Character Catalog

A collection of 58 essays on moral, political, and practical subjects. Considered one of the founding works of the essay genre in English, it showcases Bacon's pragmatic and clear-eyed thinking on human affairs.

Bacon's first major manifesto for the reform of knowledge. In it, he offers a critical assessment of human learning and calls for a rebuilding of science on the foundations of observation and experience.

Bacon's philosophical masterpiece, in which he presents his inductive method as an alternative to Aristotelian logic. He also describes the four 'idols' — cognitive biases that distort human judgment.

A utopian tale describing an ideal society governed by science. The 'House of Solomon' he imagines within it directly inspired the founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660.

An expanded Latin version of The Advancement of Learning, aimed at Europe's scholarly readership. In it, Bacon develops his encyclopedic classification of the sciences, which had a lasting influence on Enlightenment philosophers.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought about the order of Nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations.

The family residence where Francis Bacon was born in 1561. His father Nicholas Bacon served there as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, introducing young Francis early to the realities of English power and politics.

Bacon began his studies here in 1573, at the age of just 12. It was here that he developed his first criticisms of Aristotelian philosophy, which he considered too abstract and of little use to genuine knowledge of the world.

Bacon was admitted here in 1576 to study law and resided there for much of his life. He conceived and wrote several of his major works within its gardens, which he himself helped design.

A country estate inherited from his father, to which Bacon retreated following his disgrace in 1621. It was here that he devoted his final years to writing and scientific experimentation.

The seat of Parliament and the courts of justice, where Bacon pursued his political career over several decades — first as a Member of Parliament, then as Lord Chancellor from 1618 to 1621.