Francis Bacon

Bacon was the younger son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper of the Seal. He entered Cambridge at twelve and already disliked the empty talk of its Aristotelianism. He studied law, sat in Parliament and was long passed over, until under James I he rose rapidly, becoming Lord Chancellor in 1618 and a viscount. In 1621 he was charged with taking bribes, admitted guilt, was fined and barred from office, and devoted the rest of his life to writing.

His grand project, the Great Instauration, was to replace Aristotle's Organon with a new method and rebuild all the sciences. The New Organon diagnosed four 'idols' of the human mind: idols of the tribe (biases common to human nature), of the cave (individual limitations), of the marketplace (the misleadings of language) and of the theatre (the seductions of philosophical systems), then proposed a method of systematic observation, experiment and graduated induction for discovering the laws of nature.

He made no scientific discoveries himself, and later ages found his induction too mechanical. But he defined science as a collective, cumulative enterprise aimed at improving human life, and that idea changed Europe. The research institution 'Salomon's House' in New Atlantis directly inspired the Royal Society. He died of a chill caught while stuffing a chicken with snow to test preservation by cold, an ending that reads like a footnote to his philosophy.