"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."As son of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Elizabeth 1, the young Francis grew up within the court circle, conversed with the queen at an early age and developed lofty ambitions. Sent to France at 16 with the English ambassador, he expected to become a great statesman. The death of his father when he was 18 forced him to study law in an effort to fit himself for service to the queen. It was only under her successor, James 1, that he achieved a knighthood and the high office he sought as Lord Chancellor. Accused of bribery, he spent a short time in the Tower until payment of a large fine secured his release. This was the end of his public career.("The Great Instauration")
Bacon placed much emphasis on method. The key was induction - the development of general laws and principles based on a number of particular instances. He regarded his system as novel, describing it as "the way of the bee". łThe Empiricists, like ants, gather and consume. The Rationalists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. The bee adopts the middle course, drawing her material from the flowers of the garden or field, but transforming it by a faculty peculiar to herself.˛
Bacon is well known for his lucid, epigrammatic essays but his major enterprise was The Great Instauration . Its avowed aim was to restore man's "dominion over the universe" through the unrestricted but systematic acquisition of knowledge. This put him in opposition with the Church which declared inquiry into nature as sinful. Other impediments to learning identified by Bacon, he termed "idols and false notions". All such impediments, he believed could be overcome by rigorous experiment and induction as expounded in the Novum Organum . By this means, the underlying fundamental structures of nature could be revealed. The founding of the Royal Society in 1662 owes much to his ideas and principles. He died in the service of science, from a chill brought on by filling a chicken's body with snow as an experiment in preservation of the flesh.