to convince Clara to stick with her studies, Martin now was worried
that her withdrawal might lead to a downward spiral of despair. Two
weeks later, in my second meeting with Clara, I gave her a pre-
scription for the pill that she has taken ever since.

Pills were not always a form of treatment that Clara had been will-
ing to try. Three years earlier, in 1990, during another period of inde-
cisiveness and depression, Clara had resisted a suggestion from a
fellow student that she might benefit from medication. Instead, she
found relief in psychotherapy. In the course of sixteen weekly ses-
sions with a psychologist who specialized in a technique called cog-
nitive therapy, ^† Clara gradually began feeling better. Abandoning
self-doubt, she became much more optimistic about the career she
might have in philosophy.

It was during this period that Clara turned her attention to Fran-
cis Bacon's most famous book, The New Organon. Published in
1620, when Bacon was almost sixty, it argues that knowledge comes
mainly from experiments and observations instead of from simply
applying old ideas handed down by learned authorities. Bacon's
argument, which we have come to take for granted, was revolution-
ary in its time. The New Organon played a pivotal role in the devel-
opment of experimental science.

As Clara read more by Bacon, and about him, she came to think
of this seventeenth-century gentleman-scholar as a kindred spirit.
She was particularly attracted by Bacon's scathing criticism of the
human tendency to make inaccurate inferences based on inade-
quate information. Relating Bacon's message to herself, Clara began
to recognize her own propensity to make unfounded and excessively
critical self-judgments. When viewed in this way, it seemed to Clara
that Bacon's writings were important not only for the overall devel-
opment of science, but also as a basis for the changing views of
human nature that came with the Age of Reason. Pleased with this
insight, she decided to write her Ph.D. thesis on the psychological
implications of the epistemology of Francis Bacon.

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