Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher and Lord Chancellor of England, was one of the key thinkers involved in the development of the procedures and epistemological standards of modern science. Bacon thus has also played a vital role in shaping modern attitudes towards nature, human progress, and the environment.He inspired many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, especially in England and France. Moreover, Bacon laid the intellectual groundwork for the mechanistic view of the universe characteristic of eighteenth and nineteenth century thought and for the explosion of technology in the same period.

Sir Francis Bacon. (Painting by Paul Somer. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.)

In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620), Bacon attacked all teleological ways of looking at nature and natural processes (i.e., the idea found in Aristotle and in...