The English statesman and philosopher whose Novum Organum proposed a new inductive method to replace Aristotelian syllogism, whose program of organized empirical research helped found the modern scientific institution, and whose vision of the New Atlantis sketched the research society that became the Royal Society.
francis-bacon
English Lord Chancellor and philosopher (1561–1626) whose Novum Organum proposed inductive natural philosophy against the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, whose Great Instauration projected an encyclopedic scientific reform, and whose programmatic vision shaped the founding of the Royal Society and the institutional form of modern science.
Life
Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House on the Strand in London, the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I, and his second wife Anne Cooke Bacon, the daughter of Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI. The family was politically central to the Elizabethan regime; Anne Bacon was the sister-in-law of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen's chief minister.
Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1573 at twelve, and according to his own later account left the university "with the strangest dislike" of the Aristotelian curriculum still dominant there — the contention being not with Aristotle himself but with the use of Aristotle in the Scholastic mode that disputed received conclusions without advancing knowledge of nature. He entered Gray's Inn in 1576 to study law, and after a French diplomatic posting cut short by his father's death, returned to England to make his way without the patrimony his father had failed to settle on him.
The political career followed. Bacon entered Parliament in 1581 and held a seat continuously for the next forty years. His advancement under Elizabeth was repeatedly blocked, by his own assessment, by his uncle Burghley's preference for his cousin Robert Cecil. The favor of the Earl of Essex during the 1590s ended badly when Essex's 1601 rebellion forced Bacon, as queen's counsel, to participate in his former patron's prosecution. Under James I, Bacon's rise accelerated: Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper in 1617, Lord Chancellor in 1618, Baron Verulam in 1618, Viscount St Alban in 1621.
The fall in 1621 was abrupt. Charged in Parliament with corruption — having accepted gifts from litigants in cases before his court — Bacon confessed (the standard practice was widespread and Bacon defended himself by claiming the gifts had not influenced his judgments, but the legal facts as charged were undisputed), was sentenced to a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower at the king's pleasure, exclusion from Parliament and office, and disgrace. The fine was largely remitted, the imprisonment lasted only three days, but the political career was finished.
The five remaining years were given over almost entirely to the philosophical and scientific work that had been the project of his life and that the demands of public office had constantly interrupted. He died on 9 April 1626 at the country house of the Earl of Arundel, of pneumonia contracted, by John Aubrey's report, while performing an experiment on the preservation of meat by freezing — stopping his coach in snow near Highgate to stuff a chicken with snow and observe the effects.
The Great Instauration
Bacon's lifelong project, announced in the dedicatory letter to James I prefixed to the 1620 Novum Organum, was the Instauratio Magna — the Great Restoration of human knowledge. The plan, in six parts, projected: (1) a division of the sciences as currently constituted; (2) the new method (novum organum); (3) the natural history that would supply the matter for the new method to work on; (4) examples of the new method applied; (5) anticipations of the new philosophy; (6) the new philosophy itself — a complete reconstruction of natural knowledge on the new foundation.
The project was never completed; only the first two parts were brought to publication in anything like systematic form. The first part — the survey of the sciences — appeared in English as The Advancement of Learning (1605) and was expanded in Latin as De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). The second part — the new method — appeared as Novum Organum (1620). Of the natural history that should have constituted the third part, several preparatory texts survive: Historia Ventorum (1622), Historia Vitae et Mortis (1623), Sylva Sylvarum (posthumous, 1627).
The Novum Organum
The Novum Organum — the title's reference to Aristotle's Organon (the logical works) signaling that Bacon's new instrument is intended to supersede the Aristotelian — is divided into two books. Book I, in 130 aphorisms, diagnoses what is wrong with the existing philosophical and scientific traditions. Book II, in 52 aphorisms, presents the positive method.
The diagnosis is sharp and famous. The Idols of the human mind — systematic distortions that prevent accurate knowledge — are classified in four types:
Idols of the Tribe (Idola Tribus): distortions arising from the nature of the human race as such. The mind imposes greater order and regularity on nature than nature contains; it is drawn to confirmations of its existing beliefs and overlooks contrary evidence; it is moved more by the vivid than by the statistical; it strives for ultimate causes when it should attend to immediate ones.
Idols of the Cave (Idola Specus): distortions arising from each individual's particular constitution — education, temperament, the books and teachers that have shaped his thinking.
Idols of the Market (Idola Fori): distortions arising from language, particularly from words that lack referents in nature (Fortune, Prime Mover, Element of Fire) or that conflate things really distinct.
Idols of the Theater (Idola Theatri): the false philosophies that humanity has constructed and accepted — systems Bacon classifies into the sophistical (the Scholastic Aristotelians), the empirical (the alchemists who generalize from a narrow base of experiment), and the superstitious (those who mix theology with natural philosophy).
The positive method, presented in Book II, is the famous Baconian induction. The method proceeds from extensive natural histories — compilations of observations on a particular phenomenon (heat is Bacon's running example) — organized in three tables. The Table of Presence lists instances in which the phenomenon appears (sun, fire, friction-heated bodies). The Table of Absence lists instances closely related but in which the phenomenon is absent (moonlight is associated with the sun's light but lacks heat). The Table of Degrees lists instances in which the phenomenon varies in intensity. From systematic comparison of these tables, the inquirer ascends by stages — prerogative instances of various kinds guiding the ascent — to the form of the phenomenon: that which is invariably present when the phenomenon is present, absent when it is absent, varying as it varies. In Bacon's worked example, the form of heat is identified as expansive motion restrained and acting on the small parts of bodies — a remarkably modern conclusion for 1620.
The method's significance lies less in the specific procedures (most of which subsequent science modified or abandoned) than in its programmatic claims: that natural knowledge must be built from systematic observation rather than from authoritative texts; that the slow accumulation of carefully ordered observation will, over generations, yield understanding that no individual genius could produce alone; that the work of natural philosophy must be collaborative, institutional, and patient.
The New Atlantis
The unfinished utopian fiction Nova Atlantis (composed probably c. 1624, published posthumously 1627) describes the encounter of European sailors with the island of Bensalem, whose central institution is Salomon's House — a research college organized for the systematic investigation of nature. Bensalem's researchers travel abroad to gather knowledge; they maintain extensive libraries, laboratories, gardens, and animal collections; they cultivate diverse specialties (depth of mines, height of towers, prolongation of life, sound, light, mechanical motion) under a coordinated direction.
The text was the inspiration most often cited by the founders of the Royal Society of London, chartered by Charles II in 1662. Robert Boyle, John Wallis, Joseph Glanvill, and Thomas Sprat (the Royal Society's first historian, in his History of the Royal Society of London of 1667) acknowledged Bacon as the patron whose vision the Society was attempting to actualize. The connection between Baconian programmatic claims and the institutional form of modern organized science is therefore not retrospective imposition but acknowledged historical inheritance.
The Essays
Bacon's Essayes or Counsels, Civil and Moral — published in three successively expanded editions (1597, 1612, 1625) totaling fifty-eight essays in the final edition — belong to a different genre but to the same project. The form, modeled on Montaigne's but tighter and more aphoristic, treats topics of personal and political conduct: Of Truth, Of Death, Of Revenge, Of Adversity, Of Marriage and Single Life, Of Studies, Of Travel, Of Counsel. The essays remain among the most read English prose of the period; their phrases (reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man) have entered the English idiom.
Reception
Bacon's influence on subsequent thought was extensive but contested. The Royal Society took him as a founding patron; the French Encyclopédistes — d'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse of 1751 — cited Bacon as the modern father of the scientific reform; Voltaire treated him in the Lettres Philosophiques as the originator of experimental natural philosophy. Locke, Hume, and the broader empiricist tradition operated within a framework Bacon had helped construct.
Kant, by contrast, was sharply critical: the Critique of Pure Reason dedication's epigraph praises Bacon, but Kant's own theory of natural science rests on the constructive role of the mind in knowledge that Bacon had attempted to minimize. The nineteenth-century Whewell, Mill (whose System of Logic offered an updated theory of inductive method), and Stanley Jevons all engaged Bacon directly. In the twentieth century, Bacon's reputation as a philosopher of science declined under criticism from Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) and others, who argued that scientific inquiry does not work by Baconian induction; recent revisionist work by Peter Urbach, Stephen Gaukroger (Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Michael Silverthorne has complicated that judgment.
The standard scholarly edition is the Oxford Works now being produced under the editorship of Graham Rees, Lisa Jardine, Brian Vickers, and others (15 vols. projected, in progress since 1996), replacing the nineteenth-century Spedding, Ellis, and Heath edition (14 vols., 1857–74).
Significance
Bacon's significance is institutional and programmatic. He did not produce a successful new method of scientific discovery in the technical sense his enthusiasts sometimes claimed; he did not himself contribute decisively to any branch of natural science. What he did produce was a vision: that human knowledge of nature could be reorganized as a long-term collaborative enterprise, systematically working from observation to generalization, supported by institutional structures, dedicated to the practical improvement of human life. That vision shaped the founding of the Royal Society, the Encyclopédie, the modern research university, and the institutional form of modern science. The vocabulary of "the advancement of learning," of "natural philosophy" as a public project, of science as service to human welfare — these are Bacon's, and they have shaped four centuries of practice.