ABSTRACT
For Bacon, the progress of suitably reformed arts and sciences was the basis of humanity’s greatest hopes. And Descartes, despite their many differences about knowledge, shared Bacon’s vision of the human race becoming, through the advance of science, the masters and possessors of Nature. This optimism about the fruits to be expected from the proliferation of organized knowledge was echoed in the eighteenth century in the manifestos of the Enlightenment, epitomized in Condorcet’s vision of the human race ‘emancipated from its shackles, released from the empire of fate and from that of the enemies of its progress, advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness’.1
