Life by Francis Bacon

More poetry!

This from pioneering scientist, attorney general, philosopher, and poet Lord Francis Bacon.

When Bacon learned about the European discovery of the lands in the western hemisphere, he wrote The New Atlantis (1627) where he imagined a nation that gave greater rights to women, abolished slavery, eliminated debtors’ prisons, separated church and state, and provided freedom of religious and political expression.

Bacon also introduced a new way of thinking about the natural world. Instead of positing a theory and locating facts to support it, Bacon argued that one must start with facts, divide those facts into three categories (“instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees”), then reject the theories of the natural world that do not fit the facts. Bacon’s philosophy served as a cornerstone of the scientific method that developed in the decades after his death.

According to Bacon, there are four “idols” that obstruct clear, rational thinking. The idol of the tribe is the belief that preconceived notions of your place and time are correct and do not need analysis. The idol of the cave is allowing your personal likes and dislikes to interfere with your reasoning. The idol of the marketplace is confusing the meaning of words; presuming that the vernacular meaning and the technical meaning is precisely the same, for example. The idol of theater is relying on conclusions that were achieved using faulty methods or schools of analysis.

Life

The World’s a bubble, and the Life of Man
Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

Yet whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools:
The rural parts are turn’d into a den
Of savage men:
And where’s a city from foul vice so free,
But may be term’d the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband’s bed,
Or pains his head:
Those that live single, take it for a curse,
Or do things worse:
Some would have children: those that have them, moan
Or wish them gone:
What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,
But single thraldom, or a double strife?

Our own affections still at home to please
Is a disease:
To cross the seas to any foreign soil,
Peril and toil:
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease,
We are worse in peace;—
What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or, being born, to die