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Updated: September 30, 2025
Spedding finds it in the formation of a great "natural and experimental history," a vast collection of facts in every department of nature, which was to be a more important part of his philosophy than the Novum Organum itself.
He had just published the Novum Organum; and that extraordinary book had drawn forth the warmest expressions of admiration from the ablest men in Europe. He had obtained honours of a widely different kind, but perhaps not less valued by him. He had been created Baron Verulam. He had subsequently been raised to the higher dignity of Viscount St. Albans.
In a later age, the Centuries of the "Sylva Sylvarum" afford a curious comment on the Aphorisms of the "Novum Organum." The "Opus Majus" of Bacon was undertaken in answer to a demand of Pope Clement IV. in 1266, and was intended to contain a review of the whole range of science, as then understood, with the exception of logic.
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.
And, in fine, the one confers on its votary the most sincere, permanent, and exalted delight; the other continual disappointment, and unceasing molestation. That this must be the tendency of experiment, when prosecuted as the criterion of truth, is evident from what Bacon, the prince of modern philosophy, says in the 104th Aphorism of his Novum Organum, that "baseless fabric of a vision."
The criticism of the Novum Organum, the criticism of the Advancement of Learning, and the criticism of Raleigh's History of the World, than which there is none finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, is here on the surface.
It will be seen at a glance that the above is the most important of Bacon's works. The Organum was to be in several books, only two of which he completed, and these he wrote and rewrote twelve times until they satisfied him. Historic Naturalis et Experimentalis, the study of all the phenomena of nature.
And between the Advancement and the Novum Organum at least one unpublished treatise of great interest intervened, the Visa et Cogitata, on which he was long employed, and which he brought to a finished shape, fit to be submitted to his friends and critics, Sir Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes.
'Unless these end in matter, and constructions according to true definitions, they are speculative, and of little use. Novum Organum. Difficult, then, as the problem of Civil Government appeared to the eye of the scientific philosopher, and threatening and appalling as were those immediate aspects of it which it presented at that moment, he does not despair of the State.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his Novum Scientiarum Organum. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service.
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