Abstract: From the perspective of historical epistemology, this article situates Bacon within his 16th-to 17th-century context, and points out that “writing” was a central element that Bacon invoked in constructing his notion of “experience”. At the practical level, Bacon drew on the humanist tradition of “loci/topics” to establish the passage between writing, memory and experience as an axis for generating knowledge. He also proposed, under the possible influences of the Llullist ars combinatoria, “tabulation” as the process for discovering the “spelling-book of nature”, which was, in essence, to restore the orderly states of the mind through a structured and reiterative process of experience by writing. Bacon’s conception regarding this kind of “writing-experience” further suggests that early modern “empiricism(s)” may be revealed as a complex genealogy, rather than any straightforward evolution of a consistent philosophical stance. A first step is to rethink Bacon as something other than the stereotypical “inductionism” whose method is based on representational “ideas of things”.

Key Words: Francis Bacon; Experientia literata; Textual practice; Order in writing

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