Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Critically evaluate the prose style of Francis Bacon.

Bacon's prose style is renowned for being crisp, succinct, and to the point. He was a firm believer that language should be a reflection of thought. That being the case, clear thoughts should always be expressed in clear language.
As an empiricist, Bacon felt that the English language should, wherever possible, be grounded in experience. If it was not, then it was doomed to be bogged down in what he saw as the meaningless abstractions of scholastic philosophy, which, according to empiricists, tell us nothing about the world in which we live, the world of space, time, and objects studied by natural science. Bacon wanted to de-clutter the English language to make it easier for scientists such as himself to be able to talk about the empirical world in a meaningful way. And this is precisely what he did in his on written works, which are some of the finest examples of clear prose style in the English language.

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