How does this quote express Enlightenment ideas?
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at
10:36 pm
I have to explain how the quote "The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall, the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall."-Francis Bacon expresses Enlightenment ideas.
thanks!
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The enlightenment was a period in which the knowledge of man became more important than anything else. Faith in science and the reasoning that human intellect is the only sure thing in the world led to ideology of humanism, in which man is the is the source of everything that can be known, it starts all and ends up with mankind, everything else is foolish superstition. Bacon is arguing that this type of thinking caused man to fall as man is now limiting himself to only what he can reason through observation and logic. Enlightenment reasoning lead to a rejection of God and religion as being the ultimate source of knowledge, which for Bacon, was a mistake as man is now limiting himself to more closed and isolated way of thinking.
I found this quote on Wikipedia:
"Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world."
Going too far backfires. Find the sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Don’t take it too far.