With the advent of the reign of James I., a new opportunity opened to Bacon, and by paying court to the King he made rapid progress. He was knighted in 1603: and in the following year a pension of £60 was attached to his office of learned counsel. In 1606 he succeeded in his ambition to marry a wealthy woman by win ning the hand of Alice Barnham. In 1607 he secured the long-coveted solicitor-generalship, and thus came into the possession of what, in money of to-clay, would amount to £4000 a year. This appointment Bacon had probably se cured by Ins defense of royal supremacy in a dispute concerning the King's jurisdiction over some border counties. From now on, he vol unteered much advice to his sovereign, who, how ever, refused to be guided by him. Bacon's advice was marked by a strange mixture of great wisdom and unworthy trivialities. He showed wonderful insight into the political situation, and suggested plans which, if carried out, might have averted much of the trouble that ensued. But James was not a king to listen to sugges tions conflicting with his inclinations; while Bacon unfortunately did not possess a character that could give weight to his advice. In the coming struggle Bacon became more and more obsequious. lie justified himself in his own eyes by the excuse that he was keeping in touch with the King for the good of his country; but it was now obvious to every patriot that no good would cone to his country from the wilful King. In 1613 Bacon was appointed atto•ney gcneral ; and in this new office he soon became entangled in dispute with Coke on constitutional principles, and made himself obnoxious to the peo ple at large by his unscrupulous cupidity. His subservience to the King, however, served him in good stead for a few more years. In 1617 he was appointed to the position his father had held before him, that of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and in the year following he attained to the high dignity of the Lord Chancellorship and the title of Baron Verulam. In 1621 he was created Viscount Saint Albans. The enjoyment of his new honors was, however, very brief. The storm which had been gathering against the Govern ment broke first on Bacon's head. On the as sembling of Parliament he was charged with bribery. During the trial he himself confessed to the Lords that "there had been a great deal of corruption and neglect," for which he "was heartily and penitently sorry." On the first of May he was deprived of the Seal, and then followed sentence on him, condemning him to pay a fine of £40.000, to be imprisoned during the King's pleasure, and to be excluded from Parlia ment and from Court. The fine, however, was remitted by the King, and the imprisonment lasted only two days. Sometime afterwards he was even allowed to appear at Court. It seems that he now conceived the hope of reentering political life: but even in those debauched days this was impossible, and he thenceforth devoted himself to literature and science. The imme diate occasion of his death was a void caught in making an experiment to test the power of snow to preserve flesh. He died in the house of the Earl of Arundel, to which he had been removed with the fatal chill upon him, April 9, 1626.
It may be seen from the preceding sketch that the political life of Bacon was, on the whole, not an achievement of which he could well be proud. Nis glory is in his literary and scientific work.
The first edition of his Essays appeared in 1597; his two books on the Adca-uucement of Learning in 1605 (this work was afterwards treated as the first pert of the projected Install ratio Magna); his De Sapicntia Icternm (Wis dom of the Ancients), in 1609; a revised edi tion of the Essays in 1612, while the final form was given to them in 1625; the Novunt Organum (so called with reference to Aristotle's old Organon)' appeared in Latin, in 1620, and was treated as the second part of the Instauratio. The third part of this comprehensively planned work, or at least a section of the third part, ap peared in 1622, under the title Historia Nate rolls et Experimentalis ad condendant sophia-in ; sire Uni•crsi. Of the other three contemplated parts of the Instau ratio only two prefaces remain. In 1622 he also published his chief historical work, History of the Reign of Henry VII. In 1623 appeared his De Augmentis Seicntiarum, a Latin translation and extension of his Advancement of Learning.
His last work, which was published posthu mously (1627), was Sylva Sylvarum, a book whicb showed very conclusively that he was not able, in practice, to live up to his scientific theory. The New Atlantis, which appeared at the same time with the last-mentioned work, had been written as early as 1617. Besides these, he wrote several minor books and papers, which need not here be named. It is enough to say that his writings embrace almost all subjects, from jurisprudence—which he treated not as a mere lawyer, but as a legislator and philoso pher—to morality and medicine. The Essays are a treasury of rich knowledge of human rela tions, and the style in which they are written has seldom been equaled by any English writer.
Bacon's reputation as an original philosopher, as an epoch-make• in philosophic and scientific thought, was higher a generation or two ago than it is now. Yet his Nocum Organum has done, perhaps, more than any other single work to ward inculcating into science the spirit of unbiased, acettrate, and careful observation and experimentation. In it he maintains that all prepossessions, called 'idols,' must be aban doned, whether they be the common property of the race due to common modes of thought (`idols of the tribe'), or the peculiar possession of the individual ('idols of the cave') ; whether they arise from too great a dependence on lan guage ('idols of the market-place'), or from tradition ('idols of the theatre'). These idols once discarded, the seeker after truth must pro ceed to interrogate nature, not contenting him self with accepting what she has to say of her own accord. lie must collect facts, arrange them in order, and then advance to the discovery of the laws that control their workings. This can not be accomplished by the Aristotelian induetio per enumerationem simplicem, or mere inventory of all possible cases of the phenomena under investigation; but negative instances, i.e. cases in which the phenomena are absent, must be ex amined to discover wherein these instances differ from the affirmative instances—all this with a view to discover the 'form' of the phenomena, or their abiding essence. This insistence upon the formal cause has its significance only in connection with Bacon's exclusion of final causes or purposes from the domain of natural science. Not that inn-pose has no existence in the uni verse. On the contrary, Bacon believed in an overruling Providence with a perverse piety ill in accord with his life. But though religion can imagine the purposes of God, the business of the scientist is to understand the causal se quences of nature as controlled by the essences of phenomena. In ethics Bacon is to be re garded as the forerunner of the English Hedonis tic School (see HEDONISM), of which his disciple, Hobbes, is usually regarded as the founder. Bacon's own scientific work amounted to little. It is true that he propounded the theory that heat is a kind of motion, but this suggestion seems rather to have been a happy guess than a belief scientifically grounded. He was an opponent of the Copernican system of astron omy, which he regarded as a strange fancy; and he seems to have known nothing of the work of Kepler or of Harvey. His enthusi asm for science was not disinterested, hut was due to a belief that 'knowledge is power'; that human conditions can best be improved by a more thorough acquaintance with the world in which human life must be lived.
Bacon's collected works were first published by Blackbourne, in 1730; another collection, with a life, by Mallet, in 1740; a handsome but ill arranged edition is that of Montagu in 17 vols. (London, 1S25-36) ; but the best, it is generally admitted, is that edited by Spedding, Ellis, and Ileath, in 7 vols. (1857-59), with Life and Let ters, 7 vols., ed. by Spedding (1861-74). A noted review of Bacon's character and works is to be found among Slacaulay's Essays. For more temperate estimates consult: Fowler. Bacon: "English Philosophers Series" (London, 1881) ; Church, Life of Bacon: "Men of Letters Series" (New York, 1884): Abbott, Francis Bacon: An Account of his Life and Works (London, 1885) ; and John Nichol, Francis Bacon: his Life and Philosophy (London, 1888-89).