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Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC (22 January 1561 - 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, spy, freemason and essayist. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and created Viscount St Albans in 1621; both peerage titles becoming extinct upon his death.

He began his professional life as a lawyer, but he has become best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. His works establish and popularize an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method. Induction implies drawing knowledge from the natural world through experimentation, observation, and testing of hypotheses. In the context of his time, such methods were connected with the occult trends of hermeticism and alchemy.

Charles Webster has noted that, unlike Descartes, Bacon wrote nothing that could be translated into textbook form; but Bacon's contribution was not really the kind of thing that could have been encapsulated in such a form. Even his account of inductive procedures is so geared to the particular problems faced in pursuing the matter theory of his time that, although some insights are undeniably generalizable, unlike the theories of method of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy of science the attractiveness of his account lies primarily in the attention to detailed problems facing the isolation of particular properties of matter, a detail which was gradually superseded as the discipline became transformed and its role in physical inquiry rethought. Bacon's main contribution is not one to be described as lasting so much as irreversible. He inaugurated the transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists, for even though the ideas of 'science' and 'scientists' in the modern sense are only really established in the nineteenth century, their genealogy goes back to Bacon's attempt to effect a fundamental reform of philosophy from a contemplative discipline exemplified in the individual persona of the moral philosopher, to a communal, if ultimately centrally directed, enterprise exemplified in the persona of the experimental natural philosopher. In turn, observation and experiment are lifted out of the purview of the arcane and the esoteric, and planted firmly in the public realm. It is this that ultimately is one of the key developments that enables the transformation of scientific activity from an enterprise that had traditionally exhibited a pattern of slow, irregular, intermittent growth which alternates with substantial periods of stagnation, into the uninterrupted and cumulative growth that constitutes the general rule for scientific development in the West since then.

Bacon's reshaping and defence of natural philosophy, his establishment of its autonomy, legitimacy, and central cultural role, are, I believe, on a par with Plato's defence of the autonomy and centrality of the 'quiet' virtues, such as justice and moderation. Both shaped the cultures in which they lived, and shaped them irreversibly, molding those which followed, above all our own.

Bacon was, of course, not the only influential figure to have called for a fresh start: Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Gassendi, and others were doing so as well. Of these, only Descartes's proposal for a new start was to have the same longevity as Bacon's; but the two calls were motivated very differently. Descartes really had something very different to offer -- in mathematics, in geometrical and physical optics, in cosmology, in physiology, in the understanding of cognition and the mind -- and his call for a fresh start, at least in the general metaphysical version we find in the Meditations, is as much as anything else a way of getting a hearing for his radical offerings, a way of showing that if we follow the procedure of starting from indubitable foundations, we will be led to his substantive natural-philosophical doctrines. In terms of substantive doctrine, Bacon does not really have a great deal to offer, and what he does propose -- his defence of a geocentric cosmology and his account of spiritus, for example -- is quickly superseded. There are no Baconians on points of substantive natural-philosophical doctrine, as there were Cartesians on points of substantive doctrine, such as the theory of vortices and a mechanistic physiology.

Rather, to be a Baconian meant to accept Bacon's understanding of the role and place of natural philosophy, and to adopt his distinctive means of achieving results in natural philosophy. In this latter respect, Bacon's starting point was more attractive and compelling than that of Descartes: It offered less, but it was also less contentious. Although Descartes's general idea of the need for knowledge to be grounded in some basic metaphysical/epistemological theory attracted many advocates throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, none of his successors accepted hyperbolic doubt as a rationale for building up knowledge afresh, and so none adhered to any of the specifics of his programme. The situation with Bacon is very different. Bacon's reasons for starting afresh are real and compelling, and not speculative in the sense that Descartes's are. As we have seen, Bacon's account of the Idols allows him to make the case for a new start in a particularly compelling way. The doctrine of Idols sets out to show that we pursue natural philosophy with seriously deficient natural faculties, that we operate with a severely inadequate means of communication, and that we rely on a hopelessly corrupt philosophical culture: claims much more radical than anything we find in Descartes. The deficiencies of our faculties are not due to their inability to deal with a purely speculative form of doubt, but, quite the contrary, are wholly real and in constant evidence in our daily lives.

Bacon's account of the Idols, set out in detail only in the 1620s, could not have failed to strike a chord with his readers, and the general thrust, if not the details, of his advocacy of a new way of pursuing natural philosophy began finally to gain wide recognition. Immediately after his death, his work was taken up by a number of different movements in England, from the radical Puritans to the founders of the Royal Society. These movements shared a common concern: Bacon's emphasis on the communal nature of natural-philosophical investigation, and with it replacement of adversarial argument with a form of experimental 'witnessing'. Indeed, this was to be the first theme which his English followers picked out after his death; but it was nurtured in a different environment from that in which it had been proposed. The social and cultural life of England was very different in the period after the English Civil War from that of Tudor and early Stuart England, and many of Bacon's proposals for the reform of natural philosophy were less appropriate in the Restoration, for example, than they had been under James I. In particular, as we have seen, Bacon always had a centrally directed model in mind. Natural philosophy was opera basilica —works for a king—and not something that a private individual or group could undertake. Not only that, but research and teaching of natural philosophy in universities and elsewhere must be supervised, not by those who had already made a contribution to the area, or by those in the vanguard of natural philosophy research, but by 'princes or superior persons of visitation'.

Such a hierarchical conception could have little purchase in post— Civil War England. There, the non-adversarial approach to natural philosophy, with its replacement of argument with experiment, flourished. What seems to have happened in Restoration England is that a number of considerations bearing on experimental practice and the behaviour of experimental practitioners, considerations which Bacon had begun to articulate, suddenly seemed to provide the answer to a profound sectarian strife and uncertainty about the nature of authority. It should be noted here that the issue of adversarial argument was not confined to natural philosophy, and can be found, for example, in connection with religious debates; moreover, the issue of a 'civil' and experimental approach to natural philosophy, and the inculcation of these values in natural philosophers, was not exclusive to England. Nevertheless, a peculiar conjunction of circumstances in Restoration England, which made questions of social stability and authority paramount in virtually every sphere of life, produced a pervasive ideology of a gentlemanly, 'experimental' form of life in which dispute could occur safely, and agreement could be reached by means of a collective or shared witnessing of experiments, thereby providing a form of legitimation that guided natural-philosophical practice in a number of ways.

The role of experiment changes radically at the beginning of the eighteenth century however, especially during Desaguliers's tenure of the position of Curator of Experiments in the Royal Society, from 1714 to 1744. Here we witness a shift to a view of experiment as something that demonstrates the public usefulness of knowledge, in many respects something extrinsic to how one actually produces results in natural philosophy, and so no more authentically 'Baconian' than the ideology of 'collective witnessing', although both clearly have Baconian precedents.

Nevertheless, it may seem surprising that Bacon's successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have derived particular inspiration from him in the one area in which he is weakest: in setting out what is needed for the large-scale reform of natural philosophy into an organized communal enterprise. Yet although he may have had no idea of how to implement a solution, Bacon not only posed the problem in a stark and challenging way, but offered a model of scientific investigation that depended not on individual scholarship but on routinized methods of investigation which anyone could be trained to follow. Bacon began the transformation of the philosopher into what, in the nineteenth century, would become the scientist, someone who would increasingly -- even in the course of the seventeenth century -- be seen as concerned with factual rather than speculative issues. The philosopher becomes transformed in the process. As Locke puts it in a famous passage in the 'Epistle to the Reader' at the beginning of An Essay concerning Human Understanding:

The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the Admiration of Posterity: But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great Huygenius, and the Incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain; 'tis Ambition enough to be imploy'd as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish that lies in the Way to Knowledg.

The view of the reformed natural philosopher/scientist as the master builder and the philosopher as underlabourer was not universal. The great tradition of German systematic metaphysics from Leibniz to Kant was very much one of Scholastic philosophy radically reformed and renewed, and even British empiricism had its system builder in Berkeley: no underlabourers there. Still, the notion that the only systems were scientific ones, and that system building was not the business of philosophers, did predominate in Britain, Hume being its most able defender, and in France, largely through the influence of Voltaire. The result was that, to a large extent, cognitive values came to be shaped around scientific values. This had major cultural implications: with the rise to predominance of scientific and technological measures of human capacity during the industrial era, for example, where Western Europeans considered their superiority to lie shifted -- in a disconcertingly seamless way -- from their religion to their science. And the export of Western science and technology, and the cognitive values associated with these, began.

Philosophy was, of course, not immune to these upheavals. It was torn apart as it gave birth to a scientific culture, and as one of the defining characteristics of modernity, the divide between the sciences and the humanities, emerged. The division did not come about by chance, nor was it a kind of oversight. It was engineered as part of the conditions of possibility of the emergence of a scientific culture and its first engineer was Bacon. 

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