The Advancement of Learning


The Advancement of Learning is a 1605 book by Francis Bacon.
It inspired the taxonomic structure of the highly influential Encyclopédie by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, and is credited by Bacon's biographer-essayist Catherine Drinker Bowen with being a pioneering essay in support of empirical philosophy.
The following passage from The Advancement of Learning was used as the foreword to a popular Cambridge textbook: