Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, in the introduction to Thomas Spratt's history of the Royal Society

there's a poem about Francis Bacon. It reads, Bacon like Moses

had led us forth at last, the Baron wilderness he passed, did on the very border

stand of the blessed promised land and from the mountaintop of his exalted wit saw it himself

and showed us it.

Francis Bacon was a lawyer, an essayist and a political schema who climbed the greasy pole of

Jacobian politics, became Lord Chancellor and then fell down again.

But he's most famous for developing an idea

of how science should be done, a method that he hope would slow off the husk of

ancient thinking and usher in a new age. It's called Baconian Method and its influenced and inspired scientists from

Bacon's own time to the present day. With me to discuss Baconian science as Stephen Pumphrey,

senior lecturer in the history of Science at the University of Lancaster,

Patricia Farah, Senior Tutor at Claire College University of Cambridge,

and Roger Lewis, Fellow of St Hughes College, Oxford and University Lecturer in English.

Stephen, can you introduce us to Francis Bacon, the

voluminous writer and so? Can you say it all?

Mm, well as you said from 1660 onwards he's been remembered as a philosopher of science but that really

wasn't how he was thought of in his own time as you said primarily he was

known as a careerist politician and he was probably most famous in terms of writing

for his his essays.

...