Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. His works are credited with developing the scientific method and remained influential through the scientific revolution. Bacon's most valuable work surrounded philosophical and Aristotelian concepts that supported the scientific method. He received his education from several universities including Trinity College and the University of Cambridge. He carried the true spirit of Renaissance in his philosophical thoughts. Bacon had a close affinity with Plato like that of the humanists. He shared with them the conviction that the human mind is fitted for knowledge of nature and must derive it from observation, not from abstract reasoning. Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature.
Most importantly, he argued science could be achieved by use of a skeptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. Although his most specific proposals about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long-lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a skeptical methodology makes Bacon the father of the scientific method. This method was a new rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and methodology. Francis Bacon's philosophy is displayed in the vast and varied writings he left, which might be divided into three great branches: Scientific works – in which his ideas for a universal reform of knowledge into scientific methodology and the improvement of mankind's state using the Scientific method are presented.
Religious and literary works – in which he presents his moral philosophy and theological meditations. Juridical works –in which his reforms in English Law are proposed. To the year 1609 belongs the treatise De Sapientia Veterum, or Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, which he describes in the preface as a recreation from severer studies. It is a collection of thirty-one classical myths, each with a second title in English, often one word only, giving Bacon's interpretation of the myth; for example, Perseus; or War, Sphinx; or Science.
The stories are remarkably well told, and should be better known than they are. His work in the field of advancement of learning was arguably his greatest contribution. One of his works titled "The Proficience and Advancement of Learning" published in 1605dealt with Bacon's famous distempers of learning, wherein he describes three types of unproductive and baseless enquiry: fantastical, contentious and delicate learning (alternatively known as vain imaginations, vain altercations and vain affectations).In 1612, the second edition of the Essays, now enlarged from ten to thirty-eight, was published. In 1623, he published the Latin version of the Advancement of Learning, now issued in nine books with the title De Augmentis Scientiarum. The poet George Herbert is said to have helped him with the translation.
His Apophthegmes New and Old, 1624, can only be said to have been the occupation of a morning in the sense that he may have arranged the order of the stories in one morning. The last three years of Bacon's life were spent in writing his Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural History, and in editing the third and final edition of the Essays. This edition, published in March, 1625, contains the fifty-eight essays of all subsequent editions, and was entitled Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. The book was dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham.Bacon's seminal work NovumOrganum was influential in the 1630s and 1650s among scholars. This book involves the basis of the
Scientific Method as a means of observation and induction. During these years Bacon wrote much. Francis Bacon died, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, of the disease now known as bronchitis With Francis Bacon begins philosophical reflection upon life, in the style of
Plutarch's Morals and the Essais of Montaigne. Bacon's mind was catholic in its range like Plutarch's, but the subjects of moral thought that interest him are comparatively few, because generalized. His treatment of a moral subject is more scientific also than that of the classical writer, more scientific than himself even when writing on a strictly scientific theme. In the Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural History, for example, Bacon brings together a great many facts about nature, which he calls "experiments," some of them observations of real value, while others must have been trivial even to himself. In the Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall the method is ever to reduce reflection to its lowest terms, to try to discover the fundamental principles of conduct that influence the actions of men. Again, Bacon has nothing of the attractive personality of Montaigne, a man of the world who made a point of finding out what the world was like from all sorts and conditions of men, from the king on his throne to the groom of his riding-horse. Montaigne writes on and on about a subject in breezy discursiveness, like a man on horseback traversing an interesting country.
Bacon's Essays reflect his experience of life, but they tell us little or nothing of his personal likes and dislikes. They are austere, brief to the point of crudeness, they smell of the lamp. Bacon's own judgment of his Essays, as we know from the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the third edition, was that they might last as long as books last. In the essay, Of Innovations, he says, "Time is the greatest innovator." The most obvious division of the Essays is that which time has made. Certain essays do "come home to men's business and bosoms" in a universal way. They appeal to all men at all times. They discourse of great subjects in the grand manner.
The essays, Of Truth, Of Death, Of Great Place, might have been written by Aristotle, and what is said in these and other essays of like character is as true to-day as when Bacon lived. Another type of essay is distinctly limited, partly by Bacon's own character and partly by the social characteristics of his time The essays, Of Love, and Of Marriage and Single Life, were the product of a social condition in which passion did not necessarily enter into the marriage relation, and marriage itself was an affair to be arranged between parties suitably situated. It was a man's world, and it is impossible to judge it fairly now, because in the modern world the advancement of woman has revolutionized the older ideas of domestic relations. Essayists of Bacon's mental characteristics will still write on love and marriage, but their treatment of these themes must inevitably be broader and deeper, because it has been spiritualized. It is juster, because it recognizes the mutual obligations of men and women. When Emerson talks about Friendship and Love we are in another world than Bacon's. Emerson opens his essay on Domestic Life with impassioned tenderness for the child in the house. There are no children in Bacon's world. Some eight or ten of Bacon's essays have become obsolete in thought. They are those which grew out of his experience of life at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I, of the petty rivalries and intrigues which led him to believe and to say, "All rising to great place is by a winding stair." Bacon's "winding Chancellorship runs through the essays, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Of Delays, Of Cunning, Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, Of Dispatch, Of Suspicion, Of Negotiating, and Of Followers and Friends. Fancy Emerson writing an essay on cunning!
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