One sins against the majesty of God by being unwilling to look into nature's own works and contenting oneself with reading the works of others; in this way by being unwilling to look for oneself one forms and creates for oneself various fanciful notions and does not only miss the enjoyment of looking into God's wonders, but also wastes the time which should be spent on necessities and to the benefit of one's neighbour, asserting many things which are unworthy of God. Such are these scholastics, such are most philosophers, and those who devote their whole lives to the study of logic. Time is not to be spent on explaining and defending these opinions, indeed scarcely on examining them, and one must not boldly and impetuously assign anything to art on the basis of observing a single thing. From now on I shall spend my time, not on meditations, but solely in investigation, experience, and the recording of natural objects and the reports of the ancients on the observation of such things, as well as in testing out these reports, if that be possible.
[Chaos N 59, quoted in Troels Kardel, Steno, Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, Copenhagen, 1994: p. 16]
This is from a very early manuscript, usually called the Chaos-manuscript, which are notes that Steno jotted down as a student. While it would be too much to demand that people make the discoveries by themselves, Steno is clearly going for a more moderate position, in which people should try to be familiar with the way things actually work, rather than merely with how someone says they do. (I've recently had a sci-fi short story buzzing around in the back of my mind which might take the first sentence as its epigraph.)
