Early in the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon proposed that science consisted in the elevation of the authority of experiment and observation over that of reason, intuition, and convention. Bacon thought that as more and more reliable and precise particular facts accumulate, they can be classified and generalized, resulting in an ever-expanding hierarchy of useful 'axioms'. This is what he meant by 'induction'. Although many people today continue to regard the collection of facts and their arrangement by induction into theories as the heart of scientific method, Bacon's conception of what facts and theories are and of the relationship between them was hopelessly unrealistic even in his own time. The most important early scientific discoveries---such as those made by Galileo about the movement of the earth, by Keppler about the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, and later by Newton about the 'force' of gravity--could never have been made if Bacon's rules had prevailed. Determined to avoid all premature speculations, Bacon proposed that data gathering be carried out by illiterate assistants with no interest in whether an experiment turned out one way or another. Plain facts, properly arranged, would automatically lead to certain knowledge of the universe. Nothing could be more misrepresentative of the actual problem-solving techniques of the scientific method. That plain facts do not speak for themselves is evident from Bacon's own acceptance of the errors contained in what appeared to be the most 'obvious'' of facts. For Bacon, that the earth did not move was a fact because it could be seen not to move and for Bacon it was a fact that life was being spontaneously generated because maggots always developed in putrid flesh and frogs appeared after every rain. What is clear is that the great breakthroughs of Newton, Darwin, or Marx could never have been achieved solely on the basis of Baconian fact gathering. Facts are always unreliable without theories which guide their collection and which distinguish between superficial and significant appearances. According to Bacon, facts______.