Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

This line comes from Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Death,” first published in the 1612 expanded edition of his Essays. Bacon (1561–1626)—statesman, philosopher, and advocate of empirical inquiry—often wrote in a practical, moralizing vein about common human passions and public conduct. In “Of Death,” he examines why death terrifies people and how that fear is socially amplified. The comparison to children afraid of the dark reflects Bacon’s interest in how imagination and received stories (“tales”) can intensify anxieties beyond what nature initially supplies, a theme consistent with his broader critique of superstition and unexamined opinion.

Bacon argues that fear of death is less a rational response to an understood reality than an imaginative dread, akin to a child’s fear of darkness. The “natural fear” is real but modest; it grows when fed by frightening narratives—religious terrors, folklore, or cultural scripts that dramatize dying. The simile implies that maturity should bring clearer sight: death is an unknown, but not necessarily a horror. Bacon’s point is not to deny mortality’s seriousness, but to diagnose how secondhand stories and mental images can magnify fear, suggesting that steadier judgment and honest contemplation can reduce it.