40 



eity of having some scientific method for the due construction 

 of abstract conceptions. It is there said that the " pars infor- 

 mans," that is, the description of the new method, will be 

 divided into three parts the ministration to the senses, the 

 ministration to the memory, and the ministration to the reason. 

 In the first of these, three things are to be taught; and of these 

 three the first is how to construct and elicit from facts a duly 

 formed abstract conception (bona notio); the second is how 

 the senses may be assisted ; and the third, how to form a satis- 

 factory collection of facts. He then proposes to go on to the 

 other two ministrations. 



Thus the construction of conceptions would have formed the 

 first part of the then designed Novum Organum ; and it would 

 seem that this arrangement was not followed when the Novum 

 Organum was actually written, because in the meantime Bacon 

 had seen that this part of the work involved greater difficulties 

 than he had at first supposed. For the general division into 

 f< ministrationes " is preserved in the Novum Organum l , though 

 it has there become less prominent than in the tract of which 

 we have been speaking. In the ministration to the senses, as 

 it is mentioned in the later work, nothing is expressly included 

 but a good and sufficient natural and experimental historia; the 

 theory of the formation of conceptions has altogether disappeared, 

 and both this ministration and that to the memory are post- 

 poned to the last of the three, which contains the theory of the 

 inductive process itself. We must set out, Bacon says, from 

 the conclusion, and proceed in a retrograde order to the other 

 parts of the subject. He now seems to have perceived that 

 the theory of the formation of conceptions and that of the 

 establishment of axioms are so, intertwined together, that the 

 one cannot be presented independently of the other, although in 

 practice his method absolutely requires these two processes to 

 be carried on separately. His view now is, that at first axioms 

 must be established by means of the commonly received con- 

 ceptions, and that subsequently these conceptions must them- 

 selves be rectified by means of the ulterior aids to the mind, 

 the fortiora auxilia in usum intellectus, of which he has spoken 

 in the nineteenth aphorism of the second book. But these 

 fortiora auxilia were never given, so that the difficulty which 



1 Nov. Org. ii. 10, 



