The Essays (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): or Counsels Civil and Moral

By Francis Bacon and Kenneth A. Richman

Francis Bacon once wrote, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. . . ." This is a book to be chewed and digested, and these essays make as satisfying a meal today as when the first edition was published in 1597. Indeed, the present-day reader is amply rewarded for the effort of taking in the old-fashioned English and peeking at the back of the volume for translations of the Latin quotations sprinkled liberally throughout.

Most of Bacons Essays are as relevant as ever; others offer windows into a social order now gone but somehow familiar from its influence on our own. This is a book of moral instruction, a book that distills the wisdom of European civilization, and a book that reminds us that people are people, no matter when they lived. All of this is wrapped in prose showing flashes of brilliance lit by an authorial voice that is authoritative and often kind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430815

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English philosopher, scientist, and statesman. Recognized for his intelligence from a young age, Bacon would develop the empirical basis for modern scientific inquiry—known today as the scientific method—by promoting skepticism and observational experimentation as essential for the discovery of truth and the growth of human knowledge. A central figure of the scientific revolution and the Renaissance, Bacon was recognized as Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Alban during his lifetime and was honored by both Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI for his contributions to society. Bacon was also an accomplished statesman, responsible for drafting early legal documents and charters for the British colonization of the Americas. His career was not without controversy, however, as accusations of bribery tarnished his reputation and barred him from government service toward the end of his life and career. Today, he is remembered as one of the founders of modern science whose theories and methods continue to form the basis of all scientific experimentation and inquiry.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Dedication

ESSAYS OR COUNSELS - CIVIL AND MORAL

ESSAY I.—OF TRUTH

ESSAY II.—OF DEATH

ESSAY III.—OF UNITY IN RELIGION

ESSAY IV.—OF REVENGE

ESSAY V.—OF ADVERSITY

ESSAY VI.—OF SIMULATION AND DISSIMULATION

ESSAY VII.—OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN

ESSAY VIII.—OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE

ESSAY IX.—OF ENVY

ESSAY X.—OF LOVE

ESSAY XI.—OF GREAT PLACE

ESSAY XII.—OF BOLDNESS

ESSAY XIII.—OF GOODNESS, AND GOODNESS OF NATURE

ESSAY XIV.—OF NOBILITY

ESSAY XV.—OF SEDITIONS AND TROUBLES

ESSAY XVI.—OF ATHEISM

ESSAY XVII.—OF SUPERSTITION

ESSAY XVIII.—OF TRAVEL

ESSAY XIX.—OF EMPIRE

ESSAY XX.—OF COUNSEL

ESSAY XXI.—OF DELAY

ESSAY XXII.—OF CUNNING

ESSAY XXIII.—OF WISDOM FOR A MAN’S SELF

ESSAY XXIV.—OF INNOVATIONS

ESSAY XXV.—OF DISPATCH

ESSAY XXVI.—OF SEEMING WISE

ESSAY XXVII.—OF FRIENDSHIP

ESSAY XXVIII.—OF EXPENSE

ESSAY XXIX.—OF THE TRUE GREATNESS OF KINGDOMS AND ESTATES

ESSAY XXX.—OF REGIMENT OF HEALTH

ESSAY XXXI.—OF SUSPICION

ESSAY XXXII.—OF DISCOURSE

ESSAY XXXIII.—OF PLANTATIONS

ESSAY XXXIV.—OF RICHES

ESSAY XXXV.—OF PROPHECIES

ESSAY XXXVI.—OF AMBITION

ESSAY XXXVII.—OF MASQUES AND TRIUMPHS

ESSAY XXXVIII.—OF NATURE IN MEN

ESSAY XXXIX.—OF CUSTOM AND EDUCATION

ESSAY XL.—OF FORTUNE

ESSAY XLI.—OF USURY

ESSAY XLII.—OF YOUTH AND AGE

ESSAY XLIII.—OF BEAUTY

ESSAY XLIV.—OF DEFORMITY

ESSAY XLV.—OF BUILDING

ESSAY XLVI.—OF GARDENS

ESSAY XLVII.—OF NEGOCIATING

ESSAY XLVIII.—OF FOLLOWERS AND FRIENDS

ESSAY XLIX.—OF SUITORS

ESSAY L.—OF STUDIES

ESSAY LI.—OF FACTION

ESSAY LII.—OF CEREMONIES AND RESPECTS

ESSAY LIII.—OF PRAISE

ESSAY LIV.—OF VAIN-GLORY

ESSAY LV.—OF HONOUR AND REPUTATION

ESSAY LVI.—OF JUDICATURE

ESSAY LVII.—OF ANGER

ESSAY LVIII.—OF VICISSITUDE OF THINGS

A FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY.—OF FAME

ENDNOTES

INDEX OF QUOTATIONS AND FOREIGN PHRASES

GLOSSARY

SUGGESTED READING

001002

Introduction and Suggested Reading Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble Books

Originally published in 1597

This edition published by Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used

or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

written permission of the Publisher.

Cover Design by Stacey May

2005 Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 0-7607-7018-2

eISBN : 978-1-411-43081-5

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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INTRODUCTION

IN Of Studies, Francis Bacon writes, Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. . . . This is a book to be chewed and digested, and these essays make as satisfying a meal today as when the first edition was published in 1597. Indeed, the present-day reader is amply rewarded for the effort of taking in the old fashioned English and peeking at the back of the volume for translations of the Latin quotations sprinkled liberally throughout. Most of Bacon’s Essays are as relevant as ever; others offer windows into a social order now gone but somehow familiar from its influence on our own. This is a book of moral instruction, a book that distills the wisdom of European civilization, and a book that reminds us that people are people, no matter when they lived. All of this is wrapped in prose showing flashes of brilliance lit by an authorial voice that is authoritative and often kind.

Francis Bacon was an English lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers of Western civilization. Living from 1561 to 1626, Bacon contributed to the rise of the modern era by rejecting the traditional reliance on old systems and schools of thought. Like his contemporary Descartes, he wanted to put the individual thinker in the center of the effort to understand the world. Unlike Descartes, Bacon emphasized observation and experience over analysis of concepts and contemplation of ideas. Also unlike Descartes, Bacon separated our knowledge of the natural world from our knowledge of religious truths. Bacon conceived of the Essays as conveying ideas of a piece with his more technical writings,¹ but in a manner that come[s] home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.

Francis Bacon was born to Sir Nicholas Bacon and his second wife, Anne Cooke, in 1561. Francis had an older brother named Anthony, as well as several half siblings born to Sir Nicholas’ first wife. The family was not among the most well established in England, but Bacon’s father was an important lawyer. Under Queen Elizabeth, Sir Nicholas became England’s highest judge, with the title Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

Young Bacon was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was twelve. At Cambridge, he was introduced to the Aristotelian tradition of academic thinking, which he detested.² In 1576, Bacon was admitted for legal studies at Gray’s Inn, an institution where his father was a prominent figure. But rather than begin the formal study of law right away, he spent nearly three years in the party of Sir Amias Paulet, England’s ambassador to France.

Upon learning of his father’s death in 1579, Bacon returned to England. Sir Nicholas’ death was a turning point for Bacon, and historians generally agree that Bacon’s life would have been quite different if Sir Nicholas had taken pains to make better provisions for Francis in his will.³ As it was, Bacon was left with a very modest income for someone of his position and aspirations, so that he was necessarily concerned with his place in English society and his relationships with individuals of means. This may explain the difficulty Bacon had balancing his dual life as a politician and lawyer, on the one hand, and as a philosopher, on the other.⁴

Bacon was admitted to the bar in 1582. He became close associates with Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex, who took on the role of promoting Bacon’s fortunes in Queen Elizabeth’s government. Essex was not the best person for this job, as his arrogance and irascibility often put him on bad terms with the Queen. Worse still, Essex’s temper and pride led him to act so badly as to warrant a charge of high treason. The Queen assigned Bacon the task of prosecuting his friend and patron, and, after Essex had been convicted and executed, required that Bacon compose an official declaration of Essex’s guilt.

More success was achieved when James ascended the throne--at least for a while. Bacon was knighted in 1603 and appointed a King’s Counsel, and his power and income rose quickly. In 1617, he attained his father’s position of Keeper of the Great Seal. In January 1618, he was promoted still further to become Lord Chancellor of England. That summer he was made a peer with the title Lord Verulam.

Bacon’s luck ran out in 1621 when Parliament turned its attention to the practice of litigants giving gifts to judges. Bacon pled guilty, and was sentenced to a fine and imprisonment. He was also barred from holding certain public positions, such as a seat in Parliament. Although his sentence was enforced only lightly, this turn of events left the aging Bacon once again in a situation of relative poverty and reliance on others.

Bacon’s major philosophical works were published during the reign of King James I. They include The Advancement of Learning (1605), which was revised and expanded into a Latin version titled De Augmentis Scientiarum, and the Novum Organum (1620). The Novum Organum was combined with other works to form what Bacon called The Great Instauraton.

Tradition holds that Bacon contracted his fatal illness while experimenting on preservation of flesh by cold. As Bertrand Russell puts it, . . . he died of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken full of snow.⁵ Francis Bacon died 9 April 1626, his reputation and social status un-restored.

Bacon’s era was characterized by challenges to authority and hierarchy in religion, philosophy, and politics. But the sands in these three related arenas did not shift quite in tandem. The Protestant Reformation, which is said to have started in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses, challenged the authority of the pope and thereby the hierarchy of access to religious truth. In philosophy, Bacon, along with some of his contemporaries, challenged the authority of the long-dominant Aristotelian schools of thought. We can see the political analog of these changes in the temporary abolition of the monarchy following the English civil wars of the mid- 1600s, and, later, in the French and American revolutions. Bacon himself rejected the authority of tradition in philosophy while embracing the authority of the nobility in English society and politics.

Bacon’s break from the authority of Aristotelianism was based on objections to that tradition’s conceptions of knowledge, as well as a general aversion to accepting claims as axiomatic simply because they appear in respected texts. Tradition does not make good grounds for truth:

It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.⁶

On the other hand, as we can see from his frequent use of quotations from classical sources, Bacon in no way abandoned old wisdom. Instead, he adopted an eclecticism,⁷ which was cautiously respectful of a plurality of sources:

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.⁸

The source of a claim is not as important as what we do with it.

Historian of philosophy Stephen Gaukroger explains Bacon’s eclecticism as reflecting a sensibility according to which rejecting an author or system out of hand would be ungentlemanly. Bacon disdained the usual adversarial approaches to academic discourse as mere verbal disputation, as aimed at winning rather than at truth, and as ungracious.⁹ In the England of Bacon’s time, the status of gentleman, with the associated manners and expectation of high character, was a sign of trustworthiness in all things, including science (natural philosophy): Gentility was a massively powerful instrument in the recognition, constitution, and protection of truth.¹⁰ The gentleman is free to be honest because he is free from the petty worries of losing money by losing the favor of one who might want the truth hidden. The Essays provide clear examples of Bacon’s own gentlemanly approach to knowledge even as they offer instruction as to how the reader might become more gentlemanly.

In traditional philosophy, the model of scientific knowledge -- what Aristotle called episteme--was the conclusion of a logically valid syllogistic argument from first principles, where first principles are known with certainty and are independent of observation. In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written around 1628), Descartes embraced a similar model, using the word scientia with somewhat the same sense as Aristotle’s episteme. Leibniz also had a logic-oriented notion of knowledge based on analysis of concepts. These theories of knowledge can be characterized as deductive due to their reliance on arguments that allow strict logical validity and necessity based on concepts and definitions. By contrast, Bacon’s model of proper investigation emphasized drawing judicious generalizations from careful observation--an inductive method.

Of first importance in this method is avoiding the Idols that beset men’s minds--the tendencies and influences that draw the mind away from truth. Having collected a store of legitimate observations, the investigator may begin to build generalizations, taking care not to over-generalize or to posit unobserved connecting causes:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immoveable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.¹¹

Bacon’s principal intellectual legacy is his promotion of this inductive method--our ideal of scientific enquiry.

Despite lasting disputes concerning Bacon’s character (for instance, whether he showed disloyalty in his prosecution of Essex), no one disputes the fact that Bacon’s writings had an enormous impact on the rise of modern science. Indeed, the inductive method laid down by Bacon--and refined through the generations--simply is the core of science as we know it. And while other thinkers of the time (e.g., Galileo) were engaged in observation and induction, Bacon’s works became the voice of this new approach to learning.

While it is common today to picture Isaac Newton as a singular beacon of science at the dawn of the modern era, Bacon was very much Newton’s equal in the eyes of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. For instance, Thomas Jefferson commissioned portraits of Bacon, Newton, and John Locke--the three great minds. David Hume even compared Bacon to the ancient philosopher Thales of Miletus. Thales is considered the very first philosopher, a thinker who put Greek thought on an entirely new track by attempting to explain the world through physical causes rather than myth. Hume suggests that Bacon did the same for England and the modern world in general. Bacon’s influence was in no way limited to the English-speaking world, however. The twelfth of Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques is devoted entirely to Bacon; Denis Diderot’s work owes a great debt to Bacon, as well.¹²

As one keen observer of intellectual history put it: . . . the unwary reader of Bacon will hardly avoid according to him the kind of response which became stereotyped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘How true’, he will find himself feeling, ‘how profoundly true!’¹³ Based on this characteristic, some scholars categorize the Essays in the genre of commonplace books.¹⁴ Commonplace books are notebooks, published or private, containing useful or memorable quotations and observations. Bacon himself remarked on the usefulness of commonplaces, although he complains that many merely reflect a school of thought rather than reflecting the true nature of things.

The Essays were tremendously popular when they were first published, and pirated editions circulated. Bacon prepared new editions in which the pieces were rearranged and additional essays added. A second edition was published in 1612; a third edition, expanded still further, appeared in 1625. The Essays deal with human subjects--manners, character, relationships--by drawing on observation, useful quotations and analogies to the physical world. The idea that we can draw analogies between nature and human beings is particularly fertile here. For instance, in Of Great Place we find the observation that . . . as in nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place, so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm.

The essay Of Friendship is a particularly rich offering in this vein. Here Bacon prescribes friendship as medicine for the heart by drawing analogies to curatives for other organs:

We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castorem for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend. . . .

On reading this, we might begin to believe, with the American essayist Christopher Morley, that books themselves can be our friends. In Bacon’s Essays you will find a long and worthwhile relationship.

Kenneth A. Richman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Health Care Ethics at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He is co-editor of The New Hume Debate (Routledge, 2000) and author of Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine (MIT Press, 2004).

TO

THE RIGHT HONORABLE

MY VERY GOOD LO

THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM

HIS GRACE, LO. HIGH ADMIRALL

OF ENGLAND

EXCELLENT LO.

SALOMON saies; A good Name is as a precious oyntment; And I assure my selfe, such wil your Graces Name bee, with Posteritie. For your Fortune, and Merit both, have beene Eminent. And you have planted Things, that are like to last. I doe now publish my Essayes; which of all my other workes, have beene most Currant: For that, as it seemes, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes. I have enlarged them, both in Number, and Weight; So that they are indeed a New Worke. I thought it therefore agreeable, to my Affection, and Obligation to your Grace, to prefix your Name before them, both in English, and in Latine. For I doe conceive, that the Latine Volume of them, (being in the Universall Language) may last, as long as Bookes last. My Instauration, I dedicated to the King: My Historie of HENRY the Seventh, (which I have now also translated into Latine) and my Portions of Naturall History, to the Prince: And these I dedicate to your Grace; Being of the best Fruits, that by the good Encrease, which God gives to my Pen and Labours, I could yeeld. God leade your Grace by the Hand,

Your Graces most Obliged and

faithfull Servant,

FR. ST. ALBAN.

ESSAYS OR COUNSELS

CIVIL AND MORAL

ESSAY I.—OF TRUTH

WHAT Is Truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie’s sake. But I cannot tell: this same truth is a naked and open day-light, that doth not shew the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves? One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum dœmonum, because it filleth the imagination,