Write briefly about Francis Bacon.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an Englishman best known
for his essays, who played an important role in acceptance and popularization of
experimental science and the scientific method of solving problems. He was also a
philosopher, jurist, and statesman.

Bacon was born in
London, to an important counsellor to Queen Elizabeth I. He was elected to Parliament in
1584, and knighted  In 1603. He held several government positions, notably lord
chancellor in 1618.  In 1621, Bacon was convicted of taking bribes and imprisoned
briefly.  Later the charges were established to be false. However, on this account Bacon
withdrew from public life and devoted rest of his life to study and
writing

Bacon developed the formal essay style and is
considered to be the first English essayist.  One of his major works was a collection of
10 essays dealing with subjects like death, fear, truth, and wealth explain how to lead
a sensible life.

Bacon held that claims to knowledge
prevalent in his time, particularly the ones based medieval science, were doubtful
because they were based on poor logic. He believed the mind of people has a tendency to
make hasty generalizations, that interfere with the attainment of knowledge. At the same
time he also stated that the mind could discover truths that would enable humanity to
conquer disease, poverty, and war by gaining power over nature. Bacon believed that a
new world of culture and leisure could be gained by inquiry into the laws and processes
of nature.

He argued that to discover such knowledge, the
human mind must rid itself of four prejudices, which he called Idols of the Mind. These
include

1. the tendency of general human perception
   to generalize too quickly,


2. the tendency of each person to
   base a knowledge of things on individual experiences, education, and tastes,
   


3. the dependence on language to communicate,
   and


4. the influence of previous philosophies and laws of
   reasoning that are merely products of human
   imagination.

Bacon advocated inductive method
of investigation, which he described as four step process consisting
of:

1. Listing all known cases in which a
   phenomenon occurs


2. Listing similar cases where the
   phenomenon does not occur


3. Listing the cases in which the
   phenomenon occurs in differing degrees


4. Examination of the
   three lists, to understand the cause of a
   phenomenon.