Foreign Volume - 200 Learning Stories That Benefit Children's Lives

Author: Wei Jinping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-03-01
Features: Bacon was born in London in 1561 into a noble family. His father was the King's Seal Master under Queen Elizabeth I, and his mother was also a renowned intellectual. Good family education allowed Bacon to mature early and showed extraordinary talent in various aspects. When Bacon was young, his father took him to the palace to broaden his horizons. At first, his father was a bit worried that he would be afraid of meeting the queen, but unexpectedly, young Bacon was not shy at all. When the queen asked him how old he was, he replied with great composure, "I was born in the happy reign of Her Majesty, and I am two years younger than Her Majesty's dynasty." His witty and appropriate answer pleased the queen greatly. Although Bacon was physically frail and often sick as a child, he loved learning and reading very much. Bacon once said, "Reading is a pleasure, a fine pursuit, and a means of developing talent. History makes one wise, poetry makes one elegant, mathematics makes one meticulous, science makes one profound, ethics makes one dignified, and logic and rhetoric make one persuasive. Whatever one learns shapes their character." Bacon always valued the mastery of knowledge, and the idea that "knowledge is power" was proposed by him. He was revered among the giants of the Renaissance as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy and science. Marx called him the "true progenitor of English materialism and the entire modern experimental science."