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 prescription for the pill that she has taken ever since.

Pills were not always a form of treatment that Clara had been willing to try. Three years earlier, in 1990, during another period of indecisiveness 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 sessions with a psychologist who specialized in a technique called cognitive 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 Francis 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 revolutionary in its time. The New Organon played a pivotal role in the development 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 inadequate 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 development 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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