United States or Sri Lanka ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
As Bacon says, in De Augmentis Scientiarum: "Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines, procured a plentiful vintage.
It is the first great book in English prose of secular interest; the first book which can claim a place beside the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. As regards its subject-matter, it has been partly thrown into the shade by the greatly enlarged and elaborate form in which it ultimately appeared, in a Latin dress, as the first portion of the scheme of the Instauratio, the De Augmentis Scientiarum.
Some men's thoughts on this curious fact would probably take the form of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, beginning with 'the tendency of the infinite to reveal itself in the finite, and ending who can tell where? But as we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves any skill in the scientia scientiarum, or say, 'The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old.
Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the famous "De Vanitate Scientiarum," and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit's "Disquisitions on Magic" that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in "Hudibras": Agrippa kept a Stygian pug I' the garb and habit of a dog That was his taste; and the cur Read to th' occult philosopher, And taught him subtly to maintain All other sciences are vain.
One of his favorite books was "Agrippa de Vanitate Scientiarum," which he especially commended to me, and so set my young brains in a considerable whirl for a long time.
"Yes, sir," said my father, rousing himself, "such was Giles Tibbets, M. A., Sol Scientiarum, tutor to the humble scholar you address, and father to poor Kitty. He left me his Elzevirs; he left me also his orphan daughter." "Oh! as a wife " "No, as a ward. So she came to live in my house. I am sure there was no harm in it.
The Professors of the University of Louvain declared that they detected forty-three errors in the book; and Agrippa was forced to defend himself against their attacks in a little book published at Leyden, entitled Apologia pro defencione Declamationis de Vanitate Scientiarum contra Theologistes Lovanienses.
But for philosophy in its highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable.
Bacon published his survey of the circle of the sciences in the English work, the Advancement of Learning, 1605, a much enlarged revision of which, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, appeared in Latin in 1623. This title, Novum Organum, of itself indicates opposition to Aristotle, whose logical treatises had for ages been collected under the title Organon.
Word Of The Day