Ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №1 Course paper Theme: Francis Bacon The Man who perfected the English essays

CHAPTER.II

II.1. Contribution In English Literature

Bacon used to write in the Elizabethan Era. He has given us a true picture of the English society of his time. We remain indebted for the aphorisms his essays carry. They are filled with sensuousness and wit. He does not talk plainly about what he favors, rather he presents a balance sheet of advantages and disadvantages.
Best of His Quotes
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content, to begin with, doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
“Reading maketh a full man, writing an exact man".
“Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.”

II.2. Francis Bacon : Essays.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the English philosopher, was instrumental in the development of the Scientific Revolution in the late 18th century even though he had passed away centuries before. The “Scientific Revolution” was an important movement that emphasized Europe’s shift toward modernized science in fields such as mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry (Grant). It was an extension of the Renaissance period, which then led to the Enlightenment which brought advances across all areas of human endeavor. Francis Bacon, in particular, is remembered today primarily for the “scientific method” as a way of establishing what is true from what is false perception (a method that still lies at the heart of modern science). Bacon’s primary focus in his writings revolved around the practice of inductive reasoning, which he believed to be a complement to practical observation (Grant). Most people before this period followed the Aristotelian methodology for scientific arguments. This idea maintained that “if sufficiently clever men discussed a subject long enough, the truth would eventually be discovered” (“History – Francis Bacon.”). However irrational this sounds, the Scientific Revolution helped replace this outdated system of thinking with Bacon’s scientific method. Bacon argued that any proper argument required “evidence from the real world” (“History – Francis Bacon.”). His revolutionary ideas about empirical information helped propel him toward political and societal importance and fame.
LITERARY CONTEXT
Francis Bacon had a passion for metaphors, analogies, and vivid imagery. He was a rhetorical writer and his essays highlight his wisdom and incisive mind. His first book was released in 1597 followed by later editions with added essays that were released in 1612 and 1625. Each essay that Bacon wrote reveals his knowledge of Latin and draws on ancient Roman wisdom through axioms and proverbs. Additionally, Bacon uses wit as a way of getting his point across to his audience and this indeed causes the reader to reflect on his or her own beliefs and values. A key aspect of Bacon’s literature is its “terseness and epigrammatic force” (De). By managing to pack all of his thoughts and ideas into quick, brief statements, Bacon deepens the reach and impact of his work. His writing deviated from the typical Ciceronian style of the time, which was characterized by “melodious language, clarity, and forcefulness of presentation” (“Ciceronian.”). His statements are meaningful particularly because they are straight and to the point. The brevity of his ideas also facilitates the communication of his arguments, which is significant because, at the time, a solid, meaningful education was hard to come by. As such, Bacon’s work helped spread the notions that would eventually bear fruit with the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Francis Bacon’s Essays cover a wide variety of topics and styles, ranging from individual to societal issues and from commonplace to existential. Another important aspect of the appeal of Bacon’s essays are that they weigh the argument at hand with multiple points of view. Bacon’s essays were received at the time with great praise, adoration, and reverence (Potter). He was noted for borrowing ideas from the works of historical writers such as Aristotle (Harmon), and, as such, he represents a continuation of this philosophical school of thought. Another important impact of the Scientific Revolution and Bacon’s literature is that it allowed common people of the era to question old, traditional beliefs. They began to consider everything with reason, which led to a greater sense of self as well as moral and ethical standards. By having the opportunity to judge for themselves, the people were able to advance society a step closer to a form of democracy.
Bacon appears as an unusually original thinker for several reasons. In the first place he was writing, in the early 17th century, in something of a philosophical vacuum so far as England was concerned. The last great English philosopher, William of Ockham, had died in 1347, two and a half centuries before the Advancement of Learning; the last really important philosopher, John Wycliffe, had died not much later, in 1384.The 15th century had been intellectually cautious and torpid, leavened only by the first small importations of Italian humanism by such cultivated dilettantes as Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester, and John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. The Christian Platonism of the Renaissance became more established at the start of the 16th century in the circle of Erasmus’s English friends: the so-called Oxford Reformers—John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas More. But that initiative succumbed to the ecclesiastical frenzies of the age. Philosophy did not revive until Richard Hooker in the 1590s put forward his moderate Anglican version of Thomist rationalism in the form of a theory of the Elizabethan church settlement. This happened a few years before Bacon began to write.In England three systems of thought prevailed in the late 16th century: Aristotelian Scholasticism, scholarly and aesthetic humanism, and occultism. Aristotelian orthodoxy had been reanimated in Roman Catholic Europe after the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation had lent authority to the massive output of the 16th-century Spanish theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez. In England learning remained in general formally Aristotelian, even though some criticism of Aristotle’s logic had reached Cambridge at the time Bacon was a student there in the mid-1570s. But such criticism sought simplicity for the sake of rhetorical effectiveness and not, as Bacon’s critique was to do, in the interests of substantial, practically useful knowledge of nature. The Christian humanist tradition of Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and, more recently, of Erasmus was an active force. In contrast to orthodox asceticism, this tradition, in some aspects, inclined to glorify the world and its pleasures and to favour the beauty of art, language, and nature, while remaining comparatively indifferent to religious speculation. Attraction to the beauty of nature, however, if it did not cause was at any rate combined with neglect and disdain for the knowledge of nature. Educationally it fostered the sharp separation between the natural sciences and the humanities that has persisted ever since. Philosophically it was skeptical, nourishing itself, notably in the case of Montaigne, on the rediscovery in 1562 of Sextus Empiricus’ comprehensive survey of the skepticism of Greek thought after Aristotle.The third important current of thought in the world into which Bacon was born was that of occultism, or esotericism, that is, the pursuit of mystical analogies between man and the cosmos, or the search for magical powers over natural processes, as in alchemy and the concoction of elixirs and panaceas. Although its most famous exponent, Paracelsus, was German, occultism was well rooted in England, appealing as it did to the individualistic style of English credulity. Robert Fludd, the leading English occultist, was an approximate contemporary of Bacon. Bacon himself has often been held to have been some kind of occultist, and, even more questionably, to have been a member of the Rosicrucian order, but the sort of “natural magic” he espoused and advertised was altogether different from that of the esoteric philosophers.There was a fourth mode of Renaissance thought outside England to which Bacon’s thinking bore some affinity. Like that of the humanists it was inspired by Plato, at least to some extent, but by another part of his thought, namely its cosmology. This was the boldly systematic nature-philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and of a number of Italians, in particular Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizzi, Tommaso Campanella, and Giordano Bruno. Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno were highly speculative, but Telesio and, up to a point, Campanella affirmed the primacy of sense perception. In a way that Bacon was later to elaborate formally and systematically, they held knowledge of nature to be a matter of extrapolating from the findings of the senses. There is no allusion to these thinkers in Bacon’s writings. But although he was less metaphysically adventurous than they were, he shared with them the conviction that the human mind is fitted for knowledge of nature and must derive it from observation, not from abstract reasoning. Bacon drew up an ambitious plan for a comprehensive work that was to appear under the title of Instauratio Magna (“The Great Instauration”), but like many of his literary schemes, it was never completed. Its first part, De Augmentis Scientiarum, appeared in 1623 and is an expanded, Latinized version of his earlier work the Advancement of Learning, published in 1605 (the first really important philosophical book to be written in English). The De Augmentis Scientiarum contains a division of the sciences, a project that had not been embarked on to any great purpose since Aristotle and, in a smaller way, since the Stoics. The second part of Bacon’s scheme, the Novum Organum, which had already appeared in 1620, gives “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature,” in other words, an account of the correct method of acquiring natural knowledge. This is what Bacon believed to be his most important contribution and is the body of ideas with which his name is most closely associated. The fields of possible knowledge having been charted in De Augmentis Scientiarum, the proper method for their cultivation was set out in Novum Organum. Third, there is natural history, the register of matters of observed natural fact, which is the indispensable raw material for the inductive method. Bacon wrote “histories,” in this sense, of the wind, of life and death, and of the dense and the rare, and, near the end of his life, he was working on his Sylva Sylvarum: Or A Natural Historie (“Forest of Forests”), in effect, a collection of collections, a somewhat uncritical miscellany.Fourth, there is the “ladder of the intellect,” consisting of thoroughly worked out examples of the Baconian method in application, the most successful one being the exemplary account in Novum Organum of how his inductive “tables” show heat to be a kind of motion of particles. Fifth, there are the “forerunners,” or pieces of scientific knowledge arrived at by pre-Baconian, common sense methods. Sixth and finally, there is the new philosophy, or science itself, seen by Bacon as a task for later generations armed with his method, advancing into all the regions of possible discovery set out in the Advancement of Learning. The wonder is not so much that Bacon did not complete this immense design but that he got as far with it as he did.In the first book of Novum Organum Bacon discusses the causes of human error in the pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was original in looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological causes. He invented the metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of human error. Bacon distinguishes four idols, or main varieties of proneness to error. The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are universal to mankind, or, at any rate, very common. One, for example, is a tendency toward oversimplification, that is, toward supposing, for the sake of tidiness, that there exists more order in a field of inquiry than there actually is. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are in fact unrepresentative.The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses, another on the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on the totality.The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which language is responsible. It has always been a distinguishing feature of English philosophy to emphasize the unreliable nature of language, which is seen, nominalistically, as a human improvisation. Nominalists argue that even if the power of speech is given by God, it was Adam who named the beasts and thereby gave that power its concrete realization. But language, like other human achievements, partakes of human imperfections. Bacon was particularly concerned with the superficiality of distinctions drawn in everyday language, by which things fundamentally different are classed together (whales and fishes as fish, for example) and things fundamentally similar are distinguished (ice, water, and steam). But he was also concerned, like later critics of language, with the capacity of words to embroil men in the discussion of the meaningless (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune). This aspect of Bacon’s thought has been almost as influential as his account of natural knowledge, inspiring a long tradition of skeptical rationalism, from the Enlightenment to Comtian positivism of the 19th and logical positivism of the 20th centuries.The fourth and final group of idols is that of the idols of the theatre, that is to say mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest, Baconian sense of the term, in which it embraces all beliefs of any degree of generality. Bacon’s critical polemic in discussing the idols of the theatre is lively but not very penetrating philosophically. He speaks, for example, of the vain affectations of the humanists, but they were not a very apt subject for his criticism. Humanists were really anti-philosophers who not unreasonably turned their attention to nonphilosophical matters because of the apparent inability of philosophers to arrive at conclusions that were either generally agreed upon or useful. Bacon does have something to say about the skeptical philosophy to which humanists appealed when they felt the need for it. Insofar as skepticism involves doubts about deductive reasoning, he has no quarrel with it. Insofar as it is applied not to reason but to the ability of the senses to supply the reason with reliable premises to work from, he brushes it aside too easily.Bacon’s attack on Scholastic orthodoxy is surprisingly rhetorical. It may be that he supposed it to be already sufficiently discredited by its incurably contentious or disputatious character. In his view it was a largely verbal technique for the indefinite prolongation of inconclusive argument by the drawing of artificial distinctions. He has some awareness of the central weakness of Aristotelian science, namely its attempt to derive substantial conclusions from premises that are intuitively evident, and argues that the apparently obvious axioms are neither clear nor indisputable. Perhaps Bacon’s most fruitful disagreement with Scholasticism is his belief that natural knowledge is cumulative, a process of discovery, not of conservation. Living in a time when new worlds were being found on Earth, he was able to free himself from the view that everything men needed to know had already been revealed in the Bible or by Aristotle.