The Senses

Bacon spent quite a bit of time expressing his opinion that the senses are deceptive and a hindrance to the pursuit of truth. In book one, aphorism 50 he writes, “But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the sense...”. Although I agree that the senses have a tendency to deceive, in the case of a ship that appears to be falling off of the earth as it travels beyond the horizon, I am inclined to think that experimentation is merely on step away from the senses and still falls short of completely transcending the problems of the senses.

Additionally, I struggle to think that reason is something that is totally separate from the senses because it seems to me that our reason is informed by our senses and our sub-conscious is formed by our sensory experience. I mean to say that the use of reason and the discovery of experimentation are all founded on the senses in one way or another and despite the fact that reason and experimentation help us to see through the illusions that our senses perceive, experimentation and reason themselves would not have been formulated had it not been for sensory input.