Bacon, Francis

« Bacon, Francis Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

He had little respect for the work of his predecessors, which he saw as having been vitiated by a misplaced reverence for authority, and a consequent neglect of experience.

Bacon's dream was one of power over nature, based on experiment, embodied in appropriate institutions and used for the amelioration of human life; this could be achieved only if the rational speculations of philosophers were united with the craft-skills employed in the practical arts. The route to success lay in a new method, one based not on deductive logic or mathematics, but on eliminative induction.

This method would draw on data extracted from extensive and elaborately constructed natural histories. Unlike the old induction by simple enumeration of the logic textbooks, it would be able to make use of negative as well as positive instances, allowing conclusions to be established with certainty, and thus enabling a firm and lasting structure of knowledge to be built. Bacon never completed his project, and even the account of the new method in the Novum Organum (1620) remained unfinished.

His writings nevertheless had an immense influence on later seventeenth-century thinkers, above all in stimulating the belief that natural philosophy ought to be founded on a systematic programme of experiment.

Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, has been the modern concept of technology - the union of rational theory and empirical practice - and its application to human welfare. 1 Life Francis Bacon was born into the political elite of Elizabethan England.

His father, Nicholas, was Lord Keeper; his mother, Anne, sister-in-law to Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer.

Much of Bacon's career and even some aspects of his philosophy can best be understood as resulting from an upbringing which made him familiar with the exercise of power, and the wealth that came with it.

His perspective is always that of an insider, but of one who experienced considerable difficulty in establishing his own position as such. In 1573 Bacon was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge.

In later recollection at least, he found little to admire in the Aristotelian philosophy to which he was introduced, and still less in the writings of such authors as Peter Ramus, who were becoming fashionable alternatives (see Aristotle ; Aristotelianism, Renaissance ; Ramus, P. ).

As was usual with undergraduates of his social rank, he did not take a degree.

In 1576 he returned to London to train as a barrister at Gray's Inn, an institution with which he was to maintain a much more enduring connection.

His father died in 1579, leaving him with only a modest inheritance.

Throughout his life Bacon spent freely and lived beyond his income; quite apart from considerable personal ambition, much of his pursuit of office can be seen as an attempt to repair chronic indebtedness. Though he was elected to successive parliaments from 1581 onwards, Bacon's career did not flourish under Queen. »