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BACON’S RELATIONS WITH HIS PHILOSOPHY

By Allama Muhammad Yousuf Gabriel

Yousuf_gabriel@yahoo.com

The philosophies in the pre-modern ages taught poverty, patience, perseverance, and sacrifice of this transient world for the sake of the next eternal world. This world was to be shunned as an issue of deceit. Love of God was preferred to the love of wealth and this world. The torture of worldly misery was thus mitigated, and also the calamity was attributed to the will of God and was thus taken with patience. All the givers of revealed religion, excepting perhaps Solomon, lived in poverty and preferred poverty to wealth. The lives of all the great teachers of mankind, e.g Socrates, Budha, Christ and the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, serve as the precedent. Bacon’s life on the other had is an example of the worldly pleasure and luxury and engenders hatred for poverty, morality and humility. Epicurus may only be seen to side with Bacon in this.

Bacon’s relation to his own philosophy may be surmised as follows:-

            “Love of wealth, power and ostentation was inherent in the nature of Bacon, that he might give the philosophy of fruit and man’s right of dominion over nature. And his mind was so set on these things that he went as far as condemning the moral philosophy and misinterpreting the word of Bible”.