BIOGRAPHY

Francis Bacon's life can be characterized as a mercurial search for power. As the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Queen Elizabeth I, Francis's early life was one of prestige and privilege. His uncle, Lord Burghley, was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. His mother, Lady Bacon, was a woman of uncommon learning (and a committed Puritan). As a young man, Francis displayed remarkable intellect. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was only twelve years old. There he came to the conviction that the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy was hopelessly sterile. As a result, much of Bacon's later work has a strong antischolastic cast. Upon graduating three years later, his intellectual gifts attracted the interest of the queen herself, and he was sent to France (at age sixteen) as part of the English ambassador's staff.

Bacon's shooting star came hurtling down two years later at the death of his father. Under the inheritance laws of the time, he found himself, as the youngest son, penniless at age eighteen. He took up law--a promising career for a man with connections and little money. In 1584 (at age twenty-three), he won a seat in Parliament. For the next twenty-three years he was prominent in public affairs--and, notoriously, in controversies. Once, he publicly opposed the queen and lost his high position. Subsequently, however, he supported the queen's decision to hang his best friend. His motivations and his reasonings in this case have frequently been debated.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension of James I, Bacon's star rose once more. He was made Solicitor-General in 1607 and six years later Attorney-General; in 1617, he was given his father's former position, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; the following year he was named Lord Chancellor and the Baron Verulam. During the reign of James I, Bacon also wrote his two most important philosophical works. The first, The Advancement of Learning (1605), argued that scholars should be freed from the past and encouraged to seek new discoveries in science. The second, his Novum Organum (1620), explained the various ways scholars had been held in intellectual bondage and proposed an inductive method to escape such bondage.

Bacon's career reached a peak in 1621 when he was named the Viscount St. Albans. But exactly one week after this last, and highest, investiture, Bacon was accused of bribery, to which he later pleaded guilty. He received a heavy fine (£40,000) and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Even though the king forgave the fine, and Bacon spent only four days in the Tower, he was disqualified from public office for life. As he later cryptically wrote: "I was the justes judge that was in England these fifty years; but it was the justes censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years." Although he followed his time's practice of accepting gifts from litigants, he insisted that his judgment had never been swayed by a bribe. Again, his conduct has been the subject of much discussion. The last years of Bacon's life were spent in research and writing.

BASIC THOUGHT

Bacon's drive for power extended beyond politics. He saw knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, as a means to power. He was not interested in abstract "Truth," but in "that knowledge whose dignity is maintained by works of utility and power." He sought to make humans masters of the natural world. The goal of science is "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." To this end he sought a "total reconstruction of the sciences, arts, and all human knowledge"--what he called "The Great Instauration."

Bacon's total reconstruction begins with the dismantling of all past errors. He argues that medieval philosophers, the Scholastics, were consumed with disputing questions but never approached knowledge of the real world. Renaissance humanists were not much better. They were obsessed with the eloquence of ancient Greeks and Romans but inclined to "hunt after words more than matter." According to Bacon, all previous thinkers, and most thinkers of his own day as well, had developed bad mental habits or what he called "Idols of the Mind." In the first part of his Novum Organum describes these idols and explains how they have impeded real knowledge.

Having removed past errors and the "Idols of the Mind," Bacon presented his positive program. Instead of the deductive methods of the Scholastics, he proposed a method of induction. If one would know the cause of a phenomenon, one begins by tirelessly collecting data and constructing three tables: (1) instances exhibiting the phenomenon, (2) instances not exhibiting the phenomenon, and (3) instances in which the phenomenon is present in different degrees. Using heat, for example, one would construct tables of "What's Hot," "What's Not," and "What's Sort of Hot and Sort of Not." From such tables one could discover the "form" of heat. Contemporary philosophers of science point out that Bacon's "scientific method" leaves out both working hypotheses and mathematics. Moreover, simply listing phenomena does not necessarily yield knowledge--after all, every phenomenon in the universe could be on at least one "What's Hot" list! But Bacon is still appreciated for encouraging the systematic empirical study of science.