PREFACE xv 



rational admiration l . Bacon is like a great archi 

 tect, conceiving a vast plan, distributing it into its 

 proportionate parts, and so giving each man his 

 appropriate chamber, in which to direct his mind to 

 the right object in its real relations to the whole 

 of things. Hence, in projecting the Encyclopedic, 

 D Alernbert called Bacon the greatest, the most 

 universal, the most eloquent of philosophers, and 

 joined Diderot in adopting as their basis the Baconian 

 classification of sciences as the most exact enumera 

 tion possible. 



Secondly, in the Advancement Bacon showed his 

 deliberate foresight by distinguishing between what 

 had been done for learning and what remained to be 

 done, so as to strike the balance between merits and 

 defects. Hence too, at the end of the De Augmentis, 

 he drew out of these defects a list of Desiderata. The 

 consequence is an extraordinary suggest] veness of 

 problems to the thinking mind. At the very moment 

 when we tend to lose ourselves in the antique techni 

 cality of his intricate divisions and subdivisions, we are 

 constantly surprised by some new proof of his 

 modernity. The stress on the facts of natural history 

 as opposed to theories, and the demand for a history 

 of literature and philosophy 2 ; the requirement, in the 

 De Augmentis 3 , of a living astronomy which should 

 dissect, as it were, the viscera, the physical causes, 

 of the substance, of the motion, and of the influence 

 of the stars ; the conception of comparative anatomy, 

 vivisection, and relief of pain as a physician s business 4 ; 

 the grasp of human nature as a whole and in its 

 parts 5 ; the perception of a philosophic grammar, and 

 the definition of rhetoric as the application of reason 

 to imagination for the better moving of the will 6 ; the 

 preference of duty to interest and of action to con 

 templation 7 , together with the recognition that more 



1 Johnson, Lives of the Poets : Cowley. 

 8 Post, pp. 76 seq., 113. 3 Lib. Ill, c. 4. 



* Post, pp. 122-3. 6 Post, p. 115. 



6 Post, pp. 146-9, 156. 7 Post, pp. 166-7. 



