 Interestingly, thirteen years earlier, in 1905, Eloy Bullón y Fernández, wrote in Los Precursores españoles de Bacon y Descartes that Sanches had anticipated Descartes, Bacon, and Comte (1905: 181). But here the tone is more conciliatory and sober, and Bullón y Fernández takes the trouble to call attention not only to similarities, but also to the differences between these thinkers. He recognizes, for instance, that while both Sanchez and Descartes begin their project with a critique of scholasticism, and particularly, a critique of the appeal to authority, their initial battle call, Sanches’ dismissal of metaphysics and its replacement with empiricism was not shared by Descartes (1905: 170); and neither was it by Bacon, despite the latter’s questioning of the syllogism in the Novum Organum. What, according to Bullón y Fernández, Sanches shares with Bacon is a belief in the observation of things (res) over the analysis of words (verba). And one can certainly hear echoes of Sanches in aphorism XIII from the Novum Organum when Bacon writes: 