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Updated: September 30, 2025
There were verses on all manner of subjects mostly the nobility and their works and ways, from the viewpoint of disapproval and epigrams, generally ill-humorous, like the following, headed "Novum Organum": "In Bacon see the culminating prime Of British intellect and British crime.
So totally was the world off its guard at the moment of this great and greatest innovation in its practice so totally unaccustomed were men then to look for anything like power in the quarter from which this seemed to be proceeding so impossible was it for this single book to remove that previous impression that the Author of the Novum Organum could even venture to intersperse these directions, with regard to its specific and particular applications, with pointed and not infrequent allusions to the comprehensive nature the essentially comprehensive nature of 'the Machine' whose application to these certain instances he is at such pains to specify; he could, indeed, produce it with a continuous side-long glance at this so portentous quality of it.
His soul is a Novum Organum his mind is a table of rejections that sifts the historic masses, and brings out the instances that are to his purpose, the bright, bold instances that flame forth the doubtful truth, that tell their own story and need no interpreter, the high ideal instances that talk in verse because it is their native tongue and they can no other.
'For although, he continues,'such remarks those last quoted be just, unless they terminate in MATTER AND CONSTRUCTION, according to the TRUE DEFINITIONS, they are SPECULATIVE, and of LITTLE USE. But in the Novum Organum, those more natural divisions are reduced to a form in which it IS possible to commence practice with them at once, in certain departments, where there is no objection to innovation, where the proposal for the relief of the human estate is met without opposition, where the new scientific achievements in the conquest of nature are met with a universal, unanimous human plaudit and gratulation.
But with the aid of the persons of the Drama, and their suggestions, the new philosophy is carried into departments which it would have cost the Author of the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning his head to look into.
It has been said, that in the constructing of Shakspeare's Dramas there is, apart from all other "faculties" as they are called, an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum That is true; and it is not a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakspeare's dramatic materials, we could fashion such a result!
Spedding in another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the "organum," the "formula," the "clavis," the "ars ipsa interpretandi naturam," the "filum Labyrinthi," or by whatever of its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a command over the powers of nature of this philosophy we can make nothing.
He never heard Lord Bacon's name. But he proceeds in the strictest conformity with the rules laid down in the second book of the Novum Organum, and satisfies himself that minced pies have done the mischief. "I ate minced pies on Monday and Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion all night." This is the comparentia ad intellectum instantiarum convenientium.
Scala Intellectus, or "Ladder of the Mind," is the rational application of the Organum to all problems. By it the mind should ascend step by step from particular facts and instances to general laws and abstract principles. Prodromi, "Prophecies or Anticipations," is a list of discoveries that men shall make when they have applied Bacon's methods of study and experimentation.
Bacon has been accused of overrating the importance of those sciences which minister to the physical well-being of man, and of underrating the importance of moral philosophy; and it cannot be denied that persons who read the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, without adverting to the circumstances under which those works were written, will find much that may seem to countenance the accusation.
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