The Ant, the Spider, and the Bee in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon”

 

Those who have debated both Philosophy and Science have been either devotees of empiricism or of rationalism. The people of empiricism are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a blended and transformed course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. To me this is the real business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from the natural environment and mechanical experiments but instead it symthisizes the organic whole, as it finds it, but lstores it in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and more precisely between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon [Book One]. 1620.