The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution.
-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay
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