SOURCE: "Bacon's Man of Science," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XV, No. 3, June, 1949, pp. 348-70.

In the excerpt below, Prior summarizes Bacon's view of the ideal man of science.

The dominating motive of Bacon's intellectual life was the complete reformation of learning, and he labored under the conviction that he was, almost single-handed, promoting a revolution in knowledge to the end that man might win a new empire over things. In those of his writings which he regarded as the parts of his grandiose plan, he gave frequent expression to his new conception of the proper goals of human knowledge and proposed new methods by which they were to be attained. And clearly implicit in this new approach to learning was an alteration in the conception of the learned man. Since the new aim and the method were to make unprecedented demands on the knower...