How powerful were the skeptics of human sensation and reason during the late Renaissance? How persuasive and influential were the sophists, paradoxists, deniers, and nihilists as civilization, culture, and quality-of-life were rising radically in Europe after the 1494 French invasion of Italy? Evidently, the skeptics were pretty strong.
Francis Bacon, in the Novum Organum (1620), was eager to speak out against them. He flatly opposed "The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be obtained at all" and who claim "that nothing can be known". His own doctrine of science, philosophy, and "the interpretation of nature and the kingdom of man" is "infinitely separated and opposed" to theirs. Bacon notes that these irrational enemies of man, knowledge, progress, and happiness "destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise and supply helps for the same."
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