But he confessed that experience alone was an undisciplined kind of knowledge. By placing great emphasis on experience, Gessner had amassed enough material to write four hefty volumes that far surpassed what anyone had known before about animals. The more material he uncovered, the more difficult it was to organize the natural world into distinctly logical patterns. Science is born from the collaboration of the two.” Gessner’s experience gathering materials for a new history of nature in the mid-sixteenth century gave him direct insight into the problems of combining reason and experience. “Reason comes to us from God experience depends on the will of man. “Reason and experience are the two pillars of scientific work,” he affirmed. In the midst of his great Historia animalium (History of Animals, 1551–8), the Swiss-German naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) offered the following reflection on the process of creating knowledge.
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