Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (London, 1561 - Highgate, 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman and lawyer, widely regarded as the father of philosophical and scientific empiricism. He lived through the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and his ideas helped lay the groundwork for the modern scientific method. His lasting importance lies in his insistence that knowledge should rest on observation and experience rather than on the authority of the ancients alone.

He was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and of Anne Cooke, a highly learned woman who guided his early education in Puritan principles. Because of his fragile health he was taught largely at home before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve, in 1573. There he came to believe that the methods and results of science as practised in his day were flawed, and that Aristotelian philosophy, though revered, seemed barren and mistaken in its aims. He left the university convinced that learning needed a new purpose and new methods to reach it.

After a period in France as a diplomatic attendant, the sudden death of his father in 1579 left him with a modest inheritance and forced him back to London. He turned to law and politics. He entered the House of Commons in 1584 and moved in the circle of the Earl of Essex, the queen's favourite, although his advancement was slow. In 1597 he published his Essays on moral and political matters, inspired by Montaigne, which helped introduce that form into English writing. The failed Irish expedition of Essex and mounting debts brought a hard period. Under James I, however, he gained recognition, a knighthood and increasingly senior posts, culminating in the office of Lord Chancellor in 1618.

His philosophical project aimed to reorganise the study of nature. He observed that deductive reasoning dominated the science of his time at the expense of induction, and he proposed beginning with careful, controlled observations checked against experience, then reaching cautious generalisations. In the Novum Organum of 1620, part of his Great Instauration, he set out the rules of this experimental method, and in his treatise on the dignity and advancement of learning he developed an empirical theory of knowledge. His sceptical method required scientists to accept no explanation that observation could not test. Other works, such as the New Atlantis, imagine a society in which learning serves the progress of humankind.

His influence spread through the modern conviction that human beings are at once servants and interpreters of nature, and that knowledge arises above all from experience. Although his specific proposals for method did not survive unchanged, his insistence on empirical proof shaped later scientific thought. He died in 1626, and a miscellany of natural history notes, Sylva Sylvarum, appeared posthumously the following year.