Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English statesman, lawyer, essayist and philosopher of science. The son of Elizabeth I's Lord Keeper, he sat in Parliament for nearly forty years and rose under James I to be Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, with the titles Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans, before a conviction for taking bribes ended his public career in 1621. His Essays, revised through three editions, are the first of their kind in English. In The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum he argued for a new science founded on observation, experiment and the systematic correction of the mind's errors.