Francis Bacon 21 



stances Francis Bacon was peculiarly suited for such an inclusive 

 consideration of the processes of thought and nature, and for the 

 expression in permanent literary form of many of the intel- 

 lectual tendencies which were beginning to make themselves 

 manifest on the one hand in the philosophical reaction against 

 the barren intellectualism into which the later scholasticism had 

 degenerated, and on the other hand in the organisation of the 

 new objective worlds which had been disclosed to science by the 

 work of such men as Copernicus, Vives, da Vinci, and. in Bacon's 

 own time, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Grotius, and Boyle. 



Possessed of a literary skill that has made him, both by his 

 " Essays " and by his '' New Atlantis," one of the prominent 

 figures of late Elizabethan and of early Jacobean literature. Bacon 

 ranks none the less high among the earlier of the English phil- 

 osophers. With an ambitious daring as characteristic of the 

 writer as of the seamen of " the spacious times of great Eliza- 

 beth," Bacon sketched out in the plan for the Instauratio Magna 

 a globus intcllectnalis which he could not circumnavigate and 

 whose bournes were beyond even his ken. Yet such was the 

 prospective power of his mind, and so great was his ability in 

 the intellectual preconstruction of experience that he anticipated 

 many of the methods and processes of later science. With a 

 characteristic philosophical contempt for the simplicity of the 

 vulgar tongue, Bacon sought to give his work greater perma- 

 nence by the use of the Latin language ; and it is only further 

 proof of the vitality of his thought that his work still stands 

 translation and still continues to hold suggestions for the modern 

 thinker. 



In considering Bacon as one of those philosophers who have 

 concerned themselves with the problem of the method of knowl- 

 edge, and in attempting to estimate the value of his contribution 

 as a basis for the subsequent development of epistemology, it 

 seems convenient to group his ideas under these four heads: 



I. The purpose or end of knowledge. 

 II. The means or materials of knowledge. 

 III. The method of knowledge. 

 IV. The educational implications of Bacon's method. 



