ABSTRACT
Methodological speculation on science during the Renaissance reached its high point in the work of Francis Bacon and Descartes. Both Bacon and Descartes use the same figure of speech to illustrate their argument: an artistic ignoramus with a compass can draw a more perfect circle than the greatest artist working free hand. Bacon was much more the ideologist of science than Descartes and his ideas had a more far-reaching cultural and social impact. Historians of thought have usually been more interested in Bacon’s contribution to scientific method, however critical they sometimes have been of it, than in his speculations on the larger issues of philosophy. The influence of Bacon on English civilization in the seventeenth century reached into every important aspect of cultural and even political life. Neither Bacon nor Descartes felt that there were any really great intellectual differences between men of an intrinsic sort.
