Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) was an English philosopher, lawyer and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor under James I. [1] In works including The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum he attacked reliance on inherited authority and argued for a systematic method of observation, experiment and inductive reasoning. [2] His programme influenced the founding of the Royal Society and is generally regarded as a foundation of the scientific method. [3]
Early life and education
Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House in the Strand, London, the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Anne Cooke, a formidably learned woman connected by marriage to the Cecil family. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve, where he formed an early dislike of the Aristotelian scholasticism that dominated the curriculum. [1]
He then joined the English embassy in France and studied at the University of Poitiers. The death of his father in 1579 left him with little inheritance, and he turned to the law, entering Gray's Inn and being called to the bar in 1582. [2]
Political career
Bacon sat in the House of Commons from 1581 and spent two decades seeking advancement, hindered by his opposition to a subsidy demanded by Elizabeth I and by the rivalry of his cousin Robert Cecil. He was associated with the Earl of Essex, who supported his career; when Essex was tried for treason in 1601, Bacon took part in the prosecution, a decision that has been much criticised. [1]
Under James I his rise was rapid: knighted in 1603, he became Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper in 1617 and Lord Chancellor in 1618, and was created Baron Verulam and then Viscount St Alban. [2]
In 1621 Parliament charged him with taking bribes from litigants. He admitted the charges, was fined, briefly imprisoned in the Tower and barred from office and from sitting in Parliament. The fine and imprisonment were remitted, but his public career was over. [1]
Philosophy and writings
Bacon's central claim was that knowledge of nature had stagnated because scholars argued from authority and from premature generalisation. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he surveyed the state of the disciplines and proposed a comprehensive reform of learning. [3]
The Novum Organum (1620), intended as part of a larger unfinished work called the Instauratio Magna, set out his alternative: a graduated ascent from carefully gathered observations through tables of comparison to general axioms, together with an account of the "idols" — habits of mind, language and tradition — that distort judgement. He insisted that experiment, and the deliberate search for negative instances, must discipline the process. [2]
His Essays, first published in 1597 and expanded twice, are concise reflections on subjects such as truth, studies, friendship and empire, and are a landmark of English prose. New Atlantis, published after his death, describes an imagined society organised around a state-supported research institution, Salomon's House, which was explicitly cited by the founders of the Royal Society. [3]
Death and legacy
Bacon died at Highgate, north of London, on 9 April 1626. Contemporary accounts attribute his fatal illness to a chill caught while experimenting with the preservation of meat by packing it with snow. [1]
He is credited with articulating the empirical programme that underlay the scientific revolution, and his name is attached to "Baconian" method and to the ideal of science as a public, cumulative enterprise. [3]
