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Francis Bacon By Cadet Ku__
Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626, English philosopher, essayist, and statesman, b. London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Gray's Inn. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth I. Francis Bacon was a member of Parliament in 1584 and his opposition to Elizabeth's tax program retarded his political advancement; only the efforts of the earl of Essex led Elizabeth to accept him as an unofficial member of her Learned Council.
At Essex's trial in 1601, Bacon, putting duty to the state above friendship, assumed an active part in the prosecution-a course for which many have condemned him. With the succession of James I, Bacon's fortunes improved. He was knighted in 1603, became attorney general in 1613, lord keeper in 1617, and lord chancellor in 1618; he was created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Albans in 1621. In 1621, accused of accepting bribes as lord chancellor, he pleaded guilty and was fined £40,000, banished from the court, disqualified from holding office, and sentenced to the Tower of London.
Bacon's great claim to fame is not that he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 12, not that he was Lord Chancellor of England under James I, nor even that he has been reputed the real writer of Shakespeare's plays, but that he was a philosopher of the first rank and the effective founder of the modern, experimental, scientific, approach to understanding.
Before Bacon, 'learning' largely meant memorizing the classics, especially Aristotle, and acceding to every dictat of established religion. In The Advancement of Learning, he argued that the only knowledge of importance was that which could be discovered by observation- 'empirical' knowledge rooted in the natural world.