found in the Advancement is either contradicted or even by implication retracted or abandoned in the De Augmentis; the few omissions are of passages, which, on whatever account their retention may have been thought objectionable, make no part of the exposition of the author's philosophical views, and seem to have been discarded only on the principle indicated in his letter, already quoted, to the King, in which he says that he had been his own index expurgatorius, in order that the work might be read in all places.* The substance, too, of the Advancement, there is reason to believe, had been for the greater part excogitated, and to some extent even reduced to the shape in which we actually have it, a considerable time before it was published. In a letter sent to his friend Matthew with the printed volume, Bacon, as we have seen, speaks of the First Book as having been seen by Matthew in a completed state, it may have been years before. But, however this may be, there is at any rate a perfect or nearly perfect consistency throughout the whole course of Bacon's writings, in so far as they relate to what is commonly understood by his system of philosophy, whether they may have come from his pen in the earlier portion, in the middle, or towards the close of his life. His views are of course more fully developed in those of them that are of later date; but even in the earliest, if we do not find the seeds of all his subsequent speculations, we can detect nothing which entitles us to infer that his opinions had ever undergone any change. There is every reason to believe that his chaplain Rawley only states the fact when he tells us that it was while he was still at the University, and as yet only in his sixteenth year, that he fell into that dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle, in which he continued to his dying day. may be reasonably supposed, however, to have been not till a somewhat later date that he arrived at those other views which are regarded as constituting his own philosophy. He has himself, indeed, noted when it was that these new views first assumed any thing of distinctness

* See ante, page 39.

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† See vol. i. p. 11.

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and consistency in his mind. In his letter to Father Fulgentio, written in 1623 or 1624, after speaking of the zeal and constancy with which he had cherished the scheme of his Instauratio Magna through so many years, he proceeds (to adopt the translation in the Biographia Britannica):-"For well I remember that forty years ago I composed a juvenile work about these things, which, with great confidence I graced with the swelling title of The Greatest Birth of Time (Temporis Partus Maximus)." This would be when he was in his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year.

The great principle of the Baconian philosophy, however, the investigation of nature by experiment, is only generally indicated either in the Advancement of Learning, or even in the De Augmentis. Its complete explanation, and the method of applying it, form the subject of the Second Part of the Instauratio Magna, the Novum Organum, to which we now proceed.

SECTION III.

THE NOVUM ORGANUM, FORMING THE SECOND PART OF THE INSTAURATIO MAGNA.

THIS Second Part of the Instauration, it is to be recollected, was the portion of the work that was first published. It appeared in a folio volume in October, 1620, with the title of Novum Organum Scientiarum, sive Instaurationis Magnae Pars Secunda.' The First Part of the Instauration, the treatise ' De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum,' which we have just reviewed, was not given to the world till 1623, with the exception of so much of it as is contained in the Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning,' which had been published in 1605.

The amplification of the Two Books of the Advancement into the Nine Books of the De Augmentis, and the adaptation of the extended treatise to form the First Part of the Instauration, would appear not to have been contemplated in the original design of that work, nor even when the Second Part of it, the Novum Organum, was first published. At the head of the latter, as has been already mentioned, was given an intimation to the effect that the First Part of the Instauration, containing the Partitions of the Sciences, was wanting; but that the said Partitions might in part be sought from the Second Book of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning.' The two treatises, the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, were afterwards distinctly connected by the publication along with the former both of the short prefatory advertisement by Rawley, and of a note at the end stating that after the De Augmentis followed in Order the Second Part of the Instauration, explaining

the art of interpreting nature, and of the true application (adoperationis) of the intellect; not however in the form of a finished treatise, but only digested, according to the heads of the subject, into aphorisms. The subordinate title of the Novum Organum is Indicia de Interpretatione Naturae, sive de Regno Hominis' (Indications respecting the Interpretation of Nature, or respecting the Kingdom of Man).

The reader has already been informed that to the Novum Organum were prefixed various prolegomena which are properly to be regarded as introductory to the entire body of the Instauratio Magna. The Novum Organum, however, has also its own Preface, specially explaining its nature and design.

In this discourse Bacon begins by observing that they who have pronounced of nature as of a thing already explored have done the highest detriment to philosophy and the sciences, by extinguishing inquiry exactly in proportion as they have gained credit; while they who, on the other hand, have asserted that nothing can be certainly known, although they have adduced reasons for their opinion not to be despised, have yet also altogether exceeded the bounds of truth. The more ancient of the Greek philosophers, whose writings have perished, appear to him to have taken a wiser course than any of their successors; keeping a middle way between dogmatism and scepticism, and moreover being accustomed to test and judge of nature rather by experiment than by disputation: yet even they followed no rule or system in their experiments, but employed only the unregulated force of the intellect, and placed all their dependence upon intense meditation and perpetual revolution and agitation of mind. He then proceeds to describe generally his own method, as consisting in guarding the sense by what he calls a certain reduction (per reductionem quandam), by which he perhaps means a drawing of it back to its proper function; in rejecting for the most part the mental operation which follows the sensethat is, apparently, the conclusion to which the under

standing is naturally inclined to come at once on receiving the intimation of the sense ;* and in laying open and fortifying for the mind a new and certain road from the very perceptions of the senses. That the mind requires some props or helps he holds to have been without doubt perceived by those who assigned so great a part to Logic; but that art, from the manner in which it was employed, was rather efficacious in rivetting errors than in disclosing truth; so that nothing, he conceives, remains but that the whole work of the mind be begun afresh; that from the very commencement the mind be in nowise left to itself, but always forced to proceed according to rule; and that the business be finished as if by means of machinery. The necessity of mechanical aid for the production of all great effects in works of the hand is insisted upon as an illustration and proof of a similar necessity in works of the mind. Two special admonitions are then propounded; the first relating to persons, the second to things. The honour and reverence due to the ancients Bacon professes to be desirous of allowing to remain undiminished and untouched; with them he comes into no opposition or rivalry; the intellectual road or method by which he proposes to pursue his end is one which was to them wholly untried and unknown. Nor is it any part of his purpose to attempt to throw down either the actually received philosophy, or any other system, more correct or more comprehensive, which may exist or may arise. He does not deny but that the received philosophy and other systems of the like kind may be employed pro

*This obscure passage is rendered by Shaw,-"to guard the sense by a kind of reduction" (explained in a foot-note as meaning, by contriving ways of transmitting things, in a proper manner, to the senses, that a true judgment may be formed of them when thus again brought under view'); generally to reject that work of the mind which is consequent to sense." Mr. Wood's translation is,-" We, as it were, restore the senses to their former rank, but generally reject that operation of the mind which follows close upon the senses.'

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