London. These professional associations of barristers (British litigators)
and judges have been headquartered in stone and brick building complexes
(resembling Ivy League college dorms) in the heart of London for
hundreds of years. Even today, if a sightseer were to saunter about the
neighborhood where the inns are parceled, you would likely encounter
barristers in white wigs and red robes making their way to the nearby
Courts of Justice. Like encountering young brokers in power suits near
Wall Street and stumbling into sleepless, unshaven residents schlepping
their way home post-call near Mass General Hospital, ensembles do
“make the man,” if not mark the man.
Into that powdered-wig world of barristers and jurists came the Starry
Messenger; Galileo’s central character was the supernova, but to a
particular political philosopher living at Gray’s Inn, the Italian genius was
himself the envoy. That barrister was Francis Bacon, who never conducted
a scientific experiment himself, but is considered by most to be the father
of empirical science.
Francis Bacon was born into privilege in a stone mansion on the banks
of the Thames in 1561. A child prodigy, he entered Cambridge University
at age twelve; his precociousness prompted his portraitist to inscribe the
motto, “If I could only paint his mind” directly onto the canvas itself. His
brilliance was renowned his entire life. Bacon was meditative,
scientifically curious, and a thinker of “soaring ambition and vast range.”^9
Simultaneously a professional lawyer, politician, courtier, and royal
adviser, he was also ruthlessly insecure and preternaturally striving for
advancement.
Bacon’s “active public life, under both Elizabeth and James I, was taken
up with political business and legal reform. Bacon achieved high office as
Lord Chancellor in 1618, until disgraced by corruption charges. His final
years saw a furious spate of writing on natural philosophy, politics, and
history.”^10 Much of that writing occurred late in life when he was largely
abandoned by his friends, his wife, and the king.
In three great works, the last of which was published posthumously,
Bacon accomplished a project of rethinking how we think. Universities
were stuck in a morass of Aristotelian futility, impotent in generating new
knowledge. Worse, because their philosophies were grounded in his “first
principles,” it was impossible to challenge their conclusions. “Bacon