ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon's earliest education was provided by his unusually scholarly mother, Anne, a devoted Calvinist, and Bacon's religious views were, for the most part, Calvinist. For Bacon, then, the natural world becomes rebellious after the Fall, but it does not become evil. Certainly, Bacon's belief that humankind could itself contribute to the restoration of the way things were before the Fall, albeit only after concerted and prolonged effort, was counter to Calvinist ideas of the postlapsarian depravity and incapacity of humanity. There is no explicit mention of evil, however, in Bacon's 'Of Goodness', and even the discussion of 'evil arts' in the Advancement of Learning is brief and unsystematic. Bacon's ideas on evil can only be reconstructed with difficulty, and tentatively. It seems fair to say, therefore, that Bacon's ideas about the nature of evil had no influence on subsequent debates.
