The Essays

by Francis Bacon

Overview

The genius of Francis Bacon is nowhere better revealed than in his essays.

Bacon’s education was grounded in the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome, but he brought vividness and color to the arid scholasticism of medieval book-learning. Whatever their subject, whether it is something as personal as “Friendship” or as abstract as “Truth,” the essays combine a mixture of rhetoric and philosophy; and are perhaps the most complete and rounded examples of Bacon’s literary style.

Rather than merely summarizing popular philosophy or producing glib expositions of correct conduct, Bacon attempted to change the shape of the other men’s minds. He believed rhetoric, as the force eloquence and persuasion, could incline the mind towards the pure light of reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783986772741
Publisher:	Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
Publication date:	11/15/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	555
File size:	835 KB

About the Author

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, QC, was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. Bacon was knighted in 1603 (being the first scientist to receive a knighthood), and created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621. Bacon's ideas were influential in the 1630s and 1650s among scholars, in particular Sir Thomas Browne, who in his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–72) frequently adheres to a Baconian approach to his scientific enquiries. During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660. During the 18th-century French Enlightenment, Bacon's non-metaphysical approach to science became more influential than the dualism of his French contemporary René Descartes, and was associated with criticism of the ancien regime. In 1733 Voltaire "introduced him as the "father" of the scientific method" to a French audience, an understanding which had become widespread by 1750. In the 19th century his emphasis on induction was revived and developed by William Whewell, among others. He has been reputed as the "Father of Experimental Science". Bacon is also considered because of his introduction of science in England to be the philosophical influence behind the dawning of the Industrial age. In his works, Bacon stated "the explanation of which things, and of the true relation between the nature of things and the nature of the mind, is as the strewing and decoration of the bridal chamber of the mind and the universe, out of which marriage let us hope there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity" meaning he hoped that through the understanding of mechanics using the Scientific Method, society will create more mechanical inventions that will to an extent solve the problems of Man. This changed the course of science in history, from a experimental state, as it was found in medieval ages, to an experimental and inventive state – that would have eventually led to the mechanical inventions that made possible the Industrial Revolutions of the following centuries. He also wrote a long treatise on Medicine, History of Life and Death, with natural and experimental observations for the prolongation of life. For one of his biographers, the historian William Hepworth Dixon, Bacon's influence in modern world is so great that every man who rides in a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes a painless surgical operation, owes him something.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from book:
and expectations. Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy : " Extinctus amabitur idem." l III.—OF UNITY IN RELIGION. Religion being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels and divisions about religion were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief; for you may imagine what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors and fathers of their church were the poets. But the true God hath this attribute, that he is a jealous God; and therefore his worship and religion will endure no mixture nor partner. We shall therefore speak a few words concerning the unity of the church; what are the fruits thereof; what the bounds ; and what the means. The fruits of unity, (next unto the well-pleasing of God, which is all in all.) are two; the one to- wards those that are without the church, the other itowards those that are within. For the former, it is certain that heresies and schisms are, of all others, :the greatest scandals, yea, more than corruption of had revealed, " that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ." When he beheld the infant Jesns in the temple, he took the child in his arms and burst forth into a song of thanksgiving, commencing, " Lord, now lettest tliou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." — S/.. Luke ii. 29. 1 " When dead, the same person shall be beloved." — Ear. Ep. ii. 1, 14. manners ; for as in the natural bodya wound or solution of continuity is worse than a corrupt humor, so in the spiritual; so that nothing doth so much keep men out...

Table of Contents

Principal Dates in Bacon's Life
Introduction
A Note on the Text and Annotation
Further Reading
THE ESSAYSAPPENDICESThe Essays: Fragments, Versions and Parallels
1. Writing the Essays
2. Counsels for the Prince
3. The Wisdom of the Ancients
4. Idols of the Mind
5. A Poetical Essay