Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon rose to be Lord Chancellor of England under James I, fell for taking bribes, and spent his last five years writing the works that had always mattered more to him. He proposed that knowledge be rebuilt from observation and experiment rather than from Aristotle: The Advancement of Learning surveyed what was known and missing, the Novum Organum set out the new method, and New Atlantis imagined a research institute. The Essays are the shortest, sharpest English prose of their age. The Royal Society took him as its patron saint.