Francis Bacon, Science & Scientism Hans G. Schantz Sep 05, 2026

[Lawrence Gerald]

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Francis Bacon, Science & Scientism

Did Francis Bacon invent modern science, or something considerably more consequential?

In this episode of the AetherStream, I sit down with Robert Frederick of The Hidden Life Is Best to examine Francis Bacon’s extraordinary influence on the development of modern science, and the darker question of whether Bacon also helped lay the intellectual foundations of modern scientism.

Bacon famously envisioned knowledge not merely as understanding, but as power: power over nature, power to improve the human condition, and potentially power exercised by those who possess scientific knowledge over those who do not. His unfinished utopian novel New Atlantis imagined a society in which an elite scientific institution systematically gathers knowledge, develops new technologies, advises the state, and keeps some of its discoveries secret. That vision would profoundly influence the scientific culture that followed him.

Robert and I trace Bacon’s program from The Advancement of Learningand Novum Organum through New Atlantis and the subsequent rise of the Royal Society. We also examine a central tension in Bacon’s legacy: for all his advocacy of experimental investigation, Bacon himself was not a particularly successful experimental scientist. His greater achievement may have been convincing generations of others that organized science could transform both nature and society.

From there, the discussion moves into more controversial territory. Robert examines Bacon’s treatment of the soul and metaphysics, possible connections with Gnostic thought, and his argument that Bacon helped establish the intellectual conditions under which science could expand into scientism, the belief that scientific authority provides not merely knowledge about the physical world but answers to questions of politics, morality, human nature, and how society ought to be organized.

Finally, we turn to New Atlantis and ask the question that gives the discussion its contemporary relevance:

Was Bacon describing a scientific utopia, or drafting a remarkably prescient blueprint for technocracy?

Four centuries later, amid “trust the science,” Big Tech, transhumanism, scientific management, and increasingly intimate cooperation between technological institutions and the state, Bacon’s vision looks considerably less remote than it once did.

Transcript

Welcome to the AetherStream, exploring the history and development of electromagnetic science with your host, Hans G. Schantz. Today’s episode, Francis Bacon, Science and Scientism, with special guest, Robert Frederick, The HiddenLifeIsBest.com.

[music]

I’m joined by Robert Frederick of the Hidden Life is Best podcast to discuss Francis Bacon.

Bacon is perhaps best known as the prime suspect in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and he may have had an early hand in the shaping of modern Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism as well. Today, however, we will be on less speculative and better documented grounds in examining the profound role that Francis Bacon played on modern science.

Bacon influenced and inspired generations of scientists with his vision that scientific knowledge would grant power over nature and over our fellow human beings. Was his new Atlantis merely an abstract scientific utopia?

Or was it the blueprint of the emerging big tech technocratic state?

That is what Robert and I are going to discuss today. Today on the Aetherstream, I have a very special guest, Robert Frederick, proprietor over at the Hidden Life is Best podcast.

Thanks for joining us, Robert. How are you doing today?

I’m doing great, Hans. You really put me through the paces here, and I’m very glad you did.

I’ve made some really very interesting discoveries about Francis Bacon’s influence on modern science and his overall idea about science.

So I’m really looking forward to this talk. 

Well, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time as well. I do have to kick off the discussion, though, by asking what possible relevance the funny looking man with the pilgrim hat and the frilly lace collar could possibly have to modern science?

Do you have an answer for us?

Yes. I think he did, quote unquote, “invent modern science.”

And I think more importantly, he invented scientism.

Which has a terrible grip on humanity at present. I see it as a cult. I see it as the fastest growing religion on the planet.

That people have replaced trust in God with trust in science.

It’s quite extraordinary once you see it.

And the thing is, most people don’t see it. They don’t understand how deeply They trust the science.

Meaning that if they’re told that scientists said it, they’ll take it as truth, as fact.

And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. And it led... That’s how I got interested in Francis Bacon. And the entire story of Francis Bacon has just grown to mind-boggling proportions.

But you... By asking me to concentrate on his influence on science really got me to hone on those early books of science that he wrote. And I found some really remarkable things, which I’m sure we’ll get to today.

Well, let me switch to the slideshow that you want to share with us here and begin by taking a look at what’s Francis Bacon all about.

Well, he was born in 16... 16... 

1561?

1561, wow. Born in 1561, three years after Queen Elizabeth took the throne.

It was the beginning of the Renaissance in England or the early Renaissance. Renaissance was in full bloom, of course, in Italy, further along in France. England was slightly behind the times. I like to say he straddled three eras. It was still medieval. They still did jousting in Whitehall Palace. It was the beginning of the Renaissance or smack in the middle of the Renaissance. And Francis Bacon is credited with being the father of the Enlightenment era.

So he was really straddling three eras in his thinking.

And he was born right next to Whitehall Palace. He was born into great wealth. His father was the second most powerful man in the kingdom as Lord Keeper behind Cecil.

And behind Queen Elizabeth. His mother was probably the most educated woman in the kingdom or tied with her sister who was married to Cecil, William Cecil, the legendary Secretary of State and Master of Espionage.

And his grandfather, Cook.

Was the educator of King Edward VI. So he was born into this incredibly rich environment, rich with learning.

And he went to college at age 12. Nobody really knows how he was educated. His mother obviously had a hand. They no doubt had private tutors. But the tutor education system was extraordinary.

And this book here that’s up, The Mystery of Francis Bacon... is something I’ll refer back to, but that’s a great book of kind of an alternative biography of Francis Bacon.

He dropped out of college at age 15 announcing he was bored and announcing he was going to take on Plato and especially Aristotle.

And he saw them as merely good for disputation and not for Producing anything of use.

He was only 15. He was then sent to Paris. And this is a portrait of him at age 17. And there’s a Latin inscription around the edge that is translated as, it would be preferable if a picture worthy of his mind could be brought about.

Some such thing. Would be better if I could paint his mind. So he spent three years in France, and he was hanging out basically with the king and queen and the court, and they were very famous people there, and the French were revolutionizing their language. There’s a lot of speculation about what happened in France. He no doubt traveled around the continent as well. And he invented what’s called the Bacon Biliteral Cipher, Which I won’t go into now, but it was a fascinating way to hide information in ordinary looking letter.

And it used a double font. It used basically what we think of as computer code, ones and zeros, ones and zeros. He used font A and font A prime. And it was so brilliant, it’s thought to have influenced Leibniz. Some people claim it, which then influenced modern computer code. And that’s the beginning of Bacon’s life. And then that book, The Mystery of Francis Bacon, is that he didn’t really produce anything of value until 1605, until he was 44.

Besides this book, Essays, in 1598. So he was 36, 37 years old. There were only 10 essays. He’s famous for his essays. He would... He would rewrite or write more essays on his death. I think there’s 59 of them. And he became famous throughout Europe. And up until the 1800s, 1900s, his essays were still quite popular.

But he kind of positioned himself as a wise man. That was part of his thinking on how he was going to change the world.

He was going to take on Aristotle. He thought quite a lot about that. And his first, let me, before I go there, his first book on science was in 1605.

And it was called The Advancement of Learning. It was written in English. He was 44 years old. He had just been knighted by King James. Queen Elizabeth gave him no power in the government besides allowing him to be called counselor extraordinaire to her personally. And he was very close to Queen Elizabeth. And he lived at the court and he knew everyone. He was at the center of things. But the mystery of Francis Bacon is, what was he doing? He wasn’t practicing as a lawyer. He worked in Parliament. Parliament met in those days for like two weeks a year.

And he worked at Gray’s Inn, the law school, but they were...

He was apparently on vacation 40 weeks a year, and he wasn’t really doing much there.

So what was Francis Bacon up to? Because he didn’t write his first book on science until 1605. Queen Elizabeth was dead. King James was in power. He immediately knighted Francis Bacon and a few hundred other people at the same time.

And Francis Bacon married a 13-year-old girl. And got his first job in the kingdom’s legal department. This is the book. I can’t find a copy of the 1605 version. It didn’t really make a big splash, but it was out there. And this is the reprint from 1640, which, as many people have pointed out, is heavily Freemasonic.

And I’ll just jump ahead, I think. This is the first time I’ve done a slideshow of this. But the debate has raised about how much did Francis Bacon’s writing influence modern science.

And that’s one of the things I discovered, Hans, is I looked into it.

Which modern scientists credited Francis Bacon as an inspiration?

And all of these did. Which we’ll go through this list. With the exception of, you’ll see Blaise Pascal, And all of these people, with few exceptions, actually wrote about Francis Bacon being an influence on them.

Or their associates wrote about Bacon being an influence on them.

Or they used the Baconian method, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But if you want, I could go through this list quickly.

And say how they figured in to modern science and how Bacon influenced them, if you’re interested in that. Sure, please. So René Descartes was a contemporary of Bacon, so he was born 35 years later.

Descartes is often given the honor of starting modern science and being a very influential modern philosopher. But Descartes read Bacon. Bacon didn’t read Descartes. And it’s true, Descartes was extremely influential, but he was also influenced by Bacon, and he wrote about it in a letter to the third person on the list there, Marine Mersenne. And that’s another interesting thing I discovered, is that this man, Marine Mersenne, was kind of a node, an early...

Like journal. There were no scientific journals, of course. There was no science. And there were no schools for science. But there were two people, Marin Mersin and underneath it Samuel Hartlib, who had contacts with I’ve heard that referred to as the Republic of Letters in terms of how they communicated back and forth and served as a kind of central clearinghouse for scientists to talk to each other about what they were doing or writing. Yes, that’s exactly what I have heard too. And Descartes wrote in a letter to Mersenne, I admire this Baconian method with its rejection of old certainties and its vision of new beginnings. He also wrote, For myself, I do not estimate in Bacon the curiosity of his experiments so much as the consequences he draws from them and the method with which he uses them.

It is for this reason, Although his observations are very ordinary, then I think it would be a very good thing, very agreeable to many people to know his procedures.

So this is the very earliest beginnings of science. And he wrote that in a letter to Mersenne. Descartes didn’t actually write about Bacon. He did write quite a bit. It’s a fascinating story to peg Descartes against Bacon.

For reasons we might be able to get into today, but Descartes actually thought about the mind and the soul and tried to integrate them into natural philosophy, which is what science was called then.

They were natural philosophers. And what I discovered because of doing this work for you, Hans, for us, is that Bacon thought of the mind mostly as a material thing, something called material psychology. Which we’ll get to. But at any rate, Descartes, often thought of as the first scientist, was heavily influenced by Francis Bacon.

And Mersenne wrote about Bacon as well and was inspired by Bacon.

Mersenne himself was a mathematician, music theorist, theologian, friar.

And he was the hub of 17th century European scientific communities. This is very interesting. I’m impressed at all the level of detail that you have here. Oh, great. Yes, so Marin Marcin, 1588 to 1648, was a French friar, theologian, mathematician, and music theorist who served as the central hub of 17th century European scientific community. And he was very influenced by Bacon. He was also critical of Bacon. Not everybody just fell at Bacon’s feet. But as we’re going to talk about, Bacon had a very persuasive way of presenting his ideas.

So though he disagreed with Bacon on some things, he promoted him as well.

And I found this amazing article, Bacon and Descartes, in a French journal, luckily translated into English.

And she says, Dana Jalabeneau, quote, as it has been noticed before, the first generation of Baconianism took off the ground across the Channel.

It is in France and Holland that one can find Baconians as early as the 1630s.

Readers, translators, or continuators of various aspects of Bacon’s program.

It has been shown, for example, that Bacon’s works were extensively translated into French and Italian from the 1620s onwards, sometimes even earlier than this, that these translations were in France partially supervised and supported by the court and the crown. So Bacon died in 1626. Descartes didn’t publish until 1630s.

So Bacon had thoroughly saturated Europe according to some recent scholarship, which by the way, I want to point out there’s been an explosion of scholarship on Bacon in the last 20 to 30 years. And I’ve read some really remarkable articles.

So right there, we know that Bacon had saturated Europe.

And if we go below to Samuel Hartlib, he fulfilled basically the same function in England.

He was from Germany, German-Polish origin. He settled, married, and died in England. And he had a whole group around him, the Hartlib group, whose activities were inspired by the utopian writings of Francis Bacon.

And it is Bacon who has been thought to be the single greatest influence.

On the Hart-Lib Circle of which Robert Boyle was one.

So this is before the Royal Society. Most people know that Francis Bacon inspired the creation of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific body in the world still in existence. One of the very first, which sprang up in London after the end of the English Civil War.

But Hartlib, and this is pretty new information to me, had kind of gotten started with it earlier than that, and people were communicating, and they were talking about Francis Bacon. As we continue down the list, there’s Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes is also considered one of the first modern philosophers.

What I’ve come across is Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

Are the founders of the Enlightenment philosophy, the beginning of the modern era.

And Thomas Hobbes was Francis Bacon’s secretary. They were very close. Hobbes would follow him around with a notebook and write down what Bacon said. His political philosophy is very close to Baconian political philosophy. And as we’re going to discover, Bacon influenced a lot more than science.

And Hobbes was a direct connection to the Royal Society. So Bacon died in 1626. The Royal Society didn’t get started until 1660.

And Hobbes knew everyone in the Royal Society. He kind of knew everyone. He also traveled all around Europe. I think he had to vacate during the Civil War because he was a strong royalist, as was Bacon.

But Hobbes proved to be an enduring... Robert Boyle is a proselytizer of kind of the Baconian worldview, which is what we’re going to see later that Bacon also influenced early philosophy.

So I don’t think I have a slide on that, unfortunately, but Hobbes would be one of those philosophers, as is if you skip down two names, John Locke, primarily known more as the philosopher, heavily influenced by Bacon.

But when the next name is Robert Boyle, he’s considered the father of chemistry.

He wrote about Francis Bacon in very glowing terms. Let’s see, Robert Boyle, Explicit Acknowledgement of Francis Bacon.

He admitted to consulting Bacon’s Novum Organum, a book we will look at shortly.

He often referred to Bacon as our excellent chancellor because Bacon, I don’t think I told you this, became Lord Chancellor. That would have been after this first book on science was written. He became Lord Chancellor in, I think, 1616 or something, which is the second highest position in England, which we don’t have that position in America. So it’s hard to know exactly what it was, but it’s the second most powerful position.

And he actually sat as king when King James left once to go back to Scotland.

Francis Bacon was regent, king of England, for six weeks. So Robert Boyle often thought of as having the first law of science, the inverse proportion law of gases, heavily influenced by Francis Bacon.

And we can just, I don’t know how much detail you want to go into. John Locke, heavily influenced by Francis Bacon. He was in the Royal Society. Robert Boyle was in the Royal Society. Some of these names were new to me. I love early science. I love science in general. Otto von Gehrig. He was like a showman scientist. The first real showman scientist. Whoops. If I click, it goes. He did this thing called the Mecklenburg Spheres, where he pumped the gas, pumped the air, and created a vacuum.

And the spheres could not be pulled apart by two teams of eight-team horses.

He couldn’t pull these two copper spheres apart, half spheres.

In fact, that experiment in the 1640s in Germany...

Robert Boyle’s Law of Gases. And Garrick was not directly influenced by Francis Bacon, although he was heavily influenced by Descartes. And he seems to be influenced by Bacon because he wanted to also challenge Aristotle, which we’ll get to what that meant to challenge Aristotle. And Robert Boyle also wrote that he had dethroned Aristotle.

And I’m sure he wrote that because he knew that that’s what Bacon’s The goal was, since he was 15, was to dethrone Aristotle from the throne of science.

And there’s a name here, Blaise Pascal, who was a scientist who did not like Francis Bacon.

He did not like how reductive it was, how material it was.

He was what we would today call holistic in his thinking. He was quite critical. Of Bacon. And he also worked with pressure and gases. He died quite young. Fascinating guy, Blaise Pascal. Not influenced by Francis Bacon. 

Well, he did share with Bacon an intense dislike of Aristotle.

And in fact, there’s a famous quote from Pascal where he is trumpeting all of the results with the barometer where Researchers were going up to mountaintops and suspending columns of mercury and creating vacuums on top of the mercury. And Pascal had something to say along the lines of, let all of Aristotle’s most passionate acolytes and defenders try to explain this one away. So they at least shared a common enemy, even if he didn’t care much for Bacon.

Interesting. Robert Hooke. Robert Hooke is the person who first discovered the cell with a microscope.

And he frequently referenced Francis Bacon and explicitly modeled his scientific approach on Bacon’s methods. So now we’re out of the realm of physics and we’re into biology.

And that’s a whole conversation right there that maybe we’ll get to touch on later.

But let’s see if I can have a quote here. Hooke adopted Bacon’s specific terminology, such as using the concept of crucial experiments.

Contemporaries and historians describe Hooke as the great exemplar of Bacon’s ideas.

He championed the creation of a comprehensive natural history, a systematic collection of facts about the natural world, which was the central goal of Bacon’s scientific program. Using inductive reasoning, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Why don’t we skip Johann Joachim Boettcher, unless you want me to talk about him.

And we’ll go right to Isaac Newton. You know, probably one of the most famous scientists ever.

Directly influenced by Francis Bacon. He was in the Royal Society. And he did not write about Bacon. But historians agree that he was very influenced by Bacon through the culture of the Royal Society, which as I’ve mentioned, directly spoke of Francis Bacon as their founder and their inspiration and as their Moses. And I should have that famous picture of Francis Bacon from the history of the Royal Society, which was published in 1625, 1665 or something like that, really early.

But people around Bacon, people around Newton wrote about him as being very influenced by Bacon. And this was a surprising name, Gottfried Leibniz. The great genius praised Bacon’s philosophical range and lofty vision, observing that compared to Bacon, even a genius like Descartes creeps on the ground.

Quote in translation, Bacon, a man of great genius, but who stuck at the very threshold, Descartes indeed penetrated far deeper.

Nevertheless, if you look to the vastness and loftiness of Bacon’s thoughts and designs, Descartes will seem to creep on the ground. It’s kind of interesting because I would think Leibniz would be a little closer to Descartes, although Descartes saw the world as a machine and But he did want to talk about the soul and the mind, which Bacon ignored, which we’re going to get to shortly.

Benjamin Franklin wrote quite a bit. Franklin published a celebratory poem on the anniversary of Bacon’s death, describing him as the great deliverer who led true philosophy out of the gloom of cloistered monks and praising his comprehensive intellect.

Franklin’s admiration for Bacon was part of a broader inheritance of Bacon’s Enlightenment ideals. Franklin viewed Bacon alongside John Locke and Isaac Newton as a foundational thinker who laid the groundwork for the moral and physical sciences, influencing the intellectual development of American leaders like Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson really liked Francis Bacon. There’s James Watt. Who also did not write about Bacon, but everyone around him said he used Baconian methods.

He invented the steam-powered coal mining devices that you’ll see if you ever go to London and go to the Science Museum. They actually have his workbench there. And he seemed like a really cool guy. He seemed like the garage tinkerer. But he came up with inventions that changed the world. And I guess they named the Watt after him. You would know more about that, Hans. Even though he didn’t work with electricity. And let’s see. Joseph Priestley, why don’t we skip him? I would like to talk about Dennis Diderot and Jean de Laurent d’Elembert, who wrote the Encyclopedia in 1751, which considered a foundation of the Enlightenment. It was something like it was thousands of pages long and put together all the science of the day and was hugely influential, you know, for many, many years.

And they explicitly praised Francis Bacon. See if I have some direct quotes here.

De Alambert explicitly mentions and honors Bacon in his preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedia. He valued Bacon’s scientific method and used Bacon’s Tree of Knowledge from the Advancement of Learning, the book I showed you, as the primary inspiration for his own taxonomy of human understanding.

So we’re into the mid-1700s now. And with Goethe, we’re going to break into the 1800s and we’re kind of fully into the Enlightenment.

And the scientific revolution is really taking hold.

Goethe praised Bacon. Goethe is considered to be one of the smartest people who ever lived.

He praised him for his advocacy of science based on experiment and described him as one of the greatest strides forward in modern science.

So he did write about Bacon and praised him. But now, of course, we are almost 200 years from the death of Bacon.

And he’s still being cited. Charles Darwin, we’re now 260 years from the death of Bacon, praised Bacon.

Bacon and Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley.

Praise Francis Bacon. And now we’re fully into, you know, the full scientific world.

And I just wanted to show that. This actually very much surprised me, but it’s proof that Bacon had enormous influence on modern science.

Well, it’s interesting how everyone praised him so very highly despite his own failure to do anything all that significant in science. And we’re going to talk a little bit about his attitude towards some of his contemporaries.

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[Christie Waldman]

8 hours ago, Lawrence Gerald said:

Yes. I think he did, quote unquote, “invent modern science.”

Joseph Priestly who discovered oxygen was much influenced by Bacon. Priestly's Unitarian religion was not welcome in England so he emigrated to America, settling in Pennsylvania. He was a Freemason. We visited his home which had become a museum once (but it was not open that day, so we didn't get to go inside). https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/38213/what-influence-has-joseph-priestley-had-on-modern-philosophy

[Christie Waldman]

I think we have to be careful. There are some who would gladly make Bacon the scapegoat for the problems that advancing knowledge has caused in the world, without recognizing all the ways science has improved the quality of life for many. Robert Frederick gave no basis for his opinion that Pascal (1623-62) "did not care for Bacon." So why should we believe it? What did he mean? Pascal did not know Bacon personally. What did Pascal ever write or say about Bacon--to be more precise, Bacon's philosophical writings? Why did the interviewer not follow-up on that?

Here's Pascal in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal/. How can Frederick say Pascal was not "influenced" by Bacon--he means' Bacon's ideas, presumably--when Bacon's ideas had such a broad influence in France and elsewhere? It is implicit in Bacon's theory of advancing knowledge that humanity would be humble and work for the glory of God, the Creator of nature. It's as unfair to blame Bacon for "Scientism" as it is to blame God for what Humankind has done with its free will on this Planet. Bacon wanted to restore humanity to its rightful place as husband of nature, the promise of the Garden of Eden. However, it was integral to his teachings that humanity would be subject to the Higher Power that keeps human hubris in check. 

Bacon saw himself as the bell-ringer that called all the other wits together. He lived in a time when you couldn't yet state the Copernican theory as truth openly! Scientific experimentation had to be done secretly, e.g., Walter Raleigh's School of Night. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Considering the limitations of the times in which he lived, it's amazing what Bacon was able to accomplish!

Here's more on Joseph Priestly, a great example of a person influenced by Bacon (Northumberland, PA, https://joseph-priestley-house.org/:

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/josephpriestleyoxygen.html; https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/joseph-priestley/; https://josephpriestley.org/; https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajplung.00310.2013; https://www.lumexinstruments.com/blog/07.php. Frederick kind of skipped over him. 

Edited September 6 by Christie Waldman
Frederick mentioned Priestly by name, that was all.