“Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand, on the two and twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord 1560 (old style). His father was that famous counsellor, to Queen Elizabeth, the second prop of the kingdom in his time, Sir Nicholas Bacon, knight, lordkeeper of the great seal of England; a lord of known prudence, sufficiency, moderation, and integrity. His mother Anne, one of the daughters of Sir Anthony Cook; unto whom the erudition of King Edward the Sixth had been committed, a choice lady, and eminent for piety, virtue, and learning, being exquisitely skilled, for a woman, in the Greek and Latin tongues. These being the parents, you may easily imagine what the issue was like to be; having had whatsoever nature and breeding could put into him."

"1

Very little is known of Bacon's early life. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. His three years at the University ended in disappointment. He was oppressed with the barrenness of the current intellectual atmosphere. Just such a feeling of disappointment with university education was a little later to be expressed by Descartes, whose in

1 Dr. Rawley's Life of Bacon, published 1657; reprinted by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, Bacon's Works, vol. I; this reference, vol. I, p. 3.

tellectual reactions to the learning of his time and whose efforts toward intellectual reconstruction have many points of similarity with Bacon's program for building the sciences anew. The tendency of thought to be revolutionary was characteristic of the founders of modern philosophy. With Descartes, however, judgment was long suspended, and his thought took constructive form only after a prolonged period of doubt. Bacon on the other hand never floundered. The central purpose of his life, about which he was never in doubt, and from which he never departed, was clearly formed before he left the University. "While he was commorant in the university, about sixteen years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart to myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day." 1 Coincident with the realization of the futility and barrenness of the Aristotelian philosophy, came the determination to seek a new method of scientific investigation. This resolution, formed while a mere boy in college, is regarded by Spedding "as the most important event of his life." "From that moment he had a vocation which employed and stimulated all the energies of his mind, gave a value to every vacant interval of time, an interest and significance to every random thought and casual accession of knowledge; an object to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough to fill the soul forever with religious and 1 Dr. Rawley's Life of Bacon, vol. I, p. 4.