Francis Bacon
3 books
- You get a brief, unfinished utopian tale rather than a fully formed novel, with sailors discovering Bensalem and the astonishing research institution called Salomon’s House. It’s worth your time if you enjoy seeing science imagined as a public, almost sacred enterprise, though the characters stay more emblematic than alive.
- You get a bracing lesson in how your own habits of thought mislead you, from Bacon’s “idols” of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theater to his insistence on testing ideas against experience. It’s more argumentative than readable in a leisurely way, but its clipped aphorisms keep sparking long after you close it.
- You get Bacon thinking through what knowledge is for, from the familiar “knowledge itself is power” territory to his sharp account of learning’s gaps, habits, and abuses. The prose is dense and occasionally digressive, but his sly, practical intelligence keeps showing through, especially when he turns scholarly problems into memorable images.