Abstract

Those who read this book may be more impressed with its author than the man about whom he is writing. Loren Eiseley is an anthropologist, naturalist and humanist, but more than this he is a man who has a talent for poetic expression. His ardent admiration of Bacon, the heralder [[sic]] of the scientific age, permeates the work and motivates him to speak of the philosopher as "the greatest Elizabethan voyager of all time—a man who sounded the cavernous surges of the darkest sea against which men will ever contend: the sea of time itself." For Eiseley, Bacon is the forerunner of modern times with its awareness of the viability of science in the affairs of man. Bacon recognized the import of the history of philosophy and science and was consumed with the idea that nature is an infinite plenum of hidden potentiality beckoning man to unfold its mysteries and truths. He thought a new frontier could be forged grounded on a "new organ," an inductive method born of the marriage between reason and imagination. He was anxious to achieve triumph of the experimental method and harshly criticized Aristotle’s inductive method. One familiar with Aristotle, however, is cognizant of the fact that he was not, as Bacon contended, caught up with "simple enumeration" but maintained that scientific knowledge as a knowledge of the four causes did not preclude any serious attempts to discover real causal connections.