Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

British materialist philosopher and essayist in modern times; founder of British materialist empiricism and modern experimental science in modern times.

Bacon was born on January 1561, in London, Britain, into a noble family. His father, Nicholas Bacon, served as the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Queen Elizabeth I; his mother, Anne, was also from a renowned family. Bacon received a good education from an early age and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 13, but he soon showed his distaste for the existing educational system and medieval scholastic philosophy. Bacon began his political career in 1576 when he left Cambridge to take up a post in the English embassy in Paris as the assistant to the English ambassador to Paris, France. Afterwards, he held important posts such as Attorney General, Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lord Chancellor, etc. In 1621, Bacon was accused of bribery by his political opponents and was removed from office and imprisoned. Although he was released shortly thereafter, he withdrew from the political arena and retired to the countryside, devoting himself to academic research. His main works include: The Advancement and Proficiency of Learning Divine and Human (1605), Novum Organum (New Engine) (1620), New Atlantis (1624), and a series of essays later compiled as Essays.

Bacon’s social and political views embody his two-sided feature as a modern aristocrat. In his paper Of Nobility in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, on the one hand, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the feudal monarchy and his yearning for bourgeois democracy, on the other hand, he wanted to maintain “the majesty of the monarch” and “the height of the nobility” and to use the power of nobility to suppress the “insolency” of “inferiors” and “attemper sovereignty”.

In philosophy, Bacon sharply criticized the scholastic philosophy as the ideological foundation of feudalism, criticized its detachment from reality, playing with concepts, and admiring the bad style of empty talk. He exposed that the scholastic philosophy separated the relation between man and nature, blocked the path of knowing nature, and imprisoned people’s minds, and held that the fundamental task of science was to study nature and its forms in order to benefit mankind. In his main philosophical work Novum Organum (New Engine), Bacon held that in order to obtain true scientific knowledge, it was necessary first to remove all kinds of “idols” of the mind, including scholastic philosophy, including the “idols of the tribe”, “idols of the den”, “idols of the market”, and “idols of the theatre”. Bacon held that the new scientific inquiry should take sense experience as its starting point, exclude as far as possible the free conjectures of the mind and the rigid Aristotelian syllogism, and inductively derive universal causal connections from individual instances. In addition, as the founder of modern materialist empiricism and induction, Bacon emphasized the role of sense experience in the process of knowledge. He held that only sense experience was reliable and was the source of all knowledge. Bacon defined genuine scientific research as follows: “The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners look like spiders, which make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.” Marx evaluated Bacon as “the true ancestor of British materialism and modern experimental science” due to his scientific induction and materialistic empiricism. In April 1626, Bacon suffered a severe cold while performing a freezing experiment and died.