ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is still remembered in Popes’s words as the ‘wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind’. But when one thinks of Bacon’s achievements in his lifetime, and how much he left to us, this seems a mean appraisal. His chief crime seems to have been that his judgements, as James I’s Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor, were not as affected by bribes as his contemporaries would have wished. The distinction between bribes and fees was certainly far less clear-cut then than now. In any case he died heavily in debt. Quite apart from his formidable legal and political careers, Francis Bacon was a considerable literary figure, as he perfected the essay form. As a philosopher he virtually invented modern scientific method, which he saw as essentially based on inductive procedures for generating knowledge from many exploratory observations and ‘crucial’ experiments to serve as ‘fingerposts’ for selecting the way at cross-roads of possibilities.
