Around the time Shakespeare inaugurated the gilded age of English drama, the young Francis Bacon proposed to take all knowledge to be my province. He soon realized the difficulty of his task, but in the process of his study he posed two related questions which he understood better than any other man of his time: can human beings respect and obey nature, and can they also command nature? Developing these points, he asked many other questions considered useless and impractical in his time but vital in ours.

After a busy career as an English parliamentarian, judge and advisor of King James I, Bacon published in his final years the results of a proposal, The Advancement of Learning, which had had written in middle age. These works included his New Atlantis–with its prescient vision of human accomplishments, many achieved only in the past century–and, in the first important book of English essays, an investigation of civil and moral problems that continue to engage and perplex us.