Happy Birthday, Sir Francis Bacon

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about Bacon:

Sir Francis Bacon (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Early in his career he claimed “all knowledge as his province” and afterwards dedicated himself to a wholesale revaluation and re-structuring of traditional learning. To take the place of the established tradition (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural magic), he proposed an entirely new system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal would be the production of practical knowledge for “the use and benefit of men” and the relief of the human condition.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about Bacon:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the leading figures in natural philosophy and in the field of scientific methodology in the period of transition from the Renaissance to the early modern era. As a lawyer, member of Parliament, and Queen’s Counsel, Bacon wrote on questions of law, state and religion, as well as on contemporary politics; but he also published texts in which he speculated on possible conceptions of society, and he pondered questions of ethics (Essays) even in his works on natural philosophy (The Advancement of Learning).

The SEP article goes on to elaborate on Bacon’s influence on the direction of science and his advocacy of induction:

Already in his early text Cogitata et Visa (1607) Bacon dealt with his scientific method, which became famous under the name of induction. He repudiates the syllogistic method and defines his alternative procedure as one “which by slow and faithful toil gathers information from things and brings it into understanding” (Farrington, 1964, 89). When later on he developed his method in detail, namely in his Novum Organum (1620), he still noted that “[of] induction the logicians seem hardly to have taken any serious thought, but they pass it by with a slight notice, and hasten to the formulae of disputation. I on the contrary reject demonstration by syllogism …” (Bacon, IV [1901], 24). Bacon’s method appears as his conceptual plot, “applied to all stages of knowledge, and at every phase the whole process has to be kept in mind” (Malherbe, 1996, 76). Induction implies ascending to axioms, as well as a descending to works, so that from axioms new particulars are gained and from these new axioms. The inductive method starts from sensible experience and moves via natural history (providing sense-data as guarantees) to lower axioms or propositions, which are derived from the tables of presentation or from the abstraction of notions. Bacon does not identify experience with everyday experience, but presupposes that method corrects and extends sense-data into facts, which go together with his setting up of tables (tables of presence and of absence and tables of comparison or of degrees, i.e., degrees of absence or presence).The last type can be supplemented by tables of counter-instances, which may suggest experiments: “To move from the sensible to the real requires the correction of the senses, the tables of natural history, the abstraction of propositions and the induction of notions. In other words, the full carrying out of the inductive method is needed” (Malherbe, 1996, 85).

I am not aware, however, that philosophers before Bacon did not have the material (i.e., semi-developed science and technology) needed to study induction. So I believe that Bacon is wrong to treat them as if they failed or as if they willfully rejected induction. Read the SEP and IEP articles for more!! See also About.com’s Francis Bacon page.