HISTORY AND PLAN 



THIS EDITION. 



BACON'S works were all published separately, and never 

 collected into a body by himself ; and though he had deter- 

 mined, not long before his death, to distribute them into 

 consecutive volumes, the order in which they were to suc- 

 ceed each other was confessedly irregular ; a volume of 

 moral and political writings being introduced between the 

 first and second parts of the Instauratio Magnet, quite out 

 of place, merely because he had it ready at the time. 1 In 

 arranging the collected works therefore, every editor must 

 use his own judgment. 



Btackbourne, the first editor of an Opera Omnia 2 , took 

 the Distributio Operis as his groundwork, and endea- 

 voured first to place the various unfinished portions of the 

 Instauratio Magna in the order in which they would have 

 stood had they been completed according to the original 

 design ; and then to marshal the rest in such a sequence 

 that they might seem to hang together, each leading by a 

 natural transition to the next, and so connecting themselves 

 into a kind of whole. But the several pieces were not 

 written with a view to any such connexion, which is alto- 

 gether forced and fanciful \ and the arrangement has this 



1 " Debuerat sequi Novum Organum : interposui tamen Scripta mea Moralia et 

 PolUica, quia magis erant in promptu. . . . Atque hie tomus (ut diximus) interjectus 

 est et non ex ordine Instaurationis." Ep. ad Fulgentium, Opuscula, p. 172. 



2 Francisci Baconi, r., Opera Omnia, qiiatuor vohtminibus comprekensa. Londini, 

 Mucrxxx. 



A 2 



