Francis Bacon Essays - in Contemporary American English
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TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Essay 1 — What is Truth?
Essay 4 — Of Revenge
Essay 12 — Of boldness
Essay 34 — Of Riches
Essay 43 — Of Beauty
Essay 57 -- Of anger
Introduction
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a true man of the British Renaissance, for he became a
polymath: philosopher, scientist, essayist and jurist. In addition, his works
themselves show that he was a master rhetorician.
Given his manifold and versatile mind, ambition, and practical nature, Lord
Bacon is a fine example of the British Renaissance that also produced William
Shakespeare.
Born into an aristocratic family —his father was Lord Keeper of the Seal and
his uncle Elizabeth's principal minister— he was groomed and bound to become a
courtier. At the age of thirteen he set off for Cambridge, where he studied
law. Later he was elected to Parliament and appointed Queen's Counsel (1598).
In 1618, under James he rose to higher appointments until he finally became
Lord High Chancellor, the loftiest judicial post in England. Knighted in 1603,
he assumed the title of Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans. Just as his
ascendancy had been short of spectacular, his descent was as vertiginous as it
was tragic and pathetic. Charged with and having admitted accepting bribes from
litigants, he was imprisoned briefly, banished from court, and removed from
public office.
After five years of retirement, while experimenting with snow to grasp the
process of refrigeration, an acute chill killed him.
Having developed a method of reasoning that required experimentation, he’s
deemed to be the father of the inductive
method.
Much like the French philosopher and mathematician
Rene Descartes, Bacon’s method was to doubt received knowledge. He himself
described his method as a "passion for research, a power of suspending
judgment with patience, of meditating with pleasure, of assenting with caution
... of arranging my thought with scrupulous pains ... and with no blind
admiration for antiquity."
In The Advancement of Learning (1605), he
explained his wish to redo all the sciences of his own time, and based them not
in syllogistic deduction but in experimentation. In the Novum Organum (New
Instrument, 1620), he explained the inductive method of reasoning, the
method which proceeds from the particular to the general.
Famous is his description of the "idols,"
his word for bad habits of mind that cause men to fall into error and prevent
them from seeing the truth. He hoped to eliminate the superstitions and
quibbling which during the Middle Ages had confused science and philosophy.
Much of the education he received at Cambridge he rejected, considering it
useless and all but Aristotelian rehashing.
The New Atlantis (unfinished and published in 1627
after his death) is a Utopian sketch (like Sir Thomas More's Utopia) of
an ideal country of scholars, where the goal was above all scientific
achievement. Bacon’s Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) brought him great fame in
world literature. These 58 essays are meditations and maxims contain much
wisdom and nimbleness of wit. It is a practical book filled with recipes for
living a good (moral) life and achieving success—a self-help book. In Essay
XXXIV, Of Riches, he says: “There’s no real use for great riches, unless it is
in the distribution.” What appears on the surface to be a simple remark, it
contains a profound truth: we can only become wealthy if we think of others.
This was true during Bacon’s times as well as our time; to wit: the legacies of
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Although his Essays
—as all his other books and articles— were written in Latin, one fine
translation into English remains dominant today. Yet, the translation includes
archaisms: thous, thees, doths, plus intractable syntax and punctuation,
causing readers to abandon the book after laboring through two or three pages. A
pity, indeed! Imagine going through life ignoring this nugget of wisdom: There is no excellent beauty that has not
some strangeness in the proportion. This adage seems to have influence many
a writer, to include Edgar Allan Poe, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and many
others.
Our translation renders Bacon’s Essays into contemporary American English,
making them easy to grasp, while preserving the author’s style.
The poet Alexander Pope described him as "the
wisest, brightest, and meanest of mankind." Bacon’s Essays contain no mean or wicked ideas; his thought is deep and
universal, and deserves to be read today.
Read "Selected Essays of Francis Bacon" in contemporary American English: available in
KINDLE amazon.com $1.99
If you don't own a KINDLE at this time you may download "Selected Essays of Francis Bacon"
into your computer for only $0.99. Use the Paypal button below:
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