PREFACE. 193 



these ; and thirdly, that he had in his hands (but 

 whether derived from the same source or not \ve 

 cannot say) some pieces written by Bacon in Eng 

 lish, and most of them unpublished ; and that of 

 these he intended shortly to bring out a Latin trans 

 lation. 



With regard to the works contained in this volume, 

 he seems to have had no further information to give. 

 He has confined himself to the simple office of tran 

 scriber. The order in which they are arranged tells 

 nothing either as to nature or date ; and the running 

 titles, which are his own device, seem to imply a dis 

 tinction which, being untrue, can only introduce con 

 fusion. By assigning separate running titles to some 

 of the pieces and printing all the rest under one gen 

 eral running title of Impetus Philosophid, any one 

 would suppose that he meant to distinguish the first 

 as in some way different in character from the last, 

 to separate the complete from the incomplete, for in 

 stance, the solid from the slight, or the deliberate and 

 final judgment from the experimental and rudimen 

 tary essay ; whereas there is in fact no such dif 

 ference to be found between the two : there being 

 pieces among the last as complete in themselves as any 

 among the first, and pieces among the first as incom 

 plete as any among the last. And if I rightly un 

 derstand Gruter s own explanation of his motive in 

 making the distinction, namely, lest the reader 

 should impute the imperfection of the pieces to the 

 fault of the editor instead of the defervescens impetus 

 of the author, it would even seem that he supposed 

 the Descriptio Globi Intellectually and the De Principiis 

 et Originibus to be complete ; which he could not pos- 



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