Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans (January 22, 1561 – April 9, 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and created Viscount St Albans in 1621; the peerage titles became extinct upon his death.
He began his professional life as a lawyer, but he has become best known as an philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. His works establish a methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method.
Bacon's works include his Essays, as well as the Colours of Good and Evil and the Meditationes Sacrae, all published in 1597; In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, a eulogy for the queen written in 1609; and various philosophical works which constitute the fragmentary and incomplete Instauratio magna, the most important part of which is the Novum organum (published 1620).
Bacon did not propose an actual philosophy, but rather a method of developing philosophy; he wrote that, while philosophy at the time used the deductive syllogism to interpret nature, the philosopher should instead proceed through inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to law. Before beginning this induction, the inquirer is to free his mind from certain false notions or tendencies which distort the truth. These are called "Idols" (idola), and are of four kinds: "Idols of the Tribe" (idola tribus), which are common to the race; "Idols of the Den" (idola specus), which are peculiar to the individual; "Idols of the Marketplace" (idola fori), coming from the misuse of language; and "Idols of the Theater" (idola theatri), which result from an abuse of authority. The end of induction is the discovery of forms, the ways in which natural phenomena occur, the causes from which they proceed.
Bacon's somewhat fragmentary ethical system, derived through use of his methods, is explicated in the seventh and eighth books of his De augmentis scientiarum (1623). He distinguishes between duty to the community, an ethical matter, and duty to God, a purely religious matter. Any moral action is the action of the human will, which is governed by reason and spurred on by the passions; habit is what aids men in directing their will toward the good. No universal rules can be made, as both situations and men's characters differ.
Bacon separates distinctly religion and philosophy, though the two can coexist. Where philosophy is based on reason, faith is based on revelation, and therefore irrational – in De augmentis he writes that "[t]he more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honor is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith."
Aside from these works, many theorize that Sir Francis Bacon was one of the anonymous authors of the authentically questionable William Shakespeare plays.