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And before the Advancement he had already tried his hand on a work intended to be in two books, which Mr. Ellis describes as a "great work on the Interpretation of Nature," the "earliest type of the Instauratio," and which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of Valerius Terminus.
WORKS OF BACON. Bacon's philosophic works, The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum, will be best understood in connection with the Instauratio Magna, or The Great Institution of True Philosophy, of which they were parts.
The work was in fact the preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete, and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum," which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621.
It was the having leisure to finish the Instauratio Magna. The Queen looked coldly on him. The courtiers began to consider him as a marked man. He determined to change his line of conduct, and to proceed in a new course with so much vigour as to make up for lost time.
A year later Bacon produced his "Natural and Experimental History." This, with the "Novum Organum" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his projected "Instauratio Magna" which he actually finished; and even of this portion we have only part of the last two divisions.
The Instauratio was never completed, but the very idea of the work was magnificent, to sweep away the involved philosophy of the schoolmen and the educational systems of the universities, and to substitute a single great work which should be a complete education, "a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and for the relief of man's estate."
But to complete this, the last part of the Instauratio, Bacon does not hope; he speaks of it as a thing, et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata." Works, i. 71. The Novum Organum, itself imperfect, was the crown of all that he lived to do.
The Instauratio had contemplated the good of men "in the dowries of nature;" the Laws, their good "in society and the dowries of government."
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."
From that work has sprung a great renewal, a true "instauratio magna" of the zoological and botanical sciences. But the impulse thus given to scientific thought rapidly spread beyond the ordinarily recognised limits of biology.
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