Source identified1
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“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
Meaning & context
Intellectual confidence can be improved by beginning with questions rather than pretending certainty too early.
Source details
The Advancement of Learning, First Book, Project Gutenberg #5500, transcribed from the 1893 Cassell & Company edition. Bacon contrasts impatience of doubt with mature suspension of judgment and then sets out two ways of contemplation before saying that beginning with certainties ends in doubts while beginning with doubts can end in certainties. It remains early-modern epistemological argument rather than a modern experimental rule for scientific method.
