Although Bacon himself did not coin the term ‘experimental philosophy’, it was he who devised a new method to bring about the union of the experimental and rational faculties. The distinction between speculative and experimental philosophy also has its origins in Bacon. Unlike the method of the empirics, both speculative and experimental philosophy utilize the powers of the mind. However, Bacon rejects the speculative philosophy of the scholastics because it relies solely on the mind, and more specifically the imagination. He characterizes the modus operandi of the imagination as ‘play’ (lusus) because it is free to do as it pleases and ‘to make up’ (fingere) whatever it likes. And because the mind is altogether divorced from reality, scholastic philosophy is thus nothing but a delusion, a figment of the imagination. The Baconian method, by contrast, does not depend solely or even mainly on the powers of the mind. To ensure that knowledge has a basis in reality, Bacon tethers the mind to nature in an ‘enduring marriage.’ Through the exteriorization of the function of reason in the form of tables of comparison, Bacon’s new method definitively excludes any interference by imagination in the processing of the relevant data. Instead, the mind is subjected to extreme discipline and forced to ‘buckle down’ to work on the data in the tables. In contradistinction to the speculative philosophy, the Baconian experimental method is all work and no play. Knowledge and power over nature can only be acquired through hard labour. All science, says Bacon, is the mind’s ‘exercise and work’ (exercitatio & opificium).