Early modern Europe · 1561–1626
Francis Bacon
English statesman who called for science built on experiment
Human knowledge and human power meet in one: we master nature only by careful observation and gradual induction, not by syllogisms. He catalogued the “idols” — biases of human nature, language and authority — that distort understanding.
Life and thought
Francis Bacon was the son of Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He studied at Cambridge, trained as a lawyer and rose under James I to Attorney General and Lord Chancellor. In 1621 he admitted to accepting gifts from people with cases before him, was fined and removed from office, and spent his last years writing. He died in 1626; by a story told by John Aubrey, of a chill caught while stuffing a chicken with snow to see whether cold would preserve it.
Bacon’s grand plan was to renew all knowledge. The New Organon (1620) attacks the old logic: syllogisms only rearrange what we already believe. Science should instead collect careful observations and experiments and climb step by step from particulars to general laws, looking especially for “negative instances” that rule hypotheses out. He also named the “idols” that distort the mind: those of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theatre. Knowledge and human power, he held, come to the same thing, because understanding nature lets us improve human life. The Royal Society later took him as its patron.