THE NEW PHILOSOPHY 5 



Sunday allotted to Divinity 



Monday Physic (Medicine) 



Tuesday Law 



Wednesday Astronomy 



Thursday " Geometry 



Friday Rhetoric 



Saturday Music 



When I was admitted to $ B K and the symbols upon the key were 

 explained to me, I was told that the hand at the bottom of the shield 

 was pointing to the seven stars, emphasizing seven, the sacred number, 

 and that the seven stars were the seven philosophies, which should 

 guide the neophyte in <i> B K to perfection. I now understand that a 

 <f> B K antiquarian has spoiled all this symbolism. I have little respect 

 for historians they are always spoiling good stories ; they worship dull 

 facts and seem to have a small opinion of the romance that interests the 

 most of us. 



While Thomas Gresham in 1573 was planning for the propagation 

 and glorification of the seven philosophies, a young freshman named 

 Francis Bacon had entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a 

 relative of Gresham by marriage, Gresham having married a first cousin 

 of Bacon. He applied himself diligently, but three years taught him 

 to despise the current philosophy of Aristotle. He left Cambridge 

 without a degree, convinced that the methods employed jn the sciences 

 and the results reached were alike erroneous, "yielding," as he said, 

 "no true fruit of learning" but merely idle disputation and schoolish 

 ends. There was planted in him the germs of a new conception. He 

 announced that a new method of philosophy must be devised whose 

 aim should be the service and welfare of men and not the pleasure and 

 delight of scholars. He claimed that it mattered little to the fortunes 

 of humanity what abstract notions might be entertained concerning 

 the nature and principle of things. He said "The aim of all science is 

 to endow the condition and life of man with new powers or works, or 

 to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man." 

 He desired that a body of accurately ascertained facts should be 

 amassed from which alone, in his opinion, the processes of Nature could 

 be understood and a solid foundation could be laid on which discovery 

 and invention might proceed apace. By such means, he believed, man 

 would attain to "the knowledge of the courses and secret motions of 

 things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effect- 

 ing of all things possible." He held that "there is much ground for 

 hoping that there are still laid up in the womb of nature many secrets 

 of excellent use, having no affinity or parallelism with anything that is ^ 

 now known, but lying entirely out of the beat of the imagination, have 

 not yet been found out. They too, no doubt, will some time or other, 



