Bacon's Novum Organum and the Idols of the Mind

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) published the Novum Organum ("New Organon," a deliberate rival title to Aristotle's Organon) in 1620, as the second part of an intended but never completed larger project he called the Instauratio Magna, "The Great Instauration" or "Great Renewal" of the sciences. Written in Latin, the language of learned Europe, and structured as a series of numbered aphorisms rather than continuous prose, the work opens with the famous declaration that "human knowledge and human power meet in one" (scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt) — knowledge is valuable to the extent that it yields command over nature for practical human benefit, not merely contemplative satisfaction. Bacon served under both Elizabeth I and James I, rising to Lord Chancellor of England in 1618 before being convicted of accepting bribes as a judge and removed from office in 1621, a scandal that ended his political career just a year after the Novum Organum appeared but did not halt his philosophical writing, which continued until his death in April 1626, reportedly from a chill caught while experimenting with the preservation of meat by packing it in snow.