"Acorns were good until bread was found"
About this Quote
Progress, in Bacon's world, is never a gentle upgrade; it's a break with necessity so complete it rewires what counts as "good". "Acorns were good until bread was found" compresses a whole philosophy of knowledge into a kitchen-table contrast. Acorns aren't suddenly poisoned by the discovery of bread. They become inadequate. The line is a scalpel aimed at complacency: what we praise as sufficient is often just what we haven't yet learned to surpass.
Bacon is writing at the hinge of eras, when Europe's intellectual diet is shifting from inherited authority to experiment, from scholastic argument to the hard-won yield of method. Bread isn't only a better food. It's a technology: agriculture, milling, ovens, storage, a chain of human ingenuity that turns raw nature into reliable sustenance. In that sense the quote is an argument for applied reason. Nature provides; human craft improves.
The subtext is quietly combative. Bacon is warning readers who romanticize the "natural" or defend old systems because they once worked: you're mistaking scarcity for virtue. Acorns were "good" because hunger is an excellent publicist. The moment an alternative arrives, yesterday's praise starts to look like rationalization.
It also contains a colder implication: discovery doesn't just add options; it changes standards and creates dissatisfaction. Bread raises expectations. Bacon, the prophet of the new science, sells that dissatisfaction as a moral good: discontent, properly disciplined, is the engine of advancement.
Bacon is writing at the hinge of eras, when Europe's intellectual diet is shifting from inherited authority to experiment, from scholastic argument to the hard-won yield of method. Bread isn't only a better food. It's a technology: agriculture, milling, ovens, storage, a chain of human ingenuity that turns raw nature into reliable sustenance. In that sense the quote is an argument for applied reason. Nature provides; human craft improves.
The subtext is quietly combative. Bacon is warning readers who romanticize the "natural" or defend old systems because they once worked: you're mistaking scarcity for virtue. Acorns were "good" because hunger is an excellent publicist. The moment an alternative arrives, yesterday's praise starts to look like rationalization.
It also contains a colder implication: discovery doesn't just add options; it changes standards and creates dissatisfaction. Bread raises expectations. Bacon, the prophet of the new science, sells that dissatisfaction as a moral good: discontent, properly disciplined, is the engine of advancement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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