiece, the Novum Organum ("New Instrument"), attacked the method philosophers had leaned on since Aristotle: starting from general premises and reasoning downward. Bacon argued the reverse. Collect particular observations first, organize them into tables of instances, and let general rules emerge from the data, a process later generations called induction. He also cataloged the mental habits that corrupt reasoning, which he called the Idols of the Tribe, the Cave, the Marketplace, and the Theatre, covering human bias, individual quirks, the slipperiness of language, and blind deference to inherited philosophical systems.
Why it matters
Bacon gave the emerging scientific community a shared justification for experiment over authority: test claims against nature, then generalize. The Royal Society later took Bacon's program as its founding charter, and his idols of the mind anticipate modern discussions of cognitive bias in a way historians of science still cite directly.
How we know
The Instauratio Magna and Novum Organum survive in their original Latin editions and in translation; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Bacon traces the 1620 publication and its contents from those texts.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Francis Bacon · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Francis Bacon (Project Gutenberg). Novum Organum · Primary source (author-declared)gutenberg.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
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