Bacon gave a new dawn to English literature with his pithy style, discuss.

Francis Bacon was at various times a lawyer, judge, political theorist, statesman, natural philosopher, essayist, historian, rhetorician and utopian.His contribution to prose was par-execellence. He gave a new dawn to English literature with his pithy style writing.He was considered a consummate prose stylist and a prescient legal reformer.None of the other prose writer could match his exuberance in this genere of English Literature.

Bacon’s Essays, re-written and revised over the course of almost thirty years, are considered stellar examples of English Renaissance prose style. The essays range from meditations on psychological states such as envy, anger, revenge, love and boldness to considerations of political and religious topics, such as counsel, unity of religion, atheism, and judicature, to reflections on the common occurrences of everyday life, such as marriage and single life, youth and age, custom and education, and studies. Interspersed among these are essays that take on topics more abstract and philosophical, such as “Of the Vicissitude of Things”, “Of Truth” and “Of Beauty”. Baconian prose style was a creative, yet rigorous, synthesis of the rhetorical and grammatical exercises of the Tudor schools, the debate curricula of the universities, and the observational acumen of the law student. Bacon’s essays are constructed out of sentences both pithy and ponderous. Often beginning with short maxims, aphorisms, or proverbs, they nonetheless strive to articulate the complexities and antitheses that reside within these seemingly simple and univocal forms. In so doing, the essays often do more to raise questions than provide answers to their ostensible subject matter.
The Lord Chancellor’s natural philosophic texts reveal a mind gifted with analytic and synthetic facility that has achieved a fundamental and incisive grasp of the most significant intellectual, social and political issues of the early modern period. Bacon’s genius was to formulate a distinct, detailed, and conceivable natural philosophic program out of this rich intellectual brew. Baconian natural philosophy was distinct in understanding its epistemic relation to, and difference from, other competing views; detailed in articulating its working principles and protocols; and politically conceivable insofar as Bacon created his program to be institutionalized under the auspices of a royal government that was increasingly dependent upon technological and commercial developments often beyond its direct control.

In the Advancement of Learning, Bacon took the measure of the contemporary intellectual scene to pave the way for his distinct contribution to natural philosophy. What he saw was a European intellectual culture in ferment. In some quarters scholastic Aristotelianism had lost preeminence and urgency, giving way to the rhetorical, ethical and historical foci of humanism. In others, it was challenged by newly popular varieties of Neoplatonism devised by the likes of Marsilio Ficino, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Raymond Lull, and Giordano Bruno, among others. For some, the erosion of a comprehensive and coherent Aristotelianism led to the revival of ancient scepticism, or a fervent belief in the inability to know truly. For others, the proto-materialism of the ancient atomists or the early modern empiricism of Bernardo Telesio held sway. Cognizant of all of these developments, Bacon was also sensitive to the important ways in which artisanal and mercantile cultures promoted technological discovery and invention (witness the compass, the printing press, the silkworm) and pioneered new epistemological stances and attitudes. In his analysis, Bacon both articulated and cast the weaknesses of each philosophy or development in order to retrieve and incorporate its strengths into his own philosophical program. Rejecting the fossilized and book-driven terminology of Aristotelian natural philosophy with its four causes and elements, Bacon retained an Aristotelian inclination to systemic and foundational thinking and sought to revitalize Aristotelian induction.

Although he found humanism limited in its capacity to promote scientific learning, he understood the value of its revival of rhetoric, mastered its stylistic grace, practiced its historical sensibility, and engaged with its ethical issues. He adopted the Neoplatonic belief in the human capacity to cognize and benefit from matter, the lowest gradient emanating from the divine one, yet he repudiated its hypothetical generalizations and a large part (if not all) of its exclusive secrecy. He also – in contradistinction to Neoplatonism – drew a clear distinction between religious faith and natural philosophy, relegating each to its own domain. Bacon respected Telesio’s separation of natural philosophy from theology and his advocacy of induction, but deplored his failure to delineate its actual procedures. Rejecting the pessimism inherent in scepticism, he nonetheless cautioned against uncritical belief in untried hypotheses. Initially attracted to the materialist aspect of ancient atomism, he eventually spurned the metaphysical character of Democritean atomism, opting to view matter instead as a particulate mass whose changing configuration accounted for the kinds of material entities. Finally, Bacon drew solace from the fact that a burgeoning manufacturing and commercial culture had spurred on new discoveries and inventions, as well as an openness to new knowledge, while disparaging the unsystematic, hit-or-miss character of its operations.