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The universal history, all of it that the mind of man is constituted to grasp, is here in the general, under these PREROGATIVE INSTANCES, in the luminous order of the Inventor of this science, blazing throughout with his genius, and the mind that has abolished its prenotions, and renounced its rude, instinctive, barbaric tendencies, and has taken this scientific Organum instead; has armed itself with the Nature of Things, and is prepared to grapple with all specifications and particulars.
Albans, and the author of the Novum Organum as well of a host of other works, including essays on almost every conceivable subject. In the opinion of certain people, he was also the author of the plays commonly attributed to one William Shakespeare.
I say then, Sir, that, if the science of Government be an experimental science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum.
And until your reading is wide enough to give you this view of them, you had better not attempt course lecturing in the twentieth century. Said Francis Bacon, the author of "Novum Organum," "Reading maketh a full man, writing an exact man, and conversation a ready man." The first in importance of these is to be "a full man."
And if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much.
It may seem justly matter of wonder that the author of the "Advancement of Learning" should espouse this maxim in religion and politics, as well as physics, so absolutely, and that he should place it as an axiom of his first philosophy relatively to the three, since he could not do it without falling into the abuse he condemns so much in his "Organum Novum" the abuse philosophers are guilty of when they suffer the mind to rise too fast, as it is apt to do, from particulars to remote and general axioms.
They are, in fact, the identical truth which the last vintage of the Novum Organum yields on this point. 'The world is unapt for curing itself; it is so impatient of any thing that presses it, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself, at what price soever. We see, by a thousand examples, that it generally cures itself to its cost.
The logic of Aristotle, the polemics of Augustine, the prodigious onsets of a Luther, the Institutes of a Calvin, the Novum Organum of Bacon, the Principia of Newton, the Cosmos of Humboldt the like of these she will never achieve, nor is it desirable that she should. Women seldom invent.
The change is great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the Novum Organum, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared and systematized.
'The present system of philosophy, he says, 'cherishes in its bosom certain positions or dogmas which it will be found, are calculated to produce a full conviction that no difficult, commanding, and powerful operation on nature ought to be anticipated, through the means of art. And, therefore, after criticising the theory and practice of the world as he finds it, reporting as well as he can, though he can find no words, he says, in which to do justice to his feeling in regard to it the deficiencies in its learning, he devotes a considerable portion of the description of his new method to the grounds of 'hope' which he derives from this philosophic survey, and that that hope is not a hope of a better state of things in respect to the physical wants of man merely, that it is not a hope of a renovation in the arts which minister to those wants exclusively, any very careful reader of the first book of the Novum Organum will be apt on the whole to infer.
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