02 GENERAL PREFACE TO 



begins. Now although Bacon did not think that observation 

 and experiments might altogether be laid aside when once the 

 process of interpretation had begun (we see on the contrary 

 that one of the works of Solomon's House was the trying of 

 experiments suggested by previously obtained conclusions), he 

 certainly thought it possible so to sever observation from theory 

 that the process of collecting facts and that of deriving conse- 

 quences from them might be carried on independently and by 

 different persons. This opinion was based on an imperfect ap- 

 prehension of the connexion between facts and theories; the 

 connexion appearing to him to be merely an external one, 

 namely that the former are the materials of the latter. With 

 these views that which has been already noticed touching the 

 fmiteness of Nature, namely that there are but a finite and 

 not very large number of things which for scientific purposes 

 require to be observed 1 , is altogether in accordance. 



The facts on which the new philosophy was to be based, 

 being conceivable apart from any portion of theory, and more- 

 over not excessively numerous, they might be observed and 

 recorded within a moderate length of time by persons of ordinary 

 diligence. 



If this registering of facts were made a royal work, it might, 

 Bacon seems to have thought, be completed in a few years : he 

 has at least remarked that unless this were done, the foundation 

 of the new philosophy could not be laid in the lifetime of a 

 single generation. The instauration, he has said in the general 

 preface, is not to be thought of as something infinite and beyond 

 the power of man to accomplish ; nor does he believe that its 

 mission can be fully completed (rem omnino perfici posse) within 

 the limits of a single life. Something was therefore left for 

 posterity to do ; and probably the more Bacon meditated on the 

 work he had in hand, the more was he convinced of its extent 

 and difficulty. But the Distributio Operis sufficiently shows 

 that he believed, when he wrote it, that the instauration of the 

 sciences might speedily become an opus operatum. Of the 

 Historia Naturalis on which it was to be based he there speaks, 

 not less than of the Novum Organum, as of a work which he 

 had himself accomplished, " Tertia pars operis complectitur 

 Phenomena Universi," not " complecti debet." Doubtless 



1 See the Phenomena Universi, and tne Partis secundoc Del., &c. 



