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Opus Majus

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Roger Bacon's encyclopedic appeal to the pope to reform learning around mathematics, optics, languages, and above all experiment. It anticipates the scientific method by insisting that reasoning alone cannot certify a truth — only experience can.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and by experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

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