Francis Bacon and His Works
Francis Bacon was born in London on January 22, 1561. He was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher. Sir Nicholas Bacon, his father, was Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon was his father’s second wife and the daughter of humanist Sir Antony Cooke. His mother was also Lord Burghley’s sister-in-law. Francis Bacon, the younger of Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne’s two sons, began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 1573, at the age of 12. In December 1575, he completed his studies at Trinity. Bacon enrolled in a law programme at the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn the next year, the same school as his brother Anthony. Bacon later described his tutors as “men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells if a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their dictator.” when he found the curriculum at Gray’s Inn stale and out of date. Bacon favoured the Renaissance humanism above Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, the country’s more conventional schools of thought at the time. Following his father’s death, he resumed his studies of law and became a lawyer in 1582. He was elected to the House of Commons two years later and began taking an active role in politics. Bacon served in Parliament for nearly four decades, from 1584 to 1617, and was immensely involved in politics, law, and the royal court during that time.
Early on, Bacon was interested in science. It was in the search for scientific truth that his heart was. To get the great results he wanted, money and good name were important. He worked hard to get both. He ran for a lot of jobs in the government during Elizabeth’s reign, but he did not get a lot of money and was often in trouble for money. He got help from powerful people, including the Earl of Essex. His abandonment of this nobleman, as well as his involvement in his prosecution for treason, is seen as one of the most blemishes on his record.
During the reign of James I, Bacon got a knighthood, married the daughter of an alderman, and became Solicitor-General in 1606, which was the first important step in his career. In 1618, he became Lord Chancellor. In the latter year, he became Baron Verulam, and in 1621, he was made Viscount St. Alban, which made him a peer of the realm. There were two accusations against him in the same year. He was accused of taking bribes and impeached by Parliament for being corrupt. It is said some sources say that Bacon was set up by his enemies in Parliament and the court faction. They say that Bacon was used as a scapegoat to protect the Duke of Buckingham from public anger. In the end, Bacon was tried and found guilty. His fine was 40000 pounds and he was sent to the Tower of London. The good news is that his sentence was cut and his fine was removed. After four days in prison, Bacon was released. The scandal put a lot of stress on 60-year-old Bacon’s health, and he lost his reputation and his place in Parliament.
Bacon was a person who thought about science. As soon as his political career came to an end, he turned to what he loved most in life: the Philosophy of science. Bacon wanted to change the way natural philosophy looked from the moment he was old enough to do so. Strokes were made by him to make a new outline for the science class. Bacon came up with a new way to do science. He gathered data, carefully analysed it, and did experiments to see nature’s truths in an organised way. He thought that science could be used for the good of humanity. His own scientific method would start a fire in nature that would “eventually reveal and bring into view all that is most hidden and secret in the universe.” When you start the scientific method, Bacon says you should start with the ‘Tables of Investigation.’ It should then move on to the “Table of Presence,” which is a list of things that happened at the time the event was being studied. Then, “The Table of Absence in Proximity” is used to find things that are bad. Next, the “Table of Comparison” lets the person who is watching compare and contrast the severity or level of the event. After completing these steps, the scientific observer is required to perform a short survey that will help identify the possible cause of the occurrence. However, unlike a typical hypothesis, Bacon did not stress how important it is to test one’s theory. Instead, he thought that observation and analysis were enough to get a better understanding that creative minds could use to get even better understanding.
People who tried an experiment that was like how modern refrigeration works died because they did not know how it would work. In March 1626, he did a lot of experiments with ice. When he was driving near Highgate one day, he decided to see if snow would slow down the process of death. He stopped his carriage, bought a hen, and stuffed it with snow with his own hands. On April 9, 1626, he died of bronchitis because he got a cold. In the year after Bacon died, his ideas began to have a big impact on the field of science in Europe in the 17th century. British scientists who were part of Robert Boyle’s group, known as the “Invisible College,” took Bacon’s idea of a cooperative research group and used it to start the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662. The Royal Society used Bacon’s applied science approach and followed the steps of his new scientific method, which he changed.
It is called the Magna Instauration, and it is a huge project that Bacon never finished. His most important works in science and philosophy are parts of it. People have learned a lot more about the world and how it works over time in the first part of this book, called De Augments. In it, he talks about how humans have learned about the world up until his time. The second part is the famous Novum Qrganum, or New Instrument, which is a description of how he thought that future progress would be made. It is based on what he saw and tried. The later parts of the book are mostly made up of small collections of natural things and ideas about how to apply his method to the facts of the physical method. Bacon’s own experiments are not very important to science, and he did not know much about some of the most important discoveries of his time. But the basic principles he set down are still important today. Another thing is that Bacon’s writing is not limited to the field of science. History of Henry VII: He wrote a lot of pamphlets about current politics. The New Atlantis: An unfinished account of an ideal state. Wisdom of the Ancients: A series of interpretations of myths in an allegorical sense.
That is not the only thing that people love about him. He wrote a lot of essays, and they were published three times in his lifetime. The first had ten essays in 1597; the second had 30 in 1612; and the third had 50 in 1625. Bacon’s essays have been rightly described as counsels, civil and moral. They often show a sharp sense of observation, an ability to think clearly, and a broad sense of the world. They represent Bacon’s ideal of conduct. As a whole, they are more like a collection of shrewd observations about how people actually act in the real world, not how they should act, but how they act. A person’s relationship to a supreme being, himself, and society are all looked at by Bacon in his essays. He also tries to help people figure out how to be better people. They reveal common sense, crisp suggestiveness, planned elaboration of contents, luminous wisdom, intellectual elevation, knowledge of human nature. They are known for their use of Biblical and classical quotations, clever aphorisms, extreme conciseness, and well-balanced structures. When he wrote them, he talked about them in his own words as they came home to men’s business and their bodies. Because of his essays, he has become famous all over the world, and they have made him famous all over the world as well. They write in a new way that is not common in English literature. They are also, in a sense, a record of Bacon’s outlook on the world throughout the years of his active life.
Bacon was able to form his ideas because of the times he lived and worked in. Being alive during the Renaissance period, exposed Bacon to the idea that one could question established norms of thought and learning. Bacon, as a result, participated in the intellectual awakening. He was popularly known as the “father of Empiricism”. Empiricism was a movement in philosophy, which believed that experience was the source of all human knowledge, and not innate ideas (creationism) or a result of the mind’s capacity to reason (rationalism, which was largely championed by Rene Descartes) (rationalism, which was largely championed by Rene Descartes). Bacon, who believed in intensive scientific enquiry, championed the cause of the Empiricists.
Today, Bacon is still widely regarded as a major figure in scientific methodology and natural philosophy during the English Renaissance. Having advocated an organised system of obtaining knowledge with a humanitarian goal in mind, he is largely credited with ushering in the new early modern era of human understanding.
Bacon was a busy man of affairs, and one wonders where he got all the time necessary for his scientific and literary work. Among his many-sided works is his historical biography of Henry VII, the basis of most subsequent conceptions of that king and his times. A more imaginative work is the New Atlantis, probably written, as it happens, early in the migrations to New England. It is an incomplete sketch, in the manner of Utopia and many other ideal commonwealths. Plato’s lost Atlantis, Bacon avers, is America, and the New Atlantis is a wonderful island in the Pacific where the people were all wise and good. The “Lanthorne of this Kingdome,” and the noblest foundation on earth, was a college or society, called Solomon’s House, “dedicated to the Study of the Works and Creatures of God.” It is thought to have prompted the “college of philosophy” in 1645, which grew after 1660 into the Royal Society, and it is known to have inspired scientific societies on the Continent.
But of all his works, the one which has come nearest to winning men’s hearts is the little book of fifty-eight brief essays on a wide variety of topics–marriage, love, high position or great place, friendship, gardens, reading, honor, and “The Vicissitude of Things.” They are, as it were, the easy overflow of that abundant and prolific mind. We have the great man of the world to ourselves in a comfortable corner by the fire, and he is talking casually about his observations of men. He speaks no longer in the swelling and ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, but in the new prose of short sentences, which looks impromptu and has been called “baroque.” Each sentence falls softly but distinctly upon the ear in Bacon’s natural grave subdued tone, charged with wit and wisdom, and each sentence seems like a precious new find which one must keep safely somewhere within reach at a moment’s practical need. The essays combine to form a book that can be read in sections, laying it down and picking it up again, pondering its weight, revelling in the man’s rich collection of wisdom and anecdotes from others, the brilliance of his own remark, the grave and measured music of the cadences, which grow sweeter the more familiar they become.Speaking of conversation,
The honorablest part of talk is to give the occasion, and again to moderate and pass to something else, for then a man leads the dance.
A man’s own speech should be rare and carefully chosen.I knew one was wont to say in scorn: “He must be a wise man, he speaks so much of himself.”
Or, in the case of riches, I cannot regard riches as superior to the baggage of virtue.
The Roman word is better, impedimenta. Riches are to virtue what baggage is to an army.It cannot be spared or abandoned, but it impedes the march; in fact, its care sometimes costs or disrupts victory. There is no real use for great riches except in distribution; the rest is conceit [imagination].
