Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House in London and died on 9 April 1626 at Highgate. He held prominent legal and political offices in England, rising to Lord Chancellor, while pursuing a wide program of natural philosophy alongside his public career. In October 1620 he published the Novum Organum as the second part of his larger Instauratio Magna, arguing against the syllogistic, deductive logic inherited from Aristotle and proposing instead a method of eliminative induction, reasoning step by step from particular observations toward general conclusions, using organized tables of instances to rule out false explanations and uncover the underlying causes of natural phenomena. He also described four Idols of the Mind, the Tribe, the Cave, the Market and the Theatre, as habitual sources of error a careful investigator must recognize and set aside. The Novum Organum displaced Aristotle's own Organon as the standard text on method for natural investigation and is widely credited with shaping the experimental, evidence based approach that took hold across Europe in the following decades, including at the Royal Society founded in London in 1660.