The Romantics, in seeking to understand nature in her living essence, studied the 'father of science', Sir Francis Bacon. The view of Bacon and the 'inductive method' that emerges is quite a different one from that tended to prevail both before and then after, here mainly due to John Stuart Mill's interpretation later in the 1800s. For the Romantics, induction as generally interpreted 'was not enough to produce correct understanding in Bacon's terms.' They saw another side of Bacon, generally not developed, one in which nature was a labyrinth not open to "excellence of wit" nor "chance experiments": "Our steps must be guided by a clue, and see what way from the first perception of the sense must be laid out upon a sure plan."

The chief spokesman for Romantic philosophy and the 'science of science' or epistemology, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. An anonymous article (written by John Stuart Mill) published in the Westminster Review of 1840 noted that "the Romantic philosophy of Coleridge pervaded the minds and hearts of a significant portion of British intellectuals." Coleridge held that Bacon's view was that the secrets of nature, the inner essence that Bacon termed natura naturans, required a different "mode of knowing" from the intellect, but required a knowing that was "participative in its essence" and "above the ordinary human consciousness, a super-conscious mind." Here Coleridge refers to Bacon's idea of the 'Lumen siccum' - dry light or Platonic Idea that exists before and above any observation of nature, indeed directs and influences it - an organizing idea.

A good example of what Coleridge is talking about would be the shift from the Ptolemaic, earth-centred universe, which accords with man's immediate experience, to the Copernican, helio-centric one, which accords with reason. Without the benefit of the organizing idea involving a higher cognitive faculty, science will tend to deal with secondary aspects of nature instead of the primary, essential properties. As Richard Saumarez, a contemporary of Coleridge, and the creator of a dynamic understanding of physiology, wrote:

An example of this is the difference between Newton's approach to understanding color as seen via light bent through a prism (secondary event) and Goethe's approach which involved the direct observation (in the original sense of participation using that faculty of mind Coleridge called for) as set out in his Chromatology (Farbenlehre).

For Coleridge, Bacon's emphasis on clearing the "idols' that refract and distort the intellect, and developing a higher cognitive capacity is an integral part of Bacon's method for science.

For Coleridge, Bacon is rightly seen as the 'father of science', but not for the right reasons. Coleridge set out to correct what he saw as a misunderstanding of Bacon's scientific method. First he deals with the “original Science of natura naturata methodology of Francis Bacon.” He notes with Saumarez that Bacon also calls for an 'organizing idea' in science which both frames and helps to realize the experiment.

While it is true that Bacon praises the experiment over sense perception, this is in the context of there being a valid organizing idea to begin with. Without it, sense perception will amount to pure empiricism, which may lead to a compass (technology), but no advance in science (Idea and Law), but also without it, experiment becomes arid and without foundation in reality.

While experiment is important to avoid subjective sense-impressions, as Bacon rightly says, what he says for Coleridge is that " our perception can apprehend through the organs of sense only the phenomena evoked by the experiment, but that same power of mind which out of its own laws has proposed the experiment, can judge whether in nature there is a law correspondent to the same."