Bacon on the Roads to Power and Knowledge

Reyer van Blommendael, Xantippe Douses Socrates With Water (1650)

Although the roads to human power and to human knowledge lie close together, and are nearly the same, nevertheless on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of dwelling on abstractions, it is safer to begin and raise the sciences from those foundations which have relation to practice, and to let the active part itself be as the seal which prints and determines the contemplative counterpart.

–Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, bk ii, aph iv (1620) in: The Works of Francis Bacon vol. 1, p. 169 (Spedding ed. 1877)