Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was a man who was brilliant in many ways: as a scientist, as a philosopher, and as an enthusiastic innovator in the methods of science, which he considered to be means for establishing the dominion of man on earth. Bacon is remembered mostly for having worked out the inductive method.He began with such phenomena of nature as are presented to us, but he intended to go beyond the phenomenal data, to reach knowledge of the form. Nature and form are terms that recall to mind the metaphysics of Aristotelio-Scholasticism. But, as used by Bacon, these terms have a different meaning:
The metaphysical support for these natures and forms is not treated by Bacon. The only metaphysics consistent with a phenomenalistic physics is mechanical atomism. Therefore, the differences between phenomena depend upon nothing more than the different positions of atoms regulated by movement.
Even if we grant that Bacon's method leads to a knowledge of what he calls the forms (the laws of nature), such a knowledge will only indicate that until the present day the phenomena were regulated by such laws or forms. But this does not prove that tomorrow these phenomena will obey the same laws. In other words, Bacon does not give us a metaphysics -- independent of the phenomena -- which would be the support of these same phenomena.It seems, however, that Bacon did not realize the phenomenalistic consequences of his method, and hence could still affirm that the traditional metaphysical world exists alongside his phenomenal world. The later philosophers of Empiricism showed that this is an untenable position, and concluded that all reality is pure phenomenon