Yes, verily so. There is this sense of knowledge being an evolving front (independent of the abilities of human beings). I mean, a bacterium uses its sensors to know about the chemical environment, rodents are very dependent on smell, human beings are tied up with vision in a big way. Because knowledge derived from senses is ultimately usable through “induction”, the question remains if there is another way of identifying with the universe, err.. a non-local way?

I was looking for the right book and found it. Here is a quote from Capra in “The Turning Point (excuse the length):

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While Galileo devised ingenious experiments in Italy, Francis Bacon set forth the empirical method explicitly in England. Bacon was the first to formulate a clear theory of the inductive procedure – to make experiments and to draw general conclusions from them, to be tested in further experiments – and he became extremely influential by vigorously advocating the new method. He boldly attacked traditional schools of thought and developed a veritable passion for scientific experimentation.

The “Baconian spirit” profoundly changed the nature and purpose of the scientific quest. From the time of the ancients the goals of science had been wisdom, understanding the natural order and living in harmony with it. ****** Since Bacon, the goal of science has been knowledge that can be used to dominate and control nature, and today both science and technology are use predominantly for purposes that are profoundly antiecological.

The terms in which Bacon advocated his new empirical method of investigation were not only passionate but often outright vicious. Nature, in his view, had to be “hounded in her wanderings”, “bound into service”, and made a “slave”. She was to be “put in constraint”, and the aim of the scientist was to “torture nature’s secrets from her”. Much of this violent imagery seems to have been inspired by the witch trials that were held frequently in Bacon’s time.******

The ancient concept of the earth as a nurturing mother was radically transformed in Bacon’s writings, and it disappeared completely as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to replace the organic view of nature with the metaphor of the world as the machine. This shift, which was to become of overwhelming importance for the further development of Western civilization, was initiated and completed by two towering figures of the seventeenth century, Descartes and Newton.
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pp. 55-56

Before Newton there had been two opposing trends in seventeenth-century science; the empirical, inductive method represented by Bacon and the rational, deductive method represented by Descartes. Newton, in his Principia, introduced the proper mixture of both methods, ******
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p. 64
Capra goes on to explain that the Newtonian framework of the world as a machine or a clockwork has been undermined in Physics, especially in small-scale matters, but remains in very influential in the minds of biological, psychological and other researchers.

Looking forward to your post on Capra.

I would write a bit about Capra’s position soon.

Fritjof Capra writes somewhere that Bacon viewed nature as a mysterious, wild woman, something to exploit and plunder. Capra piles Bacon’s along with the Cartesian-Newtonian clockwork view of the universe, that still dominates the mind of biomedical researchers, although the physicists have adopted a more holistic view of reality in this century. [But this is mostly from Capra's, I have not read competing views on this.]