Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam, 1st Viscount St Albans

Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam, 1st Viscount St Albans (1561–1626). Lawyer, philosopher, and essayist. The son of a prominent lawyer, Bacon went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then to the Inns of Court. In constant need of money, in 1584 he became an MP. In the course of his public career, he prosecuted the earl of Essex, his former patron: he became much disliked. On the accession of James I Bacon achieved rapid promotion, prosecuting Ralegh, raised to the peerage, and ending up as lord chancellor. But in 1621 he was convicted of taking bribes, and though soon pardoned and released, he had to give up public life.

His witty and pithy Essays were first published in 1597, and are splendid examples of English prose; and in 1605 he brought out his Advancement of Learning. In this first exercise in writing about science, he was highly critical of the humanistic education he had received at Cambridge, and saw classical texts as flotsam carried down on the river of time. He believed that the Bible and the Book of Nature were, rightly understood, compatible; and that scientific knowledge properly applied would bring us back to the state of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. In 1620 he published his Novum organum, presenting his philosophy of science in the form of aphorisms, many of them memorable. In retirement, he collected and published information of a rather miscellaneous kind, in what was to be the Great Instauration: his title-pages indicate that he saw himself as an intellectual Columbus, revealing the new world of science to his contemporaries, and bringing back ships freighted with useful knowledge. He died a martyr to science, from a chill caught trying to preserve a chicken by stuffing it with snow. After his death, the fragmentary New Atlantis was published in 1627: with its vision of an island governed by an Academy of Sciences, founded ‘for the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. This is the most accessible and exciting of his writings on science.

Bacon is an important figure in the scientific revolution; Robert Boyle and other founders of the Royal Society saw themselves as his disciples. His was a cautious experimental method, the mind being cleared of preconceptions or ‘idols’ and proceeding by induction and generalization to the discovery of causes or ‘forms’. He was sceptical about mathematics, as Aristotle had been; and was similarly doubtful about the motion of the earth, and the atomic theory. He was scornful about his contemporary William Gilbert, who had done careful studies of magnetism. Galileo praised Copernicus for defying common sense; Bacon's science was organized common sense; and his vision of utility was gripping.

Britain's industrial revolution depended upon this kind of thinking, but the systematic application of science was a feature only of the 19th cent. Britons in the 1790s saw Baconian science as safe; the French philosophes had been led into dangerous speculation, and had brought atheism and revolution upon their country. Baconian induction lay behind the public health measures of the 19th cent., and John Stuart Mill sought to formalize his methods in his System of Logic of 1843. All efforts to show that inductive inference can bring certainty seem, however, to have failed; and in the 20th cent., while Baconian induction was often taught to schoolchildren as ‘the scientific method’, it fell out of favour amongst philosophers of science. Nevertheless, we can appreciate his vision of the scientist not as a spider, which spins webs; nor as an ant, which rushes around seizing upon everything; but as a bee, which collects nectar and turns it laboriously into honey.

David Knight

Bibliography

Wormald, B. H. G. , Francis Bacon (Cambridge, 1991).