Printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass had remade war, religion and the map of the world, and not one of them had come out of a syllogism. Around 1600 a European university still taught natural philosophy as a skill in argument: students read Aristotle through medieval commentators, learned the forms of the syllogism, and were examined on how well they disputed. Francis Bacon named the gap as a scandal — learning that generated arguments instead of works was not knowledge at all — and added that no clever individual was ever going to close it alone. The second half is the part people forget, and it is the part that changed everything.
He spent three decades doing something else: he sat in the Commons from his early twenties, and in 1593 opposed a bill levying triple subsidies at double the usual speed; Elizabeth took the offence personally and the court shut him out. When the attorney-generalship fell vacant the following year it went to Edward Coke. His patron the Earl of Essex consoled him with an estate at Twickenham, which he later sold for £1,800 — and in 1601, as Queen's Counsel, he helped prosecute Essex for treason. Under James the climb resumed and did not stop: solicitor general in 1607, attorney general in 1613, Lord Chancellor in 1618, Viscount St Alban in January 1621. He was sixty and at the top of the English legal profession.
Two months later Parliament charged him with twenty-three counts of taking gifts from litigants. He pleaded guilty, was fined £40,000, spent a few days in the Tower, and was barred from office and from Parliament for life. The fall did not produce the philosophy: The Advancement of Learning had appeared in 1605 and the Novum Organum in 1620, both written by a working officer of the crown. What it produced was five years with nothing else in them.
What he actually proposed is easier to state than its reputation suggests. The mind does not arrive at nature clean. It runs on distortions, which he sorted into four kinds: those built into being human, those peculiar to one person's temperament and training, those smuggled in by ordinary language, and those inherited from philosophical systems admired for their staging. Against them he set a procedure: collect instances where a quality appears, instances where it is absent under otherwise similar conditions, instances where it varies in degree — then eliminate. He ran it once at length, on heat, and concluded that heat is a species of motion: a defensible answer reached by a method anyone of no special brilliance could follow. That was the point: the procedure was meant to level wits, so that patient ordinary people working in numbers would outperform genius working alone.
He never finished. The Instauratio Magna was designed in six parts, and he substantially completed only the first two; the last of them, the science that would actually be produced, was never begun. What he wrote instead was a picture of who would do it. New Atlantis, published the year he died, describes a society whose central institution is a research college — funded, staffed by specialists with divided tasks, sending men abroad to collect. Nothing like it existed, and when the Royal Society was founded in 1660 its promoters claimed him as their origin; Enlightenment writers from Voltaire to Condorcet honoured him more for that vision than for his logic.
The logic has not worn well. Working scientists guess boldly and test, which his eliminative induction underrates, and he had little use for mathematics; how damaging that is remains disputed among historians. He died on 9 April 1626 at Highgate, of an illness the surviving accounts attribute to an experiment in preserving flesh with snow.