Character Overview

He tried his best to advocate that "reading history makes people wise; reading poetry makes people smart; mathematics makes people precise; philosophy makes people profound; ethics makes people cultivated; logic makes people cultivated; "Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend)

He respected science and developed scientific ideas. Progressive ideas and progressive slogans advocating knowledge have always promoted social progress. This thinker who has pursued truth throughout his life has collected 58 essays, discussing a wide range of life issues from various angles. He is exquisite and philosophical and has many readers.

Author of "Academic Progress" (1605) and "New Tools" (1620). Bacon sharply criticized medieval scholasticism and believed that scholasticism and theology seriously hindered the progress of science in Bacon's "New Instruments". He advocated a comprehensive transformation of human knowledge, liberated the entire academic culture from scholasticism, and achieved greatness. of revival. He believed that science must pursue the causes and laws of things in nature. To achieve this goal, it must be based on sensory experience. He put forward the principle of materialist empiricism, believing that knowledge and concepts originate from the perceptual world, and sensory experience is the source of all knowledge. To obtain scientific knowledge of nature, we must build our understanding on the basis of sensory experience. He also proposed the empirical induction method, which advocated that based on experiments and observation materials, through analysis, comparison, selection, and elimination, correct conclusions could finally be drawn.

"Collected Essays" best reflects Bacon's writing style: beautiful writing, concise language and profound meaning. The articles in this book discuss his many unique and insightful insights into the relationship between man and society, man and himself, and man and nature from various angles, allowing many people to gain edification and guidance from this book. For example:

"A person who is not virtuous himself will be jealous when he sees others who are virtuous."

"Without friendship, the world is just a wilderness."

"The most preventive medicine that can protect people's mental health is the good advice and advice of friends." "Suspicion in thought is like Bacon's "Collected Essays", like a bat among birds, always flying in the dusk. Suspicion makes kings tend to be tyrannical, husbands to be jealous, and wise men to be indecisive and melancholy."

"Cunning is a kind of insidious and evil intelligence. There is a big difference between a cunning person and a smart person. This difference is not only in honesty, but also in talent."

"The virtue of good times is temperance; the virtue of adversity is perseverance. This latter is a greater virtue."

Bacon made great academic achievements in his life, but as a politician He experienced the hardships of official career. After the death of his father, who was the Queen's Keeper of the Royal Seal, he has never been reused by the Queen. It was not until James I came to power that he gradually received promotions. He successively served as president of the court, prosecutor general, minister of the seal, etc., and was also given noble titles such as baronet and viscount. However, he was later dismissed from all official positions. After becoming a commoner, Bacon devoted all his energy to academic research, and he eventually became the famous founder of materialist philosophy in medieval England. Bacon passed away in April 1626.

[Edit this paragraph] Biography

Bacon was born on January 22, 1561, into a family of officials in London. His father, Nicholas Bacon (December 28, 1510 - February 20, 1579), was Queen Elizabeth's Privy Seal. He studied law at Cambridge University. He was progressive in his thinking, believed in the Church of England, and opposed the Pope's interference in Britain. internal things. Mother Anne is a talented woman well-known in Bacon's works. She is proficient in Greek and Latin and is a believer in Calvinism.

A good family education made Bacon mature earlier and showed unusual intelligence in all aspects. At the age of 12, Bacon was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge University for further study. While studying at school, he had doubts about traditional concepts and beliefs, and began to think about the true meaning of society and life alone.

After studying at Cambridge University for three years, Bacon served as the British Ambassador to France, Amyas. Sir Paulet's entourage came to France. During the two and a half years of living in Paris, he traveled almost all over France, came into contact with many new things, and absorbed many new ideas, which played a significant role in the formation of his world view. It has played a big role. In 1579, Bacon's father died suddenly of illness. His plan to prepare for Bacon's future support was shattered, and Bacon's life began to fall into poverty. After returning home to attend his father's funeral, Bacon enrolled in Gray Law School, where he studied law while seeking positions. In 1582, he finally qualified as a lawyer. In 1584, he was elected as a member of Parliament. In 1589, he became the clerk of the court after the vacancy. However, this position did not become vacant for 20 years. He ran around but never got any position. At this time, Bacon was more mature in his thinking. He was determined to reform all knowledge that was divorced from reality and nature, and introduced empirical observation, factual basis, and practical effects into epistemology. This great ambition was the main goal of his "great renaissance" of science and the ambition for which he fought throughout his life.

In 1602, Elizabeth died and James I succeeded to the throne. Because Bacon had advocated the union of Scotland and England, he was greatly appreciated by James. As a result, Bacon's career has skyrocketed. Knighted in 1602, appointed counselor to James in 1604, solicitor general in 1607, chief prosecutor in 1613, advisor to the Privy Council in 1616, promoted to seal in 1617 Chancellor, he was promoted to Continental Officer in England in 1618 and was created Baron Verulan and Viscount Albans in 1621. But Bacon's talents and interests were not in state affairs, but in the search for scientific truth. During this period, he made great achievements in academic research. And published many books.

In 1621, Bacon was accused of corruption and bribery by Parliament. He was fined 40,000 pounds by the High Court, imprisoned in the Tower of London, expelled from the court for life, and barred from holding parliamentary and official positions. Although the fine and imprisonment were later waived, Bacon's reputation was ruined. From then on, Bacon ignored political affairs and began to concentrate on theoretical writings.

At the end of March 1626, Bacon was riding through the northern suburbs of London. At that time, he was concentrating on the study of hot and cold theory and its practical applications. When passing by a snowy field, he suddenly wanted to conduct an experiment. He killed a chicken and stuffed the chicken belly with snow to observe the effect of freezing on preservation. However, due to his weak body and unable to withstand the invasion of wind and cold, the bronchitis recurred and his condition worsened, and he died of illness in the early morning of April 9, 1626.

After Bacon's death, people built a monument in his memory, and Sir Henry Warden inscribed his epitaph:

Viscount St. Albans

If a more prestigious title should be used

it should be called "the light of science" and "the tongue of the law"

...

[ Edit this paragraph] Art Road

Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon), the craziest artist of the 20th century, his extraordinary imagination created a new chapter in modern art. Bacon's greatest works were all created in the 1940s and 1950s. From screaming heads and roaring apes to portraits of popes and Van Gogh, Bacon fully embodies the characteristics of a maniac surrounded by claustrophobia and whims. Surprisingly, Bacon also created some landscape works in his later period, such as those in which he reviewed his travels in Africa and southern France. During this period, critics considered it a period of Bacon's search for himself, a period of exploring impressions and taking risks. period.

During Bacon’s lifetime, artists also had very stringent requirements for choosing the works they wanted to exhibit.

He required all museums or art galleries to ensure that only his later paintings could be publicly displayed. Therefore, it also led to people's unfamiliarity and surprise with the style of Bacon's early works.

Currently, the Salsbury Museum in the UK has launched an exhibition focusing on Bacon’s early works. It displays 13 early works and explains the development of Bacon’s art from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. , an in-depth exploration of the artist’s terrifying superimagination.

[Edit this paragraph] Philosophical Thoughts

Bacon’s philosophical thoughts are inseparable from his social thoughts. He was a representative of the rising bourgeoisie, advocating the development of production, eager to explore nature, and demanding the development of science. He believed that scholasticism had hindered the development of contemporary science. Therefore, he strongly criticized empirical philosophy and theological authority. He also further exposed the source of fallacies in human understanding and put forward the famous "Four Illusions". He said that this is a common pathological state in the human heart, rather than confusion and doubt arising from a certain situation. The first is the "false appearance of race", which is a misunderstanding caused by human nature; the second type is the "false appearance of the cave", which is a one-sided misunderstanding caused by an individual's personality, hobbies, education, and environment; The third type is the "illusion of the market", which is confusion in thinking caused by the uncertainty of language concepts when people communicate. The fourth type is "theatre's illusion", which refers to the misunderstanding caused by blind superstition of authority and tradition. Bacon pointed out that empirical philosophers use four kinds of illusions to obliterate the truth and create fallacies, thus giving a heavy blow to empirical philosophy. However, Bacon's "Illusion Theory" permeated the empiricist tendency of Bacon's philosophy and failed to make a strict distinction between the nature of reason and the illusion of idealism.

Bacon believed that the academic tradition at that time was poor because academics had lost contact with experience. He advocated that scientific theory and science and technology complement each other. He advocated breaking "idols" and eradicating all kinds of prejudices and illusions. He proposed that "truth is the daughter of time rather than the daughter of authority" and launched a powerful attack on scholasticism.

Bacon’s view of scientific method is mainly experimental, qualitative and inductive. He inherited and developed the ancient idea that matter is the origin of all things. He believed that the world is composed of matter, matter has the characteristic of movement, and movement is an attribute of matter. Starting from a materialist standpoint, Bacon pointed out that the task of science is to understand the natural world and its laws. However, due to the limitations of the times, his worldview still has the characteristics of simple materialism and metaphysics.

[Edit this paragraph] Ideological Contribution

Bacon was the first person to realize the historical significance of science and its methodology and the role it may play in human life. He tried to give the new scientific movement the impetus and direction for its development by analyzing and determining the general methods of science and showing its application.

Bacon was a philosopher. He explored various possibilities of experimental methods from the beginning. He said that he wanted to be a scientific Columbus. In 1605 he published his first book, "The Progress of Learning," which was the earliest popular book explaining his insights.

In 1620, part of his main work "The Great Revival of Learning" was published, which was not completed when he died. Bacon divided the book into six parts.

Introduction, namely "The Progress of Academics" "New Tools" is mainly an analysis of scientific methods and is the most complete part of the book. It was originally intended to be the fourth part of the encyclopedia about craftsmen's knowledge and experimental facts. Not found, mainly discusses how to use new methods to analyze facts. Discuss past and present scientific theories. Discuss the new natural philosophy, and finally synthesize the hypotheses extracted from various facts and existing scientific theories. Bacon only wrote the second part of this book. But he had a great influence on both England in the seventeenth century and France in the eighteenth century. In this work he proposed a theory of scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment, which became known as the inductive theory.

Bacon believed that scientific understanding of nature and technological control are complementary to each other, and both are the results of the application of scientific methods. Bacon attached great importance to the invention of printing, gunpowder and the compass.

He used these three inventions as examples to prove that modern people are much more knowledgeable than the ancient Greeks. Bacon said:

"Therefore, the first requirement for new scientific methods to promote the development of science and technology is to find new principles, new operating procedures and new facts. Such principles and facts can be found in technical knowledge are to be found in experimental sciences. When these principles and knowledge are understood, they lead to new applications in technology and science."

Bacon asked James I to issue an order to collect them. Various aspects of knowledge. He believed that the collection of large numbers of facts was the first requirement of his method, and that with an encyclopedia six times the length of Pliny the Elder's Natural History he could explain all the phenomena of nature.

Bacon’s view of scientific method is mainly based on experimental characterization and induction. He adopted a distrustful attitude toward mathematics and deduction used in the scientific method. Bacon only had his original ideas in the methods he advocated, but these original ideas were not immediately applied. It was not until the nineteenth century that Bacon's qualitative-inductive method received attention due to the development of evolutionary theory in geology and biology.

When evaluating Bacon’s methodology, Marx once said:

“Science is an experimental science, and the scientific method consists in using rational methods to organize perceptual materials, summarize, analyze, Comparison, observation and experiment are rational methods and important conditions.”

In terms of applied science, Bacon was mainly interested in craftsmen’s technology and industrial production processes, so he was called “the philosopher of industrial science.” ".

Bacon was also an essayist. The essays, which he published in 1624, are very beautifully written and are worth reading. There are many famous sentences in it:

Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people smart, mathematics makes people thoughtful, physics makes people profound, ethics makes people solemn, logic and rhetoric make people eloquent; Whatever you learn becomes your character. Truth is a product of time, not authority. Arranging time reasonably means saving time.

[Edit this paragraph] Personal treatises

In 1597, Bacon published his first work, "Collected Essays on Essays". In the book, he condensed his understanding and thinking about society and his understanding of life into many philosophical aphorisms from Bacon's "On the Wisdom of the Ancients", which were welcomed by readers.

In 1605, Bacon completed the two-volume "On the Progress of Learning" in English. This is a work that takes knowledge as its research object. It is part of Bacon's grand ideal and plan to comprehensively reform knowledge with knowledge as its field. In the book, Bacon fiercely attacked the obscurantism of the Middle Ages, demonstrated the great role of knowledge, and suggested the unsatisfactory status quo of knowledge and its remedies. In this book, Bacon proposed an outline for a systematic scientific encyclopedia, which played a major role in later compiling encyclopedias by the French Encyclopedia School headed by Diderot in the 18th century.

In 1609, when Bacon was deputy attorney general, he published a third book, "On the Wisdom of the Ancients." He believes that in ancient times, there existed the oldest wisdom of mankind, and the lost oldest wisdom can be discovered through the study of ancient fables.

Bacon originally planned to write a six-volume encyclopedic work - "The Great Revival", which was his masterpiece to revive science and reshape human knowledge, but he failed In order to complete the expected plan, only the first two parts were published. "New Instruments" published in 1620 was the second part of the book. "New Instruments" is Bacon's most important philosophical work. It puts forward the principles and methods of empirical knowledge pioneered by Bacon in modern times. This book is the antithesis of Aristotle's Instruments.

After the end of his political career, Bacon completed the book "The Chronicles of Henry VII" in just a few months. This work was highly praised by later historians and was hailed as "the most important work of modern history". A milestone in historiography."

Around 1623, Bacon wrote "New Atlantis", an unfinished utopian work first published by Rollet in the second year of his death. In the book, the author describes the ideal social blueprint for his new pursuit and yearning, and designs a country called the "True Color Column". In this country, science dominates everything. This is the "great renaissance" of science advocated by Bacon's graduation. A concentrated expression of thoughts and beliefs.

In addition, Bacon left many works after his death, which were later compiled and published by many experts and scholars, including "On the Nature of Things", "Clue of the Labyrinth" and "Critiques of Various Philosophies" "Great Events in Nature", "On Human Knowledge", etc.

Representative works

"The Progress of Learning", 1605

"New Instruments", 1620

"Collected Essays" , 1624

"The Chronicle of Henry VII"

"On the Nature of Things"

"The Clue of the Labyrinth"

"Every Critique of Philosophy"

"Great Events in Nature"

"On Human Knowledge"

"Bacon's Essay on Life"

[ Edit this paragraph] Selected readings of works

"Of studies"

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a representative figure of the British Renaissance. He was an outstanding philosopher Home, scientist and essayist. He became the founder of modern science through his persistence in thinking scientifically and his attitude of relying on observation rather than authoritative doctrine to gain knowledge. His "Collected Essays of Bacon" is a model of this genre in English literature and is hailed as an important milestone in the development of English prose. Some of the fresh vocabulary he used also entered the English literary tradition.

The main content of "Of Studies":

"Of Studies" is the most famous essay in Bacon's collection of 58 essays. The article analyzes the main purpose of learning, the different learning methods adopted by different people and how learning has a subtle impact on people's temperament and character. The language of "Of studies" is generous and persuasive, and the structure is concise and compact, revealing to readers Bacon's natural and objective attitude towards learning.

Of Studies is the most popular of Bacon's 58 essays. It analyzes what studies cheifly serve for, the different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies, and how studies exert influence over human character. Forceful and persuasive, Compact and precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacon's mature attitude towards learning.