Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, lawyer and statesman who rose to become Lord Chancellor under James I before falling in a bribery scandal. As a thinker he set out to reform the whole of human knowledge, arguing that natural science should rest on careful observation, experiment and gradual generalisation rather than on ancient authority. Later generations treated him as a founding prophet of the experimental method, and his short Essays remain classics of English prose.

Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House on the Strand in London. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I, and his mother, Anne Cooke, was a learned Puritan who translated religious works from Latin. Through her he was the nephew by marriage of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen's chief minister.

At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came to dislike the university's teaching, which was built around Aristotle and the disputations of the schoolmen. He thought it produced argument without discovery. From 1576 he trained in law at Gray's Inn, and spent the next three years in France attached to the household of the English ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet. His father's sudden death in 1579 brought him home with only a small inheritance, since as a younger son he had little provision, and money troubles followed him for the rest of his life.

Bacon became a barrister and entered the House of Commons in 1581, sitting in most Elizabethan parliaments. Despite his family connections, the queen gave him no major office, partly because he opposed a royal tax demand in the parliament of 1593. He attached himself to the Earl of Essex, the queen's favourite, who tried and failed to win him the post of Attorney General. When Essex led a failed rising in 1601, Bacon helped prosecute him and then wrote the official account of the treason, which many contemporaries saw as a betrayal of his patron.

His career took off under James I, who succeeded in 1603 and knighted him that year. In 1606 he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a London alderman. He became Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper in 1617 and Lord Chancellor in 1618, the highest legal office in the Kingdom of England. He was created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St Alban in 1621. He was a firm supporter of the royal prerogative and a rival of the jurist Sir Edward Coke.

In 1621 a parliamentary committee charged Bacon with accepting gifts from people whose cases were before him. He admitted the charges while insisting that the gifts had never changed his judgments. The House of Lords fined him £40,000, barred him from office and sent him to the Tower of London, though he was released after a few days and the fine was not enforced. Historians still debate how far he was a corrupt judge and how far a scapegoat in a system where such gifts were common and where his enemies, including Coke, wanted him gone. He spent his last five years writing.

Bacon's great project, which he called the Instauratio Magna, or Great Instauration, was a plan to rebuild learning from its foundations so that it would give people real power over nature. He thought the knowledge of his time had stagnated: the ancients were admired too much, and logic was used to win debates instead of to find new truths. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he surveyed the state of every field and pointed out where knowledge was missing.

His most important philosophical work, the Novum Organum (1620), offered a new method to replace Aristotle's logic, whose collected works were known as the Organon. Bacon proposed that investigators should gather large, organised collections of observations, arrange them in tables of cases where a quality is present, absent or present in different degrees, and then reason cautiously from these to modest generalisations, testing each step before climbing to broader laws. He stressed the value of the negative instance, the single case that can overturn a hasty conclusion.

Before this method could work, he argued, the mind had to be cleared of the "idols" that distort understanding. The idols of the tribe are errors common to human nature, such as seeing more order in the world than exists. The idols of the cave are personal biases of upbringing and temperament. The idols of the marketplace arise from the loose use of words, and the idols of the theatre come from philosophical systems accepted on authority. This analysis of bias is often regarded as his most lasting insight.

Bacon was not a working scientist of the first rank. He underrated mathematics, doubted the new astronomy of Nicolaus Copernicus and paid little attention to the work of contemporaries such as Galileo Galilei and William Harvey. His importance lay in the vision of science as a cooperative, publicly organised enterprise aimed at improving human life.

Bacon's Essays first appeared in 1597 with ten short pieces, and grew to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625. Influenced by Michel de Montaigne but far more compressed, they give practical, often worldly advice on subjects such as ambition, friendship, revenge and studies. His unfinished utopia, New Atlantis, published in 1626 after his death, describes an island ruled by a research institution, Salomon's House, where scholars conduct experiments for the public good. He also wrote a History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) and treatises on law.

According to a story told later by John Aubrey, Bacon caught a chill in the spring of 1626 while experimenting with preserving a chicken by stuffing it with snow. He was taken to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, near London, and died there on 9 April 1626, probably of pneumonia. The details of the snow story cannot be confirmed. He left large debts and no children.

The founders of the Royal Society, established in 1660, regarded Bacon as their inspiration, and his call for organised experimental research became part of the self-image of the Scientific Revolution. The young Thomas Hobbes worked for him for a time as a secretary and translator. In the eighteenth century Diderot and d'Alembert honoured him as a forerunner of their Encyclopédie and of the Age of Enlightenment, and his emphasis on experience fed into the empiricism of John Locke. He is usually placed at the start of early modern philosophy in the English-speaking world. Modern philosophers of science have criticised his picture of induction as too mechanical, but his warnings about the idols of the mind still feature in discussions of bias. A fringe theory that he wrote Shakespeare's plays has no support among historians. Bacon's life is part of the wider history of the United Kingdom.