Since the empiricists believed that rhetoric was merely a ways to explain knowledge that had already been discovered through the intake of sense data, they were fairly critical of its instances and were adamant on the purification and unification of language as a whole. This being said, Sir Francis Bacon's rhetorical contributions served to sway people from using corrupt language, thus portraying a skewed perception of knowledge, as proven by his idols of culture, explain our internal processes and how we make meaning and retain knowledge from the sense data we take in, as portrayed by his faculty of the mind, and encourage perspicuity, or a clear, direct style of language as proven by the three realms of communication. Bacon's contributions to rhetoric influenced various other rhetoricians and empiricists of the time, such as John Locke and David Hume.