Bacon: The New Organon, Preface and Book I

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination, and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded. (47)

In this passage and several others, Bacon describes what he views as an erroneous method of pursuing the truth. Bacon would prefer that the mind proceed from a first axiom to a second and then to a third, rather than skip the middle step and proceed either from the first to the third or the third to the first. He claims that trying to generalize from a few axioms or trying to deduce axioms from a hypothesized generalization is not productive. Bacon's proposed method certainly has its appeal; the mind would proceed in a perfect, logical progression. However, I wonder if this method is possible for a finite, human being. How far can a single individual travel (or even a billion united humans) towards complete truth? Bacon's method is the more cautious route - its conclusions would certainly be true - but perhaps it is better to take risks and try for a greater leap in knowledge. I might even argue that Bacon's method would result in complete stasis (wouldn't each individual have to "re-travel" the same road of his teachers? he would have to understand every step that led to the present conclusions, wouldn't he?), in which case, our original method might be the superior. Even if we don't always reach the correct conclusion, we reach that conclusion much more quickly and with greater ease, and it is far better to have movement of any kind (whether forward or back) then to remain motionless without hope of any hope of moving forward. In this sense, I think that intuition, imagination, and inspiration have their place in the pursuit of knowledge, and that maybe they offer the only feasible "help" to drag our slow minds towards truth.

So in summary: is Bacon's method (about which I admit we haven't actually read yet) feasible for finite beings? is there any place for imaginaiton, intuition, and inspiration when we seek the truth? and if the conclusions drawn from these sources are built on shaky foundations, are they worth the risk of error?