Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)

BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626)

BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626), English natural philosopher, essayist, and statesman. Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Elizabeth I's lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and his second wife, Anne Cooke. Nephew by marriage to William Cecil, chief councillor to the queen, young Bacon was well positioned to succeed at court. Educated at Cambridge from the age of twelve, Bacon in 1576 began the study of law at Gray's Inn. He interrupted his legal studies that same year to accompany Sir Amias Paulet on a diplomatic mission to France. His father's sudden death recalled him home after three years' residence abroad. Because Sir Nicholas had not made adequate financial provisions for his youngest son, Francis now had to fend for himself financially. He continued his legal studies, becoming a bencher, or senior member, at Gray's in 1586. In 1584 Bacon became a member of Parliament, but thereafter failed to secure the position of solicitor general despite the assistance of his patron, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. In 1597 he published the first version of his Essays, which he continued to revise and augment in later years. During Elizabeth's reign, Bacon only attained to the post of learned counsel extraordinary and the dubious honor of prosecuting his recalcitrant ex-patron, the earl of Essex, for his treasonous uprising in 1601.

James I's ascension to the English monarchy in 1603 marked a decided turn in Bacon's fortunes. Knighted and appointed to the position of king's counsel, Bacon thereafter became solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), member of the privy council (1616), and lord keeper (1617). He married Alice Barnham in 1606. In 1618, he was created Baron Verulam, and became lord chancellor. From 1604 until 1621, when he was impeached for bribery, Bacon advised the king on religious, financial, administrative, parliamentary, judicial, and foreign policy matters, as well as advocating for the political union of England and Scotland. As lord chancellor, he wrote important judicial decisions and sought to reform English law.

During this period, Bacon wrote extensively about ameliorating the human condition through his plans for the advancement of natural philosophy. His Advancement of Learning appeared in 1605, his natural philosophic reinterpretation of Greek mythology, De Sapientia Veterum, in 1609, the Novum Organum in 1620, and the Historia Ventorum in 1622. After his impeachment, Bacon devoted his final years to scientific writing and experiments. He died childless in 1626 from pneumonia contracted after a foray into winter snows with a chicken carcass to conduct an experiment in refrigeration.

Bacon achieved an incisive grasp of the most significant philosophical, social, and political issues of early modernism. In The Advancement of Learning, he took the measure of the intellectual ferment that comprised the contemporary intellectual scene. Aristotelian natural philosophy had lost preeminence and now competed with Neoplatonism, empiricism, alchemy, and ancient atomism, among other philosophical theories, in the effort to explicate the natural world. Bacon articulated the weaknesses of each intellectual movement and reincorporated its strengths into his own philosophical program. For Bacon, natural philosophy should begin with empirical observation and the painstaking compilation of natural histories. Inductive inquiry and the noting of particulars would be followed by controlled experiments (under natural and artificial conditions), which would yield first-level axioms or generalizations. These, in turn, would be corrected and refined by further inductive inquiry and experimentation until higher-level axioms, which were capable of producing useful material effects, were attained. To ensure the validity of inductive and experimental findings, Bacon required the natural philosopher to eschew the four "Idols of the Mind," those ways in which the human mind distorted knowledge through the peculiarities of nature, nurture, language, and ungrounded theorizing.

Bacon tried to ensure that his program was politically practical. He designed his new science to fit within the institutional framework of a Jacobean monarchy purportedly interested in mutually beneficial relations with commercial and artisanal sectors. Bacon imagined the scientific enterprise as a grand public works project that would enlist the energies and ideas of broad sectors of society but would remain under the auspices of royal government. Bacon's institution of natural philosophy would be to reconcile private intellectual ambitions with public interests to the benefit of civil society, as his scientific utopia, the New Atlantis (1627), envisioned.

Francis Bacon never gained financial or political support for his scientific program during his lifetime. His philosophic influence in England was negligible during the first third of the seventeenth century, although his importance was understood in the 1620s by Continental philosophers such as Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Beeckman. By mid-century, however, Bacon's works were highly valued everywhere. In the 1640s, Protestant educational reformists led by Samuel Hartlib saw Bacon as a forerunner. John Wilkins, Seth Ward, and John Webster followed Bacon in attempting to devise an accurate scientific language. But Bacon's greatest influence was on the early members of England's Royal Society (est. 1662), who viewed him as their intellectual progenitor. Bacon's star blazed bright into the eighteenth century, but was clouded in the nineteenth, when biographers charged him with perfidy in prosecuting his treasonous former patron, the earl of Essex. Nonetheless, the upsurge in published studies of Bacon's life and work at the turn of the twenty-first century makes evident his status as a seminal figure in the history of early modern science.

See also Alchemy ; Aristotelianism ; Descartes, René ; Elizabeth I (England) ; Empiricism ; Gassendi, Pierre ; Hartlib, Samuel ; Huygens Family ; James I and VI (England and Scotland) ; Mersenne, Marin ; Neoplatonism ; Wilkins, John .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. Edited by Michael Kiernan. Oxford, 2000.

——. The Essayes or Counsel, Civill and Morall. Edited by Michael Kiernan. Oxford, 1985.

——. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000. Translation of Novum Organum (1620).

Secondary Sources

Solomon, Julie Robin. Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry. Baltimore, 2003.

Weinberger, Jerry. Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age. Ithaca, N.Y., 1985.

Whitney, Charles. Francis Bacon and Modernity. New Haven, 1986.

Julie Robin Solomon