Thoughts on Bacon's The New Organon

Throughout my reading of Bacon’s The New Organon, I found myself thinking that there is potential in his idea of providing a new method for defining certainty. However, he is never able to support his theory. He identifies what he thinks is wrong with the current method for determining truth, but he never gives any support or evidence as to why it is wrong. An example of this is #15 in Book One (page 91) where he says; “There is no soundness in our notions whether logical or physical. Substance, Quality, Action, Passion, Essence itself, are not sound notions. Much less are Heavy, Light, Dense, Rare, Moist, Dry, Generation, Corruption, Attraction, Repulsion, Element, Matter, Form, and the like. All are fantastical and ill defined.” Here he says that all of these descriptive words are of no use in our search for certainty, but he never says why he believes this. If he were to give an explanation as to why these words are wrong, then I would be more inclined to believe him. Personally, I can identify a number of the words listed in #15 as notions that have value and merit in the search for certainty. This specific excerpt is just an example of Bacon’s lack of evidentiary support.