Francis Bacon

I was born at York House in London to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lady Anne Cooke Bacon. Trinity College, Cambridge taught me Latin, logic, and disputation; Gray’s Inn trained my hand in law. Yet even as a youth I wearied of scholastic jangling. I desired a new instrument of knowledge grounded not in authority, but in nature itself, visited by observation and trial.

My public course ran under Elizabeth and her successor James. In Parliament and at the bar I laboured; thence I rose: Solicitor General in 1607, Attorney General in 1613, Lord Keeper in 1617, and Lord Chancellor in 1618. I thought office should serve counsel and order, not faction and flourish.

In 1621 rivals and long custom together brought me low. I confessed to the taking of gifts, as was then practiced, but denied ever bending justice for reward. The sentence—fine, brief imprisonment, and perpetual disability—closed my service yet opened my leisure. Unencumbered, I turned wholly to that renovation of learning I had long designed.

I set forth The Advancement of Learning and later De Augmentis Scientiarum, to survey knowledge and mark its proper divisions. In the Novum Organum I opposed the old syllogism with a deliberate induction, rising by orderly tables, experiments, and exclusions, while warning against the Idols of Tribe, Cave, Marketplace, and Theatre that beset men’s minds. I urged fellowship in inquiry, instruments fitted to use, and a public store of experiments—imagined at large in New Atlantis. My Essays gave brief counsel on civil and private matters. I died in 1626 after testing whether snow might preserve flesh; a chill followed the experiment.