Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, founded the philosophical method of modern science and overturned the scholastic order of knowledge that had ruled European thought for centuries. His claim — interrogate nature by experiment and the answers will become new technology and power — sits at the origin point of the Royal Society, the Industrial Revolution, and modern science. He was also Lord Chancellor of England, fell on bribery charges, and his life embodies the entanglement of intellect, power, idea, and consequence.

Born in 1561 at York House in London, the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper to Elizabeth I. His mother Anne Cooke was the sister of Mildred Cooke, wife of Lord Burghley — placing him at the inner ring of Elizabethan power. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge at twelve, found Aristotelian philosophy "strong in disputation but useless to human life," and left without a degree. From 1576 he read law at Gray's Inn and in 1577 accompanied the English ambassador to France, observing post-Wars-of-Religion society at first hand.

His father's sudden death in 1579 left him with little inheritance, and he had to enter politics from below. He sat in the Commons from 1581. In 1593 he opposed Elizabeth's request for special taxation, drew her anger, and lost favour. Under the patronage of the Earl of Essex he survived as a half-employed legal counsel. When Essex rose in revolt in 1601, Bacon was compelled to act as prosecutor — a choice still debated for its motives and ethics today.

James I's accession in 1603 reopened his career. He was knighted, served as Solicitor General, then Attorney General, and in 1618 became Lord Chancellor and was created Viscount St Alban. In parallel he produced the writing that mattered: The Advancement of Learning (1605), and in 1620 the Novum Organum (New Organon), the second part of the unfinished Instauratio Magna. The book diagnosed four classes of bias — the Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, of the.