Empiricism

All knowledge comes from experience. The mind begins blank. Bacon, Locke, and their heirs built modern science on this foundation.

Empiricism begins with a refusal: the mind does not arrive pre-loaded with knowledge. Everything it comes to know, it learns through the senses. Francis Bacon pushed against the authority of ancient texts and argued for systematic observation, experiment, and the patient gathering of evidence. The mind, he thought, was riddled with idols — biases and habits of thought that distorted perception. Locke gave empiricism its clearest philosophical form: the mind at birth is a blank tablet, and experience writes on it. Ideas of color, shape, texture, and heat come from the world; complex ideas are built up from these simpler materials. This was a radical leveling. No idea arrives with special authority just because it feels innate or because a great thinker endorsed it. Knowledge had to be earned, tested, and held open to revision. That commitment became the working method of modern science.