With regard to authority, it is the greatest weakness to attribute infinite credit to particular authors, and to refuse his own prerogative to time, the author of all authors, and, therefore, of all authority. For truth is rightly named the daughter of time, not of authority.
--Francis Bacon
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45988/45988-h/45988-h.htm
Here Bacon seems to be downplaying the amount of credit authors of discoveries deserve, instead attributing them to time.
On some level I want to agree, but doesn't this kind of thinking encourage people to be passive? And why do we see the rapid technological progress of the west in the last few hundred years, when humanity has existed for so long with comparitively little technological progress. It seems like there is more to discovery and technological progress than the passage of time.
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