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Content Early legal career and political ambitions. 3
Career in the service of James I. 4
Reputation and Cultural Legacy 8
Major Books of Francis Bacon 8
Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) led a complicated life. He was born at the time of religious reformation, political upheaval, and the intellectual and artistic flourishing of late Renaissance Europe. He became a lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian and philosopher, who not only exemplified the values and virtues that he had inherited from the Renaissance tradition but also ushered in early conceptions of modernity. It is not possible to do justice to all of the facets of Bacon’s life here. What follows is a brief sketch of his legal and political career, a general account of his philosophical works and more detailed look on his work “New Atlantis”. Bacon was born Jan. 22, 1561, at York House off the Strand, London, the younger of the two sons of the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, by his second marriage. Nicholas Bacon, born in comparatively humble circumstances, had risen to become lord keeper of the great seal. Francis' cousin through his mother was Robert Cecil, later earl of Salisbury and chief minister of the crown at the end of Elizabeth I's reign and the beginning of James I's. From 1573 to 1575 Bacon was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his weak constitution caused him to suffer ill health there. His distaste for what he termed “unfruitful” Aristotelian philosophy began at Cambridge. From 1576 to 1579 Bacon was in France as a member of the English ambassador's suite. He was recalled abruptly after the sudden death of his father, who left him relatively little money. Bacon remained financially embarrassed virtually until his death. In 1576 Bacon had been admitted as an “ancient” (senior governor) of Gray's Inn, one of the four Inns of Court that served as institutions for legal education, in London. In 1579 he took up residence there and after becoming a barrister in 1582 progressed in time through the posts of reader (lecturer at the Inn), bencher (senior member of the Inn), and queen's (from 1603 king's) counsel extraordinary to those of solicitor general and attorney general. Even as successful a legal career as this, however, did not satisfy his political and philosophical ambitions. Bacon occupied himself with the tract “Temporis Partus Maximus” (“The Greatest Part of Time”) in 1582; it has not survived. In 1584 he sat as member of Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Dorset and subsequently represented Taunton, Liverpool, the County of Middlesex, Southampton, Ipswich, and the University of Cambridge. In 1589 a “Letter of Advice” to the Queen and An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England
indicated his political interests and showed a fair promise of political potential by reason of their levelheadedness and disposition to reconcile. In 1593 came a setback to his political hopes: he took a stand objecting to the government's intensified demand for subsidies to help meet the expenses of the war against Spain. Elizabeth took offense, and Bacon was in disgrace during several critical years when there were chances for legal advancement. Meanwhile, sometime before July 1591, Bacon had become acquainted with Robert Devereux, the young earl of Essex, who was a favourite of the Queen, although still in some disgrace with her for his unauthorized marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Bacon saw in the Earl the “fittest instrument to do good to the State” and offered Essex the friendly advice of an older, wiser, and more subtle man. Essex did his best to mollify the Queen, and when the office of attorney general fell vacant, he enthusiastically but unsuccessfully supported the claim of Bacon. Other recommendations by Essex for high offices to be conferred on Bacon also failed. By 1598 Essex' failure in an expedition against Spanish treasure ships made him harder to control; and although Bacon's efforts to divert his energies to Ireland, where the people were in revolt, proved only too successful, Essex lost his head when things went wrong and he returned against orders. Bacon certainly did what he could to accommodate matters but merely offended both sides; in June 1600 he found himself as the Queen's learned counsel taking part in the informal trial of his patron. Essex bore him no ill will and shortly after his release was again on friendly terms with him. But after Essex' abortive attempt of 1601 to seize the Queen and force her dismissal of his rivals, Bacon, who had known nothing of the project, viewed Essex as a traitor and drew up the official report on the affair. This, however, was heavily altered by others before publication. After Essex' execution Bacon, in 1604, published the Apologie in Certaine Imputations Concerning the Late Earle of Essex
in defense of his own actions. It is a coherent piece of self-justification, but to posterity it does not carry complete conviction, particularly since it evinces no personal distress. When Elizabeth died in 1603, Bacon's letter-writing ability was directed to finding a place for himself and a use for his talents in James I's services. He pointed to his concern for Irish affairs, the union of the kingdoms, and the pacification of the church as proof that he had much to offer the new king. Through the influence of his cousin Robert Cecil, Bacon was one of the 300 new knights dubbed in 1603. The following year he was confirmed as learned counsel and sat in the first Parliament of the new reign in the debates of its first session. He was also active as one of the commissioners for discussing a union with Scotland. In the autumn of 1605 he published his Advancement of Learning
, dedicated to the King, and in the following summer he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a London alderman. Preferment in the royal service, however, still eluded him, and it was not until June 1607 that his petitions and his vigorous though vain efforts to persuade the Commons to accept the King's proposals for union with Scotland were at length rewarded with the post of solicitor general. Even then, his political influence remained negligible, a fact that he came to attribute to the power and jealousy of Cecil, by then earl of Salisbury and the King's chief minister. In 1609 his De Sapientia Veterum
(“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), in which he expounded what he took to be the hidden practical meaning embodied in ancient myths, came out and proved to be, next to the Essayes
, his most popular book in his own lifetime. In 1614 he seems to have written The New Atlantis
, his far-seeing scientific utopian work, which did not get into print until 1626. After Salisbury's death in 1612, Bacon renewed his efforts to gain influence with the King, writing a number of remarkable papers of advice upon affairs of state and, in particular, upon the relations between Crown and Parliament. The King adopted his proposal for removing Coke from his post as chief justice of the common pleas and appointing him to the King's Bench, while appointing Bacon attorney general in 1613. During the next few years Bacon's views about the royal prerogative brought him, as attorney general, increasingly into conflict with Coke, the champion of the common law and of the independence of the judges. It was Bacon who examined Coke when the King ordered the judges to be consulted individually and separately in the case of Edmond Peacham, a clergyman charged with treason as the author of an unpublished treatise justifying rebellion against oppression. Bacon has been reprobated for having taken part in the examination under torture of Peacham, which turned out to be fruitless. It was Bacon who instructed Coke and the other judges not to proceed in the case of commendams ( i.e.
, holding of benefices in the absence of the regular incumbent) until they had spoken to the King. Coke's dismissal in November 1616 for defying this order was quickly followed by Bacon's appointment as lord keeper of the great seal in March 1617. The following year he was made lord chancellor and baron Verulam, and in 1620/21 he was created viscount St. Albans. The main reason for this progress was his unsparing service in Parliament and the court, together with persistent letters of self-recommendation; according to the traditional account, however, he was also aided by his association with George Villiers, later duke of Buckingham, the King's new favourite. It would appear that he became honestly fond of Villiers; many of his letters betray a feeling that seems warmer than timeserving flattery. Among Bacon's papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius Solutus
(“Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad “like a Marchant's wast booke where to enter all maner of remembrance of matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others, eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any maner of restraint.” This book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron, to study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the Tower of London to work on serviceable experiments. It displays the multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the King's business, his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation. Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 draftings of his most celebrated work, the Novum Organum
, and wrote several minor philosophical works. The major occupation of these years must have been the management of James, always with reference, remote or direct, to the royal finances. The King relied on his lord chancellor but did not always follow his advice. Bacon was longer sighted than his contemporaries and seems to have been aware of the constitutional problems that were to culminate in civil war; he dreaded innovation and did all he could, and perhaps more than he should, to safeguard the royal prerogative. Whether his policies were sound or not, it is evident that he was, as he later said, “no mountebank in the King's services.” By 1621 Bacon must have seemed impregnable, a favourite not by charm (though he was witty and had a dry sense of humour) but by sheer usefulness and loyalty to his sovereign; lavish in public expenditure (he was once the sole provider of a court masque); dignified in his affluence and liberal in his household; winning the attention of scholars abroad as the author of the Novum Organum
, published in 1620, and the developer of the Instauratio Magna
(“Great Instauration”), a comprehensive plan to reorganize the sciences and to restore man to that mastery over nature that he was conceived to have lost by the fall of Adam. But Bacon had his enemies. In 1618 he fell foul of George Villiers when he tried to interfere in the marriage of the daughter of his old enemy, Coke, and the younger brother of Villiers. Then, in 1621, two charges of bribery were raised against him before a committee of grievances over which he himself presided. The shock appears to have been twofold because Bacon, who was casual about the incoming and outgoing of his wealth, was unaware of any vulnerability and was not mindful of the resentment of two men whose cases had gone against them in spite of gifts they had made with the intent of bribing the judge. The blow caught him when he was ill, and he pleaded for extra time to meet the charges, explaining that genuine illness, not cowardice, was the reason for his request. Meanwhile, the House of Lords collected another score of complaints. Bacon admitted the receipt of gifts but denied that they had ever affected his judgment; he made notes on cases and sought an audience with the King that was refused. Unable to defend himself by discriminating between the various charges or cross-examining witnesses, he settled for a penitent submission and resigned the seal of his office, hoping that this would suffice. The sentence was harsh, however, and included a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower of London during the King's pleasure, disablement from holding any state office, and exclusion from Parliament and the verge of court (an area of 12 miles radius centred on where the sovereign is resident). Bacon commented to Buckingham: “I acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation's sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicolas Bacon's time
.” The magnanimity and wit of the epigram sets his case against the prevailing standards. Bacon did not have to stay long in the Tower, but he found the ban that cut him off from access to the library of Charles Cotton, an English man of letters, and from consultation with his physician more galling. He came up against an inimical lord treasurer, and his pension payments were delayed. He lost Buckingham's goodwill for a time and was put to the humiliating practice of roundabout approaches to other nobles and to Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador; remissions came only after vexations and disappointments. Despite all this his courage held, and the last years of his life were spent in work far more valuable to the world than anything he had accomplished in his high office. Cut off from other services, he offered his literary powers to provide the King with a digest of the laws, a history of Great Britain, and biographies of Tudor monarchs. He prepared memorandums on usury and on the prospects of a war with Spain; he expressed views on educational reforms; he even returned, as if by habit, to draft papers of advice to the King or to Buckingham and composed speeches he was never to deliver. Some of these projects were completed, and they did not exhaust his fertility. He wrote: “If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy.” Two out of a plan of six separate natural histories were composed— Historia Ventorum
(“History of the Winds”) appeared in 1622 and Historia Vitae et Mortis
(“History of Life and Death”) in the following year. Also in 1623 he published the De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum
, a Latin translation, with many additions, of the Advancement of Learning
. He also corresponded with Italian thinkers and urged his works upon them. In 1625 a third and enlarged edition of his Essayes
was published. Bacon in adversity showed patience, unimpaired intellectual vigour, and fortitude. Physical deprivation distressed him but what hurt most was the loss of favour; it was not until Jan. 20, 1622/23, that he was admitted to kiss the King's hand; a full pardon never came. Finally, in March 1626, driving one day near Highgate (a district to the north of London) and deciding on impulse to discover whether snow would delay the process of putrefaction, he stopped his carriage, purchased a hen, and stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, which brought on bronchitis, and he died at the Earl of Arundel's house nearby on April 9, 1626. As a work of narrative fiction, Bacon’s novel New Atlantis may be classified as a literary rather than a scientific (or philosophical) work, though it effectively belongs to both categories. According to Bacon’s amanuensis and first biographer William Rawley, the novel represents the first part (showing the design of a great college or institute devoted to the interpretation of nature) of what was to have been a longer and more detailed project (depicting the entire legal structure and political organization of an ideal commonwealth). The work thus stands in the great tradition of the utopian-philosophical novel that stretches from Plato and More to Huxley and Skinner. The thin plot or fable is little more than a fictional shell to contain the real meat of Bacon’s story: the elaborate description of Salomon’s House (also known as the College of the Six Days Works), a centrally organized research facility where specially trained teams of investigators collect data, conduct experiments, and (most importantly from Bacon’s point of view) apply the knowledge they gain to produce “things of use and practice for man’s life.” These new arts and inventions they eventually share with the outside world. In terms of its sci-fi adventure elements, the New Atlantis is about as exciting as a government or university re-organization plan. But in terms of its historical impact, the novel has proven to be nothing less than revolutionary, having served not only as an effective inspiration and model for the British Royal Society, but also as an early blueprint and prophecy of the modern research center and international scientific community. In the New Atlantis, a ship’s crew in the South Seas land on a island containing a remarkable institution known as Solomon’s House. This turns out to be a research establishment, where scientists work together to embody Bacon’s utilitarian ideal of science as the extension of men’s power over nature for the betterment of the human race. Their projects include plans for telephones, submarines, and aeroplanes. The president of the institute described its purpose thus^ The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bound of Human Empire, to effecting of all things possible. (B, 480)
Published by Rawley after Bacon’s death in 1627, this work also is incomplete because it was supposed to include an account of the legal and political constitution of the idealized island of Bensalem. It is complete from the perspective of natural philosophy, however, because Bacon has given a full account of Solomon’s House, the scientific society of the island. The New Atlantis is not a direct contribution to one of the parts of the great instauration. Rather, it is a fable used by Bacon in his attempt to popularize the new science by providing a vision of the practical results that would follow from successful inductive and experimental practices. The structure of the story itself requires little exposition, although some significant elements may be pointed out. First, as a literary work, the title indicates Bacon’s intention to update the fable of Atlantis as described by Plato in Critias and Timaeus
. Although the new Atlantis (Bensalem) is quite different from the original, Bacon appears to be expressing a belief in the existence of lost civilizations and lost wisdom, much as Plato had done. Such a belief can be likewise be seen in Bacon’s speculations here about the Americas of the distant past. The fable also imitates Thomas More’s Utopia
(to which Bacon alludes), as well as the popular travel literature of Bacon’s day. There is an interesting variation, however, on the typical encounter of European sailors with “savages”: here the sailors themselves are inferior to the citizens of the advanced civilization that they have encountered. Secondly, the New Atlantis provides commentary on and criticism of some of the social and moral practices of seventeenth-century Europe. A few of them also reflect on episodes from Bacon’s own life. The citizens and officials of Bensalem reject being ‘twice-paid’, for example indicating that taking money for a job in addition to salary (such as in accepting bribes) was seen as dishonorable. Bribery, although common in Bacon’s England, was the offense for which he was impeached. Another personal element is introduced after the account of the Feast of the Family when Joabin criticizes the European custom of a man’s marrying late in life and doing so as a business arrangement, which again is something that Bacon had done. Perhaps these sections represent expressions of regret. Bacon had learned from his own experience that these practices came with a heavy price. From the standpoint of natural philosophy, the account of Solomon’s House is most significant, and the structure of the fable seems to indicate that it is the focus of the work as well. Solomon’s House is brought up twice prior to its full discussion. First it is introduced as a device to help explain how the island became Christian, and then it figures in the explanation of how the islanders remain unknown and yet possess knowledge of the rest of the world. Finally, the story builds up to the day when one of the Fathers of Solomon’s House visits the city. In the descriptions of his entrance, Bacon indicates the supreme importance of the man by making use of both royal and religious symbolism. The Father arrives with great ceremony as a royal personage might, but he also wears or is accompanied by priestly trappings such as his tippet and crosier. When the narrator meets with him in a private audience a few days later, the narrator bows and kisses the hem of the Father’s tippet, who in turn apparently blesses the narrator. New Atlantis seems to have been written about 1623, during that period of literary activity which followed Bacon’s political fall. None of Bacon’s writings gives in short space so vivid a picture of his tastes and aspirations as this fragment of the plan of an ideal commonwealth. The generosity and enlightenment, the dignity and splendor, the piety and public spirit, of the inhabitants of Bensalem represent the ideal qualities which Bacon the statesman desired rather than hoped to see characteristic of his own country; and in Solomon’s House we have Bacon the scientist indulging without restriction his prophetic vision of the future of human knowledge. No reader acquainted in any degree with the processes and results of modern scientific inquiry can fail to be struck by the numerous approximations made by Bacon’s imagination to the actual achievements of modern times. The plan and organization of his great college lay down the main lines of the modern research university; and both in pure and applied science he anticipates a strikingly large number of recent inventions and discoveries. Reputation and Cultural Legacy
If anyone deserves the title “universal genius” or “Renaissance man” (accolades traditionally reserved for those who make significant, original contributions to more than one professional discipline or area of learning), Bacon clearly merits the designation. Like Leonardo and Goethe, he produced important work in both the arts and sciences. Like Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, he combined wide and ample intellectual and literary interests (from practical rhetoric and the study of nature to moral philosophy and educational reform) with a substantial political career. Like his near contemporary Machiavelli, he excelled in a variety of literary genres – from learned treatises to light entertainments – though, also like the great Florentine writer, he thought of himself mainly as a political statesman and practical visionary: a man whose primary goal was less to obtain literary laurels for himself than to mold the agendas and guide the policy decisions of powerful nobles and heads of state. - The Advancement of Learning, 1605 1. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy www.iep.utm.edu/ 2. Bacon Francis “Selected Philosophical Works” 3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 4. www.biography.com 5. Encyclopaedia Brittanica http://www.britannica.com/ 6. Kenny Anthony “The Rise of Modern Philosophy”
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