BACON, FRANCIS

BACON, Francis: translation

Francis Bacon was a lawyer, man of letters, and philosopher in the Elizabe­than and Jacobean eras. Although he eventually became lord chancellor of En­gland, he is best known for his Essays and writings concerning the "new philosophy," or modern science.

Born in London, Bacon was the younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper, and Anne Cook Bacon.* In 1573 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and completed his education at Gray's Inn, from which he was admitted barrister in 1582. Bacon began a parliamentary career in 1584 after his uncle, Elizabeth's lord treasurer Sir William Cecil, failed to help him enter royal service. In 1593 he damaged his prospects by opposing a war subsidy, and despite the sponsor­ship of the earl of Essex, whose service he had entered in 1591, Bacon was passed over for attorney general in 1594 and for solicitor general the next year. He was, however, made one of the queen's learned counsel, and following Es­sex's disastrous rebellion in 1601, he helped to secure his former patron's con­viction for treason. This prompted such public ill will that Bacon was obliged to publish an Apology for his efforts in 1604.

Following James I's* accession in 1603, Bacon was knighted; he also served on a commission to discuss union with Scotland and dedicated his Advancement of Learning to the king in 1605. Preferment finally came with the post of so­licitor general in 1607 and of attorney general in 1613. Bacon was then named lord keeper in 1617; sponsored by George Villiers, later duke of Buckingham, he became lord chancellor and Baron Verulam in 1618. As chancellor he pros­ecuted Sir Walter Raleigh* in 1618 and the earl of Suffolk in 1619. In 1620 he published his most famous work, Novum organum, and in 1621 he was created Viscount St. Albans. Shortly after this last promotion Bacon confessed to charges of bribery and corruption and was fined, imprisoned, and forbidden any state office.Although the king remitted the fine and a general pardon was even­tually published, Bacon's career as a public servant was over. In 1626, after an experiment to see if snow would stop a fowl from decaying, Bacon caught a chill and died.

Much of Bacon's philosophical writing works to widen the breach between medieval Scholasticism, with its emphasis on abstract concepts and application of Aristotelian formulas, and the emerging "new philosophy," which concen­trated on inductive reasoning through experimentation with physical phenomena. To Bacon, the goal of philosophy was to develop practical knowledge, which would then extend the limits of humanity's power in nature and lead to the development of new arts and sciences. While he did not exclude the importance of metaphysics, he felt that the way to truth began with observing nature directly.

In Novum organum Bacon provides his most important contribution to modern scientific thought by examining a set of "idols," or false notions that possess the mind. The greatest obstacle Bacon identifies is the medieval conviction that truth could be discerned by applying logical reasoning to a small number of observations. Bacon insists that the natural philosopher accumulate as many examples as possible, eliminate all inessential factors, and draw conclusions from whatever conditions remain. While his method fails to allow for the con­cept of the controlling hypothesis or the impossibility of exhausting all poten­tialities, its insistence on examining a wide range of situations makes it a cornerstone of modern scientific thought.

Bacon's most important literary works are the Essays (1597), The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), and The New Atlantis (1627). The Essays, the first exercise in this genre in English, speak to many aspects of human life, including politics, marriage, education, and travel, and are more concerned with examining questions about their subjects than in producing conclusions about them. The History of the Reign of King Henry VII glorifies Henry as a wise, cautious Solomon who brought England peace and unity out of civil war and presents him as the type of king James should strive to become. The New At­lantis is a futuristic utopia where work is conducted by a scientific society and provides a model for what would become the Royal Society.

While Bacon achieved high office under James I and participated as a lawyer in some of his time's most influential trials, his most important contributions came in the realm of natural philosophy. The empirical method he advocated had much to do with the development of modern science in the seventeenth century, and his approach to weighing and examining evidence can be seen in his political and literary works as well as his scientific ones. His intellectual concepts show him to be in advance of most thinkers of his time.

F. Anderson, Francis Bacon: His Career and His Thought, 1962.

J. Epstein, Francis Bacon: A Political Biography, 1977.

P. Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 1998.

Bacon, Francis: translation

(1561-1626)

   English philosopher, essayist, and royal official, knighted by King James VI and eventually raised to the peerage. The son of a high-ranking official of Queen Elizabeth I, under James VI he rose to be lord chancellor, the highest position in the state. Although Bacon was avid for high office and its social and financial rewards, he was also deeply committed to the improvement of education, especially the study of the natural sciences. During his studies at Cambridge University (1573-1575), he became convinced that the traditional scientific method of Aristotle was worthless and that a new science founded on a new scientific method must replace it.His book The Advancement of Learning (1603) set forth this program of drastic educational and scientific reform.

   Despite his many political duties, Bacon continued to publish on this theme, attempting without great success to clarify his concept of a new intellectual method. He projected a total reconstruction of science, a work called Instauratio magna / The Great New Beginning (1620); but he completed only a few fragments, notably the introductory section, also called Instauratio magna, and a sketch of his new logic, the Novum Organum. He also realized that one of the goals of a new natural science should be the application of scientific knowledge to improving the quality of human life, an idea developed in his scientific utopia, The New Atlantis. Bacon's interests were not limited to natural science. His best known literary work is his Essays, published between 1597 and 1625, which dealt with social and ethical questions and introduced into English literature the informal essay pioneered in French literature by Michel de Montaigne. Bacon also wrote an influential biography of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Although he was educated in the humanistic learning of the Renaissance, in many respects Bacon represents a passage from Renaissance to post-Renaissance thought. He no longer shared the Renaissance conviction that the improvement of learning depended on rediscovery of lost classical learning but instead declared the contribution of ancient philosophical and scientific knowledge to be exhausted. He linked the further advancement of humanity to his program of a new learning based on natural science.

Bacon, Francis: translation

(1561–1626)

English statesman. As a philosopher of science the first notable example of the empiricist tendency of English thought, but perhaps more importantly the prophet and protector of the dawning scientific revolution. He was a precocious child born into a leading family, and rapidly rose in the law, although not without questionable incident, as when at the behest of Elizabeth I he prosecuted the Earl of Essex, one of his earliest and principal patrons. His legal philosophy was one of absolute duty to the sovereign, which cannot have hindered his rise to the position of Lord Chancellor. In 1620, however, he was disgraced for bribery and spent his remaining years in seclusion.His collected works run to fourteen volumes, and include Essays (1597), The Advancement of Learning (1605), the Novum Organon (1620), and the New Atlantis (published posthumously, 1660).

Bacon was the first writer to try to delineate the proper methods of successful science, to enable science to become a craft or industry producing benefits for humanity rather than the haphazard pursuit of occasional eccentrics. Although the ‘Baconian method’ is sometimes identified with simple induction by enumeration (the generalizing from instances of phenomena to experimental laws), in fact Bacon provided a sophisticated taxonomy of scientific methods, in most respects anticipating such later results as Mill's methods, and certainly including an understanding that the search for laws was an imaginative and intellectual rather than a mechanical empirical exercise. His work included a running battle against the false approaches of metaphysics, and against superstition (his own attitude to religion certainly included some sceptical elements, and he regarded the whole matter as unimportant compared to science: ‘the research into final causes, like a virgin dedicated to God, is barren and produces nothing’). Diderot said of Bacon that his work amounted to a map of what men had to learn; he has often been 35 described in terms of a prophet standing on the edge of the promised land of scientific knowledge. See also Baconian method, idols of the mind.