144 OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. [PAGES 



The crowds that pass along the way, 



So those on wisdom's mount who stand 



A lofty vantage ground command. 



They thence can scan the world below 



Immersed in error, sin, and woe : 



Can mark how mortals vainly grieve, 



The true reject, the false receive, 



The good forsake, the bad embrace, 



The substance flee, the shadows cfiase. 



But none who have not gained that height 



Can good and ill discern aright." 

 Page 66, 1. 1. to this tendeth, this is the object of. 

 1. 2. generation, the begetting of children. 

 1. 4. celebration, we should now say celebrity. 



1. 6. the monuments of wit, etc., cf. the boast of the Latin 

 poet Horace "I have raised a monument more lasting than 

 brass, and loftier than the kingly structure of the pyramids 

 one which neither piercing rain, nor raging wind, nor lapse of 

 time can destroy." 



1. 9. without the loss, Bacon wrote before the days of Homeric 

 criticism. 



1. 10. have been decayed, we should now say have decayed. 



1. 16. the wrong, the injury. 



1. 18. still, p. 36. 1. 6. With this passage cf. Milton's 

 Areopagitica, pp. 5-6 (Ed. Clarendon Press), "Books are not 

 absolutely dead things, but do contain a potencie of life in them 

 to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are : nay, 

 they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction 

 of that living intellect that bred them. " 



1. 22. consociateth, joins. 



1. 28. most immersed in the senses, i.e., materialistic : explain 

 ing the functions of the mind by the activity of the senses, and 

 denying the existence of any divine or immortal part in man. 



1. 30. came to this point that, confessed so much that. The 

 Latin translation has ' were compelled by force of truth to allow 

 that.' Bacon is referring here to the doctrine of Aristotle and 

 his followers. Plato had taught the immortality of the individual 

 soul. This Aristotle denied. All the lower functions of the 

 soul, he said, are destroyed by death ; but the highest function 

 of the soul, viz., the creative intellect, is indestructible. There 

 fore though after death the individual ceases to exist, yet the 

 creative intellect is not destroyed, but is resumed into the 

 universal mind. 



1. 33. affections, see on p. 65, 1. 10. 



