Francis Bacon

About this figure

Francis Bacon was born in London in 1561, the son of a senior official in Elizabeth I's government, and studied at Cambridge before training in law. He built a long career in royal service and Parliament, rising under James I to the offices of Attorney General and eventually Lord Chancellor, and was created Viscount St Alban in 1621. That same year he was convicted by Parliament of accepting bribes while serving as a judge, a charge he admitted in part, and was removed from office, fined, and briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London, though the king later pardoned the harsher penalties. He spent his remaining years in retirement devoted to writing.

Bacon is remembered chiefly as an early and forceful advocate for a new method of acquiring knowledge based on systematic observation and experiment rather than reliance on ancient authority. His Novum Organum, published in 1620 as part of a larger planned work called the Great Instauration, set out an inductive method for building up general conclusions from carefully accumulated particular observations, and argued that human understanding was routinely led astray by four kinds of "idols," or false notions, rooted in human nature, individual temperament, language, and inherited philosophical systems. The book helped establish empiricism as a guiding principle of what became modern experimental science.

His Essays, first published in 1597 and much expanded in later editions, are terse, aphoristic reflections on subjects ranging from truth and ambition to gardens and travel, and remain his most read work in English. Late in life he also wrote New Atlantis, an unfinished utopian narrative describing an imaginary island governed by a research institution called Salomon's House, dedicated to the study of nature for practical benefit; it was published in 1627, the year after his death. According to a story recorded by his early biographer John Aubrey, Bacon died of a chill caught while experimenting with using snow to preserve a chicken carcass.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.