The text you quote summarizes quite well a real historiographical debate: not so much about whether Bacon was actually a Freemason, but about whether he was the spiritual ancestor of Freemasonry, the Rosicrucian movements and the organized scientific elite that emerged later.
The interesting thing is that there are three different levels:
The historical Bacon
Francis Bacon was:
Lord Chancellor of England.
Founder of empiricism.
Supporter of organized scientific research.
Author of New Atlantis.
These are of course documented.
The utopian Bacon
In New Atlantis he describes Bensalem, a society where real power lies neither with the merchants nor with the people nor with the generals.
It is located in the House of Solomon.
This institution:
collects information from all over the world,
maintains secret laboratories,
conducts experiments,
controls the dissemination of knowledge,
decides what knowledge will be given to society.
This reminds many of:
academy of sciences,
think tank,
secret society of wise men,
or even a technocratic government.
For this reason, several authors see Bacon as the ideological ancestor of technocracy.
The esoteric/Masonic Bacon
This is where the controversial theories begin.
Authors such as Alfred Dodd, Friedrich Nicolai and others have argued that:
Bacon was associated with Rosicrucian circles,
the Royal Society was a realization of his vision,
modern Freemasonry originated from circles inspired by Bacon.
The problem is that the evidence is mostly circumstantial.
There is no known document in which Bacon writes:
"I founded Freemasonry."
Nor are there any lodge records that record him as Grand Master.
That is why most historians treat these theories with caution.
Where the matter really gets interesting
Leaving aside the question of "was he a Freemason?", his greatest influence may lie elsewhere.
Bacon essentially proposed a new social principle:
Knowledge should be gathered by experts and used to govern the world.
This idea reappears later:
in the Royal Society,
in the Enlightenment,
in the Industrial Age,
in the positivism of Auguste Comte,
in the technocratic movements of the 20th century.
This is why many critics of modern technocracy believe that Bacon's real legacy was not some secret lodge, but the idea that society should be organized by those who possess specialized knowledge.
In this sense, even if it is never proven that he was a Freemason, one can argue that he was one of the most important intellectual ancestors of the modern technocratic conception of the state and science.
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