As a long-term practising forensic scientist and a catching up freemason, I believe the emergence of speculative freemasonry had a strong link to the emergence of evidence-based science, (the enlightenment) and to law-speakers.
Does speculative freemasonry have this link today? I think not to any degree.
What began with the work of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St Albans (22/01/1561 to 9/04/1626)1 and his espousal of ‘natural philosophy by experiment’ was developed by a group of neo-scientists into the Invisible College (1646-1647).
