Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561 ～ 1626) is generally

regarded as a representative of the Renaissance in England. He was a chief figure in English prose in the early 17th century and his essays began the long tradition of the English essays in the history

of English literature.

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Francis Bacon

Bacon was born in London in 1561. Being the younger son of Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, he had a fortunate heritage and background. He was educated at Cambridge, admitted to Gray's Inn, elected to Parliament, and gradually established his

reputation.

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Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon

At the height of his career, he became Lord Keeper and then Lord Chancellor of England. But he was charged with taking bribes as a judge. After self-abasingly admitting his guilt he was sentenced to a huge fine, imprisonment in the Tower, disqualification from Parliament and exclusion from the court. He spent only a couple of days in the Tower, but his public life was over. He occupied his last years with energetic study and writing.

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Francis Bacon

Bacon's writings are of many different kinds, the largest and the most influential body of his work being philosophical

in a broad sense.

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Francis Bacon

His opinions are well expressed in his The Great Instauration, which he meant to include five parts, among which the most well known is The Advancement of Learning. This part gives a systematic classification of all branches of knowledge.

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Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon

In his theory of scientific classification Bacon distinguishes knowledge of the natural world very sharply from knowledge of the supernatural and does not much conceal the fact of his exclusive interest in the former.

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Francis Bacon

He also criticizes three prevailing, but in his view unsatisfactory, ways of seeking to gain knowledge: the abstract disputation of the scholastics, the elegant insubstantiality of the humanists, and the preoccupation with marvels and monstrosities of the Renaissance occultists.

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Francis Bacon

In their place he proposes that nature's secrets should be unlocked, so that mankind can acquire power over its circumstances, by means of a mechanical routine of eliminative induction, making a gradual ascent from the level of the observably particular to the ever more

general level of theory.

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Francis Bacon• Many of Bacon's works

lie outside the grand project of the Great Instauration. His New Atlantis, published in 1627, a year after his death, describes a Utopian community, notable for the way it depends for its progress on collective scientific research.

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Francis Bacon

• The Essays, in various editions from 1597 to 1625, started as assemblages of aphorisms, held together only by a common subject, a chaos of bright ideas of a broadly Machiavellian tone.

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Francis Bacon

Bacon's prose is rich, ornate, and supple. To a modern cast of mind there is a noticeable, but by no means unpleasing, contrast between the plainness of much of his matter and the ornamentation of his manner.

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