Contributions
Son of Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, educated at Cambridge and in the law, Francis Bacon pursued at once a political career at the summit and a body of work that refounded thought. Barrister, member of parliament, then under James I attorney-general, Lord Keeper and at last Lord Chancellor of England (1618), created Baron Verulam and then Viscount St Alban, he was one of the most powerful men in the realm. But it is as a thinker that he marks history. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and then the Novum Organum (1620), he attacked the scholastic logic inherited from Aristotle and laid the foundations of the experimental method: knowledge must arise from patient observation of nature and from induction, not from the authority of the Ancients. His project for a total renewal of the sciences, the Great Instauration (Instauratio Magna), remained unfinished. With his Essays (1597, enlarged to 1625) he was also the creator of the essay in English — dense, sententious prose, steeped in worldly experience — and the author of a scientific utopia, New Atlantis.
Significance
Bacon is the prophet of modern science: before the discoveries, he thought out its method and its purpose. In proclaiming that knowledge should serve "the relief of man's estate" and be built by experience rather than deference to authority, he drew the programme that would inspire the Royal Society and the Enlightenment; Diderot and d'Alembert placed him at the head of the Encyclopédie. His concise, memorable essayist's prose shaped a whole genre. Yet the man offers a dizzying contrast between the height of his thought and the compromises of his career. A skilful courtier, he had taken part in 1601 in the prosecution of the Earl of Essex, his former patron, which was held against him as ingratitude. Above all, having reached the summit as Lord Chancellor, he was accused in 1621 of taking gifts from litigants, admitted the facts, was dismissed, briefly imprisoned and heavily fined. The theorist of intellectual honesty ended his life disgraced, retired to Gorhambury, devoting his last years to the scientific work that would earn him immortality.
Influence
The acknowledged father of empiricism and the experimental method, he inspired Hobbes (for a time his secretary), Locke, the Royal Society and the whole English scientific spirit; the French Encyclopédistes made him a founding hero. His formula equating knowledge with power sums up the programme of technical modernity. He built himself in reaction against Aristotle and medieval scholasticism, while borrowing from Renaissance humanism, from Machiavelli for a realist analysis of power, and from Montaigne for the essay form, which he transformed in English; law and political practice fed his gift for observation.
Anecdote
In early April 1626, according to John Aubrey's Brief Lives, Bacon was riding in a coach near Highgate in the snow when an experiment occurred to him: might snow preserve flesh as salt does? He got down, bought a hen from a poor woman, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow to observe the effect of cold on decay. He caught a sudden chill, took a fever, and died a few days later, on 9 April 1626. Whether the story is exact or embellished, it has the force of a symbol: the thinker of the experimental method is said to have died of an experiment, curiosity pressed to the point of self-sacrifice.