Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on the Advancement of Learning, which at a later period was expanded into the De Augmentis, appeared in 1605.
He wrote steadily for an hour, copying and polishing, for he was too great an artist to send forth even an anonymous trifle incomplete in finish. Lord Hunsdon, who was a young man of excellent parts, took from the table a copy of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, and read diligently until Warner crossed the room and handed him the sonnet. Hunsdon was enraptured, but Warner refused to be thanked.
This review of the existing state of knowledge was intended to be made, later, into the first part of the "Instauratio Magna" under the title of "Partitiones Scientiarum." For this purpose Bacon was constantly revising it, and eventually he had it translated into Latin, and it was so published, greatly enlarged, in 1623, under the title of "De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum."
It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the Novum Organum, in the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentis, in the romance of the New Atlantis.
Montagu practises with so much ability and success, will know how often he enlivens the discussion of a point of law by citing some weighty aphorism, or some brilliant illustration, from the De Augmentis or the Novum Organum." Send me some gossip, my love. Tell me how you go on with German. What novel have you commenced? Or, rather, how many dozen have you finished? Recommend me one.
He tells us in the De Augmentis that when he was in France he occupied himself with devising an improved system of cypher-writing a thing of daily and indispensable use for rival statesmen and rival intriguers. But the investigation, with its call on the calculating and combining faculties, would also interest him, as an example of the discovery of new powers by the human mind.
Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue." It is by the Essays that Bacon is best known to the multitude. The Novum Organum and the De Augmentis are much talked of, but little read.
His petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but for the clearing of his name and for the means of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his requests. The words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but they express what he added to a letter presenting the De Augmentis; "det Vestra Majestas obolum Belisario."
Without any disparagement to the admirable treatise De Augmentis, we must say that, in our judgment, Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum. All the peculiarities of his extraordinary mind are found there in the highest perfection.
Oh, the agonies I went through! I thought myself very clever at first, for I made sure that the key would be found in some of the old books on secret writing. The Steganographia of Joachim Trithemius, who was an earlier contemporary of Abbot Thomas, seemed particularly promising; so I got that and Selenius's Cryptographia and Bacon's de Augmentis Scientiarum and some more.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking