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Updated: June 29, 2025
He might as well have proposed to impeach the Government in Parliament outright, as to offer to advance his Novum Organum into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the Author of the Advancement of Learning assures us 'are made of the pith and heart of sciences'; and that 'no man can write who is not sound and grounded. But then, if they are only written in 'with a goose-pen, they pass well enough for unconscious, unmeaning, spontaneous felicities.
Oh, Man of the new ages of science, will you have the new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in nature, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every other culture and cure, will you have the rule of this knowledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, to assist weak nature in her 'conservations' and 'advancements' in these, to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints; will you have the Georgics of this new Virgil to load your table with its magic clusters; will you take the Novum Organum to pile your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature and her perfections; will you have the rule of that Organum applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this department of art and science, this, in which the sum of our good and evil is contained, in a mere oversight of it, in a disgraceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past instrumentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us, arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that knowledge is power.
The most important of the coast towns were furnished with Roman colonies: Pyrgi the seaport of Caere, the colonization of which probably falls within this period; along the west coast, Antium in 415, Tarracina in 425, the island of Pontia in 441, so that, as Ardea and Circeii had previously received colonists, all the Latin seaports of consequence in the territory of the Rutuli and Volsci had now become Latin or burgess colonies; further, in the territory of the Aurunci, Minturnae and Sinuessa in 459; in that of the Lucanians, Paestum and Cosa in 481; and, on the coast of the Adriatic, Sena Gallica and Castrum Novum about 471, and Ariminum in 486; to which falls to be added the occupation of Brundisium, which took place immediately after the close of the Pyrrhic war.
Many of the latter formed part of the library of Sir Edward Coke; the title-page of the first edition of the ‘Novum Organum,’ published in 1620, bears the design of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules into an undulating sea. The Holkham copy is adorned by the inscription, ‘Ex dono auctoris.’
But it is not easy to discover satisfactory evidence that the 'Novum Organum' had any direct beneficial influence on the advancement of natural knowledge.
Yet in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild nothing but what sober reason sanctioned. Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the NOVUM ORGANUM... . Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.
It was the presence and the power of a great idea long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, which probably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place in the company of the "Ship of Fools," which expressed its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organum, in the sentiment that "a fool could not have written it, and a wise man would not" it is this which has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race.
Instead of stopping with that mere report of the condition of learning and its deficiences, and that outline of what is to be done, which makes the FIRST PART or Introduction to this work; or stopping with the description of the new method, or the Novum Organum, which makes the SECOND; why don't they go on to the 'new philosophy itself, and show us that as well, the very object of all this preparation?
This address might well so runs the prosecutor's reflection have been delivered wherever you like from the professor's chair or from the rostrum of the singing school, before the so-called élite of the educated people; but that it was actually delivered before the actual people, that it was held before workingmen and addressed to workingmen, that fact deprives it of all standing as a scientific work and makes it a criminal offense, crimen novum atque inauditum.
Various modes of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified. Prefaces were written to give the sketch and purpose of chapters not yet composed. The Novum Organum had been written and rewritten twelve times over. Bacon kept his papers, and we can trace in the unused portion of those left behind him much of the progress of his work, and the shapes which much of it went through.
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