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08837_Field_TCGG T602.txt
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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