It is a historical fact that Bacon's philosophy is contemporaneous with the birth of modem thought. But it is also a fact that modem thought has developed in a way which does not accord with the idea that Bacon gave of the new science. Of course, we can praise the Chancellor's sense of reformation, his critique of false sciences, his comments on academic institutions and the politics of science; we can even say, as the French Encyclopedists did, that he was the herald of experimental philosophy. But the fact remains that the Baconian concept of science, as an inductive science, has nothing to do with and even contradicts today's form of science. As far as the method of science is concerned (and by method we mean the rules and formal processes of knowledge, and not only a general sense of experience), Bacon's instauratio went to a dead end, as early as the first progress of science in the seventeenth century.