Reading makes people wise, and reading history makes people smart.

Mathematics makes people precise, physics makes people profound, ethics makes people solemn, and logic and rhetoric make people eloquent.

This sentence comes from "On Learning" and is the most famous piece 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.

About the author

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a representative figure of the British Renaissance, a British materialist philosopher, scientist and essayist. Born into a noble family, his father was the Lord Privy Seal of Queen Elizabeth and a baron. In the spring of 1626, in order to test whether refrigeration could preserve meat for a long time, Bacon was frozen in a snowstorm, contracted a severe cold, and died.

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.