The Golden Age of Islam left a legacy of scientific wealth: ideologies and methods. The Baconian method is a methodical observation of facts as a means of studying and interpreting natural phenomena, inspired by the works of Islamic scientists. This essentially empirical method was formulated early in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, as a scientific substitute for the prevailing systems of thought, which, to his mind, relied all too often on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.
After first dismissing all prejudices and preconceptions, Bacon’s method, as explained in Novum Organum (1620; “New Instrument”), consisted of three main steps: first, a description of facts; second, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories – instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees; third, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it. This process of induction is what formed the basis of scientific practice as we know it today and Bacon’s insistence on evidence also had its influence on the British empiricist movement.
