compelled to abandon public life, and to spend the remainder of his days in writing important
books.
The ethics of the legal profession, in those days, were somewhat lax. Almost every judge accepted
presents, usually from both sides. Nowadays we think it atrocious for a judge to take bribes, but
even more atrocious, after taking them, to decide against the givers of them. In those days,
presents were a matter of course, and a judge showed his "virtue" by not being influenced by
them. Bacon was condemned as an incident in a party squabble, not because he was exceptionally
guilty. He was not a man of outstanding moral eminence, like his forerunner Sir Thomas More,
but he was also not exceptionally wicked. Morally, he was an average man, no better and no
worse than the bulk of his contemporaries.
After five years spent in retirement, he died of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration
by stuffing a chicken full of snow.
Bacon's most important book, The Advancement of Learning, is in many ways remarkably
modern. He is commonly regarded as the originator of the saying "Knowledge is power," and
though he may have had predecessors who said the same thing, he said it with new emphasis. The
whole basis of his philosophy was practical: to give mankind mastery over the forces of nature by
means of scientific discoveries and inventions. He held that philosophy should be kept separate
from theology, not intimately blended with it as in scholasticism. He accepted orthodox religion;
he was not the man to quarrel with the government on such a matter. But while he thought that
reason could show the existence of God, he regarded everything else in theology as known only by
revelation. Indeed he held that the triumph of faith is greatest when to the unaided reason a dogma
appears most absurd. Philosophy, however, should depend only upon reason. He was thus an
advocate of the doctrine of "double truth," that of reason and that of revelation. This doctrine had
been preached by certain Averroists in the thirteenth century, but had been condemned by the
Church. The "triumph of faith" was, for the orthodox, a dangerous device. Bayle, in the late
seventeenth century, made ironical use of it, setting forth at great length all that reason could say
against some orthodox belief, and then concluding "so much the greater is the triumph of faith in
nevertheless believing." How far Bacon's orthodoxy was sincere it is impossible to know.