·  At the age of 12 he entered Trinity College in Cambridge

·  In 1577 he took a position a diplomatic position as assistant to the Ambassador in France

·  In 1579, after his father’s death, he came back to England and continued his study of Law

·  In 1584 he was elected to Parliament where he sit for the next 36 years

·  In 1596 Queen Elizabeth appointed him as Extraordinary Counsel, although she had been previously very upset with Bacon’s opposition to the introduction to a new tax

·  Immediately afterwards, he entered the service of the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, soldier, rising star, favourite of the Queen, whose career culminated in a disastrous coup attempt, which failed and caused his arrest and eventually his execution

·  As from 1603, when James I succeeded Elizabeth, Bacon’s prospect for advancement dramatically improved year by year till he was appointed Lord Keeper of the Royal Seal (his father’s former office) and in 1618 Lord Chancellor

·  In 1621 he was arrested and charged with bribery

·  He was heavily fined and sentenced to a prison term in the Tower of London

·  The King waived his fine and free him from prison after only 4 days, but he never allowed to hold political office again.

The Greek word organon means “instrument” or “tool,” and Bacon clearly felt he was supplying a new instrument for guiding and correcting the mind in its quest for a true understanding of nature. The title also glances at Aristotle’s Organon (a collection that includes his Categories and his Prior and Posterior Analytics) and thus suggests a “new instrument” destined to transcend or replace the older, no longer serviceable one. 

In Book Iof the New Organon, Bacon introduces his famous doctrine of the “idols.” These are characteristic errors, natural tendencies, or defects that beset the mind and prevent it from achieving a full and accurate understanding of nature.

Bacon points out that recognizing and counteracting the idols is as important to the study of nature as the recognition and refutation of bad arguments is to logic. Incidentally, he uses the word “idol” – from the Greek eidolon (“image” or “phantom”).

There are four type of idols:

·  Idols of the Tribe

They have their origin in the production of false concepts due to human nature, in its social use, because the structure of human understanding is like a crooked mirror, which causes distorted reflections (of things in the external world).

Idols of the Cave

They consist of conceptions or doctrines which are dear to the individual who cherishes them, without possessing any evidence of their truth. These idols are due to the preconditioned system of every individual, comprising education, custom, or accidental or contingent experiences.

Idols of the Market Place

These idols are based on false conceptions which are derived from public human communication. They enter our minds quietly by a combination of words and names, so that it comes to pass that not only does reason govern words, but words react on our understanding.

Idols of the Theatre

According to the insight that the world is a stage, the Idols of the Theatre are prejudices stemming from received or traditional philosophical systems. These systems resemble plays in so far as they render fictional worlds, which were never exposed to an experimental check or to a test by experience. The idols of the theatre thus have their origin in dogmatic philosophy or in wrong laws of demonstration.

The inductive method starts from sensible experience and moves via natural history (providing sense-data as guarantees) to lower axioms or propositions, which are derived from the tables of presentation or from the abstraction of notions. 

Bacon does not identify experience with everyday experience, but presupposes that method corrects and extends sense-data into facts, which go together with his setting up of tables (tables of presence and of absence and tables of comparison or of degrees, i.e., degrees of absence or presence). 

“Bacon's antipathy to simple enumeration as the universal method of science derived, first of all, from his preference for theories that deal with interior physical causes, which are not immediately observable” The last type can be supplemented by tables of counter-instances, which may suggest experiments:

• 1627 The utopian science-fiction novel The New Atlantis, which was published in unfinished form a year after his death.
• It represents an early blueprint and prophecy of the modern research center and international scientific community
  
• It is an utopian-philosophical novel, which takes place in Salomon’s House (also known as the College of the Six Days Works), a centrally organized research facility where specially trained teams of investigators collect data, conduct experiments, and (most importantly from Bacon’s point of view) apply the knowledge they gain to produce “things of use and practice for man’s life.”
• These new arts and inventions they eventually share with the outside world