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Essays (Everyman Paperbacks)

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Along with Shakespeare's works, Bacon's "Essays" is the supreme achievement of the English Renaissance. Philosopher, statesman, author, Bacon made all knowledge his province, and in the "Essays" is to be found more worldly wisdom than in any other book. "My essays come home, to men's business and bosoms." And Pope penned the epitaph, "If parts allure thee think how Bacon shined, The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." These essays, though, need a gloss for the modern reader to understand Bacon's cramped yet erudite prose and Latin quotations, as is provided in Pitcher's edition.

It's useless to dig for just one or two epigrams to stand in for the totality of Bacon's penetrating genius in the "Essays." Though it is perhaps fashionable today to detract from him in order to praise Montaigne, it should be clear that Bacon is at least as indispensable. As terse as Emerson is expansive, Bacon's "Essays" are perhaps the most truly Classical (in spirit) prose in the English language. Fans of the Leo Strauss school should have a fieldday reading between the lines of the essays "On Atheism" and "On Superstition"; for the rest of us, nobody can come away from even one of these essays without gaining invaluable insights. Though Bacon is rightly heralded for the radical newness of his pragmatic methods, he is ensteeped in history-- those mindful of Napoleon's dictum that history is the only true philosophy will certainly respond enthusiastically to Bacon's approach. From the post-Machiavellian insights of "Of Empire" to the pre-Enlightenment ethics of "Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature", one will find in reading Bacon's prose what the youth of Athens must have found in following Socrates: the presence of a benevolent, worldly-wise, supremely rational mind determined to show you the order of the world.

A collection of 59 essays by one of the shrewdest bipeds (some would say a brilliant rogue!) that ever walked this stale promontory of ours . Sir Francis Bacon offers his views on a whole smorgasbord of topics ranging from Truth,Death,'Adversitie',Marriage & the single life,Love,Boldness,Superstition,Friendship ,Health,Ambition,Youth,Beauty to Anger & Fame.These are short pieces (usually a couple of pages) but packed full of wit & timeless wisdom ____you can dip into them one at a time & chew them at your leisure .These essays are the quintessence of wholesome English common sense .Read them leisurely over a cup of tea(or coffee) on a crisp autumn afternoon (as the trees turn color) to savor their distinctly English flavor. I happen to have a Morroco-bound ,gilt-edged collection of these essays which was an added treat!

When I was a very young person and a very great reader I thought that every book must be read cover to cover, and that to miss a page was a kind of sin. Coming across Bacon on reading I came to understand that not every book had to be chewed and digested, but that there were some to be dipped in and tasted. Bacon's epigramatic wisdom has a power , a poetic condensation. I do not know the essays as a whole , but I do have the sense of Bacon as a powerful intellect capable of providing insight into diverse areas of life. I do not however have the sense of a self , and one with humor irony charm of a kind one has with Montaigne who is a far more appealing figure.

I also believe the sometimes contradictory, and often ' broken' character of the essays do make them at times feel as if they are collections of individual apercus rather than whole constructions.

On the whole though this is a classic work one which I intend to look in and reread again.

Alas, the Kindle edition suffers from that most hazardous pitfall of digitizing text: namely, the inability to recognize the difference between the serif-font n and u. The content is as splendid as one could wish, but this edition has not been combed for errors post-digitization.

This is indeed great thoughts in human history as shown by many, many reviewers.

It is worthy reading and comparing with our current thoughts, and I will try to find the time to read this book again.

On the other hand, the implication is that something not related to physical world would survive longer, for example, Of Building and Of Gardens appear out-of-date.

This edition has an introduction by Christopher Morley who describes the genius of Lord Bacon. None can match the written word of with Lord Bacon. The essence of the human mind is everywhere the same and Bacon captures the thoughts and reasoning on diverse fields of philosophy, science, history and law. Bacon believed that they would "last as long as books last", and it is for them that he is primarily remembered. The essays counsel on civil and moral life. This book is based on the 1625 edition

The first edition was published in 1597 and has the following title page:

"Essays, Religious Meditations, Places of persuasion and dissuasion, Seene and allowed. At London, Printed for Humfrey Hooper, and are to be sold at the black Bear in Chauncey Lane 1597"

Bacon has the ability to "showed man to himself" He is truly the first Modern Mind.

The book is leather-bound and the typography matches the old English words.

Francis Bacon is one of the authors whose ideas pervade society, but whose work very few of us have read. For example, many of us know of Bacon's saying that "Knowledge is Power" only through Economist Alfred Marshall. However, Bacon's analysis of how human science progresses is an essential classic. The modern scientific method owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Bacon's induction method. Bacon bases his induction method on observation and experiment. His Essays - this book - makes observations about life in all its varied dimensions. As an economist my reading focused on essays with a material content such as the essays "Of Innovations", "Of Riches", "Of Customs and Education", and so on. However, I have browsed or will soon browse other essays of the book.

Overall, it is impressive that one person did so much that has remained so insightfully informative for so long! Although the reading is slowed by the archaic and old style of the language of the book, I strongly recommend this book to all readers including young readers seeking to build their character.

Amavilah, Author

Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies

ISBN: 1600210465

A magnificent combination of style and substance. Every essay is memorable, thought provoking and a sheer pleasure to read. As wise a book as was ever written.

There is little doubt that for the modern reader, usually the college undergraduate, reading Bacon's essays is a challenging obstacle. It is not simply that his essays were written more than four centuries ago and that the English language has evolved considerably since then. The problem lies more in the style in which Bacon felt most comfortable. His erudition was immense. His audience was not meant to be the ill-trained lower class tradesman still fumbling with the rudiments of Basic English. Rather, he wrote for readers much like himself, highly conversant in history, literature, foreign languages, and philosophy.

When Bacon first began to write his essays, his primary model was Montaigne, who wrote in the highly personalized, discursive style that Bacon felt ill-equipped to emulate. Bacon was one of the first of his era to write in the terse epigrammatic style in which much is said in few words. Today, many of his sentences read as if they were taken straight from Chinese fortune cookies. Bacon favored the use of balanced phrases and parallel construction. Such writing calls attention to itself, even to the point where the means may overwhelm the message. Much of his work is replete with references to classical writers of antiquity. He often drops a vague reference to an unnamed Greek or Roman, whose identity must be supplied by editors in the form of helpful footnotes. The cultural illiteracy of modern youth is evident since it does little good to know the name without also knowing a great deal about the life and times of that writer, most of which cannot be squeezed into a footnote. Bacon also uses highly Latinate sentences with wild abandon. Since most readers today have trouble recalling their high school Latin, footnotes are again necessary.

Bacon begins his essays with a helpful one sentence summation of his thesis. Sometimes he takes a definite stand as in "Of Parents and Children" and in others as in "Of Marriage and Single Life" he does not. The reader must ascertain which essay provides this definitive result, and with Bacon, this is not always an easy task. Part of the problem that readers today have with plowing through Bacon's essays is that they have been trained to look for ideas in the context of the whole paragraph, which usually boils down to main idea, supporting detail, and conclusion. Bacon, however, did not achieve his fame in that manner. The persistent reader will discover that the key to Bacon is to look for meaning not in the macroscopic world of the paragraph but in the microscopic world of the individual phrase or even the solitary word. Bacon's penchant for the pithy phrase and illusive word often carry the linguistic day. The rest of the paragraph is often no more than a refutation or support of that word or phrase.

Adding to Bacon's aforementioned writing quirks is yet another: his use of antithesis, which refers to statements for or against a topic. Bacon often wrote his essays as if he were setting up both sides of a debate, thus necessitating giving evidence from both sides. Since his observations frequently dealt with generalized assessments of human life and how it should be lived, the reader had to assimilate these contraries, sometimes without even knowing which stand Bacon favored. And it is here that Bacon connects style to content. Since Bacon favored the inductive method of thought and research, one that proceeds from evidence to conclusion, it made sense for him to observe the world by noting both sides of a controversial issue. The reader, then, in the absence of Bacon's blunt support of one side or another, had to examine the evidence before reaching his own conclusion. Since the target audience was the seeker of power or the man about town, Bacon wanted to train that man to look beyond the obvious, to coolly and deliberately assess his position before advancing. This presupposed a mind much like Bacon's own. Modern readers are not used to such a cold and calculating approach to life, and it is as much this as any linguistic device that renders Bacon's essays both challenging and discomforting.