the modalities of Being are proportional to the modalities of our 
intellection.

     Observation and experiment were not new. What was new 
was insistence on tangible, repeatable, visible proof. Nef writes 
(p. 27): “Such insistence on tangible proofs hardly goes back 
beyond the times of William Gilbert of Colchester, who was born 
in 1544. In his De magnete , published in 1600, Gilbert wrote 
that there was no description or explanation in the book that 
he had not verified several times ‘with his own eyes’.” But 
before printing had had a century and more to build up the 
assumptions of uniformity, continuity, and repeatability, such 
an impulse as Gilbert felt or such a proof as he offers would 
have attracted little interest. Bacon himself was aware of the 
discontinuity between his age and previous history as 
consisting in the rise of mechanism. He writes in Novum