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Updated: June 29, 2025
It was like the English Constitution, venerable in authority and prescription, interpreted in contradictory methods, and never precisely defined. Few men undertook to study it with a zeal like that of Homer and his friend Lord Webb Seymour, when, in days of enthusiasm, they read and re-read the "De Augmentis" and the "Novum Organum," and Homer planned to do what Dr.
Again: 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. In the mean time the NOVUM ORGANUM was slowly proceeding.
In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Organum" a decisive influence on the developement of modern science.
It was as a disgraced and baffled statesman and courtier all lurking jealousies and suspicions at last put to rest all possibility of a political future precluded; but as a courtier still hanging on the king and on the power that controlled the king, for life and liberty; and careful still not to assert any independence of those same ends, which had always been taken to be his ends; it was in this character that he brought out at last the Novum Organum; it was in this character that he ventured to collect and republish his avowed philosophical works; it was in this character too that he ventured at last to produce that little piece of history which comes down to us loosely appended to these philosophical writings.
We may say as much for spermaceti, which he seems to have considered "the sovereign'st thing on earth" for inward bruises, and often prescribes after falls and similar injuries. See Electuarium Novum Alexipharmacum, by Rev. Thomas Harward, lecturer at the Royal Chappell. Boston, 1732.
Did it never occur to the student of the Novum Organum that the constant application of that 'New Machine' by the inventor of it himself, to one particular class of subjects, so constant as to produce on the mind of the careless reader the common impression, that it was intended to be applied to that class only, and that the relief of the human estate, in that one department of the human want, constituted its whole design: did it never occur to the curious inquirer, or to the active experimenter in this new rule of learning, that this apparently so rigorous limitation of its applications in the hands of its author is under all the circumstances a thing worthy of being inquired into?
Again, in the Protemium of the "Novum Organum": "There was but one course left, to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations." And in the Dedication to the same work, he says, with characteristic confidence, "Equidem Organum praebui," "I have provided the Instrument."
A strange theory, and yet one which so determined is man to see nothing, whether it be in the Bible or in the Novum Organum, but what each wishes to see, has been deliberately put forth again and again by men who fancy, forsooth, that the greatest of English heroes was even such an one as themselves.
There never was any one in whose life the "Souveraineté du but" was more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest that man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making them good. The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the Novum Organum, the method of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of what Bacon did.
Compare his elaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the Novum Organum, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's Treatise on Dew, or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural Philosophy. And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takes no account.
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