Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon rose to the very top of the English state: Lord Chancellor, the highest judicial office in the realm, a brilliant essayist and a tireless courtier. He was also the prophet of the new science. For two thousand years, he argued, the Western mind had turned the crank of Aristotelian logic – deducing conclusions from authoritative premises – and had ground out mountains of dispute that were brilliant and empty. To know nature truly you must interrogate it: gather observations, run experiments, rise from the particular fact to the general law. This is the method of induction, and Bacon presented it as an altogether new instrument of knowing.

He named his central book for exactly that – the Novum Organum, the new instrument, to replace Aristotle's Organon. Its liveliest part is the doctrine of the idols, the phantoms that warp the human mind: idols of the Tribe, common to everyone; idols of the Cave, peculiar to each person; idols of the Marketplace, bred in language itself; idols of the Theatre, inherited from other men's systems. It is still a shrewd register of why we reason badly. And in the unfinished New Atlantis he sketched a society built around a state research house – "Salomon's House"; the Royal Society, founded forty years later, took the fantasy for a blueprint. Bacon himself discovered little in nature. But he gave science its self-understanding.

Now the dark part, and it is built into the very shape of his life. In 1621, at the height of his power, the Lord Chancellor was accused of taking bribes from the litigants whose cases he judged. He did not wriggle – he confessed to twenty-three counts. "I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years," he said, "but it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years." He was fined forty thousand pounds, shut in the Tower, and barred from public office for life. The man who had drawn up a meticulous register of the idols that corrupt judgment could not himself withstand the oldest and dirtiest of them. The prophet of clear method fell for plain gold in the purse.

The end came almost too fitting to be true. In March 1626 Bacon was riding in a coach through the snow near Highgate when a thought ran through him: if salt preserves meat, might cold preserve it too? He stopped the coach, bought a hen from a woman by the road, and stuffed it with snow with his own hands there in the cold, to test the guess. He took a chill, the chill turned to pneumonia, and within days he was dead in a borrowed bed, finishing a letter that compared him to Pliny the Elder, who died going too close to Vesuvius. The founder of the experimental method was killed by his own experiment. No better or bitterer seal could have been set on the life.