conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Penang, Satvinder, Malaysia.Her with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Puzzles & Games?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'Knowledge is Power'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for the story.. End with the sentence '' It's a good job that Bacon never found himself in court having to prosecute him.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Knowledge is Power
  Even so, after the succession of James I (1604), Bacon responded to 'common speech' against his behaviour by publishing an apology for his involvement in the prosecution of his former patron and friend. Bacon's defence of his actions was the only one possible: that he put his duty and loyalty to the Queen above his friendship. Indeed, he wrote:
  These are fine words, but they glibly overlook the fact that Essex clearly did not intend to depose or harm the Queen and that, had Bacon let the main prosecutor, Sir Edward Coke, do all the talking, his incompetence might have told in Essex's favour. Samuel Johnson once said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. It seems hard not to think of Bacon's claims of loyalty to the crown to be a similar refuge or, worse, another attempt to win favour and preferment from the Crown even at the expense of his friend's life.
  One way or another, Elizabeth's reign was a series of disappointments for Bacon. Not only had he failed to achieve any official place in affairs of state, but his ambitions to reform natural philosophy and to kindle a light in nature for the benefit of mankind, or even for the commonwealth of England, received no encouragement whatsoever. Under her successor, James I, things certainly improved with regard to state preferments. Bacon was knighted in 1603 and further noticed by James for his parliamentarian work in connection with the union of the Crowns of Scotland and England (James was already King of Scotland). Bacon finally became solicitor general in 1607.
  The following year he was also able, at last, to take up the post and the salary of the Clerk of the Council in the Star Chamber. His fortunes improved dramatically after the death of Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley's son, who like his father rose to be Elizabeth's secretary of state and who became James's chief minister. The Cecils had formed a rival faction at court in the days when Essex was the Queen's favourite, and Cecil continued to hinder Bacon's advancement until his death. But Bacon did not rely merely on the removal of an obstacle. He also ingratiated himself with the King's rising favourite, Sir George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham.
  In 1613 he became attorney general and in 1616 a member of the King's Privy Council. When Villiers secured for Bacon James's promise that he would be next Lord Chancellor, Bacon wrote in gratitude to him: 'I am yours surer to you than my own life... I will break into twenty pieces before you have the least fall.' It's a good job that Bacon never found himself in court having to prosecute him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Given this background, Enlightenment thinkers wanted to see the heroic figures in the history of the new science as thinkers swayed only by rational and empirically grounded principles. As far as the secularist philosophers of the Enlightenment were concerned, this meant their heroes must have been at least indifferent to the superstitious doctrines of religion, and preferably nothing more than deists or even atheists. A deist was someone who accepted the existence of God on the grounds that the natural world was too well organised, too intricately designed and too interdependent to have come about without a divine creator, but who nevertheless rejected the teachings of the organised religions. A deist, therefore, would believe in a creator God, but not in Christ, virgin births, miracles, bodily resurrections from the dead and so on. Since Bacon was one of the greatest heroes of Enlightenment thinkers, there was a strong tendency for them to see him as a deist or an atheist.
  Bearing in mind that irreligion was still a capital offence during his time, Enlightenment thinkers knew that Bacon could not have announced that he disbelieved in revealed religion. Some were convinced, however, that he could have left sufficient hints or 'coded' allusions in his writings to indicate his real views to those who knew how to read between the lines. (These thinkers were convinced of this for the simple reason that they themselves played the same game in their own writings.) Certainly there are a number of instances in Bacon's writings that can easily be taken this way. Consider the story he uses to illustrate the nature of superstition:
  Another coded support for atheism was found, naturally enough, in Bacon's essay 'Of Atheism'. At one point Bacon insists that the standard Aristotelian philosophy taught in the universities, which explains all physical phenomena in terms of the interactions of four elements (earth, water, air and fire), is more likely to provide support for atheism than the atomist philosophy, which explains all phenomena in terms of the intermingling and incessant motions of virtually infinite numbers of invisibly small atoms. It is more likely, Bacon explains, that only four elements might randomly interact in the appropriate way than that an infinite army of atoms should randomly give rise to the world around us.
  On the face of it, the discussion reads like a defence of atomism against charges of atheism. Enlightenment thinkers turned the story on its head, however. Since atomism had always been associated with atheism, Bacon's insistence that Aristotelianism (which had been adopted as the official natural philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages) provided better support for atheism than atomism was a clear signal that atheism, no matter which natural philosophy you subscribe to, must be true.
  But the claim of Bacon's that has often been presented as most irreligious in its import is his insistence that natural philosophy and religion should always be kept separate. Bacon insisted that the study of the natural world had been blighted by 'a troublesome and intractable enemy' – namely, 'blind immoderate religious zeal'. This could be seen, he explained, not only in ancient times, but also at present:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As far as the secularist philosophers of the Enlightenment were concerned, this meant their heroes must have been at least indifferent to the superstitious doctrines of religion, and preferably nothing more than deists or even atheists. A deist was someone who accepted the existence of God on the grounds that the natural world was too well organised, too intricately designed and too interdependent to have come about without a divine creator, but who nevertheless rejected the teachings of the organised religions. A deist, therefore, would believe in a creator God, but not in Christ, virgin births, miracles, bodily resurrections from the dead and so on. Since Bacon was one of the greatest heroes of Enlightenment thinkers, there was a strong tendency for them to see him as a deist or an atheist.
  Bearing in mind that irreligion was still a capital offence during his time, Enlightenment thinkers knew that Bacon could not have announced that he disbelieved in revealed religion. Some were convinced, however, that he could have left sufficient hints or 'coded' allusions in his writings to indicate his real views to those who knew how to read between the lines. (These thinkers were convinced of this for the simple reason that they themselves played the same game in their own writings.) Certainly there are a number of instances in Bacon's writings that can easily be taken this way. Consider the story he uses to illustrate the nature of superstition:
  Another coded support for atheism was found, naturally enough, in Bacon's essay 'Of Atheism'. At one point Bacon insists that the standard Aristotelian philosophy taught in the universities, which explains all physical phenomena in terms of the interactions of four elements (earth, water, air and fire), is more likely to provide support for atheism than the atomist philosophy, which explains all phenomena in terms of the intermingling and incessant motions of virtually infinite numbers of invisibly small atoms. It is more likely, Bacon explains, that only four elements might randomly interact in the appropriate way than that an infinite army of atoms should randomly give rise to the world around us.
  On the face of it, the discussion reads like a defence of atomism against charges of atheism. Enlightenment thinkers turned the story on its head, however. Since atomism had always been associated with atheism, Bacon's insistence that Aristotelianism (which had been adopted as the official natural philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages) provided better support for atheism than atomism was a clear signal that atheism, no matter which natural philosophy you subscribe to, must be true.
  But the claim of Bacon's that has often been presented as most irreligious in its import is his insistence that natural philosophy and religion should always be kept separate. Bacon insisted that the study of the natural world had been blighted by 'a troublesome and intractable enemy' – namely, 'blind immoderate religious zeal'. This could be seen, he explained, not only in ancient times, but also at present:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Royal Society went on to become extremely successful and influential, being seen as the embodiment of science in England. The fact that its actual successes rest more on the discoveries of individual innovative natural philosophers among its fellows than on its professed Baconian collaborative schemes is, as far as the success of Baconianism is concerned, neither here nor there. What mattered for the posthumous fame of Bacon was the fact that the members continued to rhetorically exploit the advantages of Baconian objectivism and factualism. Perhaps the seal was set upon this when Isaac Newton, champion of English science, defended his theory of gravity against the attacks of the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in entirely Baconian terms.
  This was the ultimate endorsement. Newton's was a name with real clout, and the future of the Baconian method was now assured. When the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment recognised the power and potential of Newton's achievement, they looked more closely at the culture from which his work had emerged. Recognising first of all Newton's older contemporaries – the experimental scientist Robert Boyle and the philosopher John Locke – they soon noted the influence on them of Francis Bacon.
  Enlightenment intellectuals were entirely optimistic about the new science and the changes it would bring to all aspects of human living. This makes Bacon a particularly suitable hero for the Enlightenment. He too was always optimistic about his plan to reform the world of learning, and about the benefits that would accrue to mankind if knowledge of nature should be pursued for practical ends, so that human knowledge and human power met in one.
  It is a final irony of Bacon's thought that his optimism even displaced his belief in induction. To learn from induction is to learn from past experience, but Bacon's optimism saw a way to avoid an inductive despair. 'The blacker the past', he wrote, 'the brighter the hope for the future' (Thoughts and Conclusions). After all, he explained, 'if men had been on the right path all those ages past and yet had got no further, what hope could there be?' As things are, we know that we just have to try to find the right path, where human knowledge and human power, and we must add, human desire, meet in one. 'Not to try', he believed, 'is a greater hazard than to fail... Not to try is to forgo the prospect of measureless good.'
  There's no substitute for reading an important historical figure's own words, and this is especially true of Francis Bacon, who wrote with such wonderful style.