Bacon, Francis (1561 - 1626) English philosopher, founder of materialism and experimental science in modern times; saw task

of science as to increase the power of humanity over Nature, and that this could be achieved only by revealing the "true causes" of things; promoted scepticism in relation to all previous learning, cleansing the mind of all preconceptions and "Idols", to rationally re-interpret the facts of experience by methodical generalisation - "induction", particularly including the analysis of experimental activity, and attention to "negative instances". Bacon wrote the Phenomena of the Universe Or Natural History for the Building Up of Philosophy when he was 48. For most of his life, Queen Elizabeth I was Queen of England, a period of expansion of British trade and influence. Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1580, when Bacon was 19. The Italian Giordano Bruno, had further developed the Copernican system of the heavens (which replaced the Earth as the centre of the Universe with a heliocontric system), proposing an infinity of worlds and removing the Sun from the centre of the Universe. In 1600, when Bacon was 39, Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his heresy. Shortly before Bacon's death Charles I ascended the throne. Bacon's New Atlantis, written in 1617, foresaw a utopia in which people flourished on the basis of rational learning and advanced technology. New Atlantis was no "classless society" but a bourgeois republic. In 1640, Oliver Cromwell lead the English Revolution, for the first time in history beheading the King and replacing the monarchy with a bourgeois republic. Bacon was a contemporary of Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) though Galileo's principal work, Dialogo dei due sistemi dei mondo, was not completed until after Bacon's death. Galileo was forced to recant. In Bacon's time, there could not be said to exist anything which could be called natural science. What we have today began with the work of Galileo and Bacon. In Bacon's time, it would have been

impossible for someone with a scientific disposition to distinguish between fact and fiction - religious dogma, travellers' yarns, superstition, the untested and unsubstantiated wisdom of the ancients, the practice of farmers and artisans handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Only mathematics and, thanks to Galileo, the infant science of mechanics, could lay any claim to demonstrable verity. The advantage Bacon had over his fellow-philosophers on the Continent, was that while war and the inquisition ravaged Europe, England was relatively (relatively!) united, prosperous and liberal and it was possible for Bacon to write as he did without winding up on the rack or the stake. In fact, Bacon had at one time spent 4 days in the Tower of London, not for his radical views, but for accepting bribes in his job as Lord Chancellor! See Francis Bacon Archive.