The Modern Dilemma

REVIEWS
"One of that select group of men of science who also have high literary gifts."—Wall Street Journal

"...these meditations offer the best appreciation of the adventure and beauty of the scientific quest, and they will inspire the young to join the great unfinished work."—Science

"This is another collection of the lovely and haunting essays by Loren Eiseley, the naturalist writer who has given us so many delightful moments with his books....If there is a scientist anywhere writing more poetic prose, and making more sense with it, I have not encountered him....Eiseley seeks to establish Bacon's remarkable vision of the future and remove from him the onus of having been the founder of today's materialism and technocracy....a stimulating introduction and insight to Francis Bacon."—Charles D. Aring, M.D., Archives of Internal Medicine

DESCRIPTION
Before T. H. Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog"), before Richard Dawkins, before Loren Eiseley himself, there was Francis Bacon. Perhaps the Elizabethan era's greatest intellectual figure next to Shakespeare, Bacon codified the scientific method and set the stage for Isaac Newton's revolution. A victim of his own success, Bacon has been attacked as an advocate of modern materialism, and his spectacular fall from political grace in his own time has tarnished the reputation of his intellectual work. In these penetrating essays Loren Eiseley, noted anthropologist and historian of science, has sought to do justice to Bacon's real vision of the future of humanity. Dr. Eiseley surveys not Bacon alone—for Bacon here stands as a symbol—but also that strange complex of multifarious, contradictory, and creative worlds which is the human mind itself.

(Also published as "Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma" and, in a modified format, "The Man who Saw through Time".)