This ambitious and important book provides the first truly general account of Francis Bacon as a philosopher. It describes how Bacon transformed the values that had underpinned philosophical culture since antiquity by rejecting the traditional idea of a philosopher as someone engaged in contemplation of the cosmos.The book explores in detail how and why Bacon attempted to transform the largely esoteric discipline of natural philosophy into a public practice through a program in which practical science provided a model that inspired many from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Stephen Gaukroger shows that we shall not understand Bacon unless we understand that a key component of his program for the reform of natural philosophy was the creation of a new philosophical persona: a natural philosopher shaped through submission to the dictates of Baconian method. Thus, we begin to glimpse how the scientific paradigm for cognitive inquiry in our own culture was formed.This book will be recognised as a major contribution to Baconian scholarship of special interest to historians of early-modern philosophy, science, and ideas.