(Lord Verulam) (1561-1626) English politician and philosopher. Bacon became Lord Chancellor of England in 1618, but was driven immediately from office under charges of official corruption. As an early empiricist, he rejected scholastic accounts of the natural world in favour of a new method for achieving knowledge, based exclusively on careful observation and cautious eliminative induction, which he described in The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. Bacon warned that effective reasoning must be freed from the "idolatrous" influence of personal interest, human nature, social conventions, and academic philosophy.