418 PREFACE TO 



plies required, in 1605 ; tlie intervening year of 1604 having 

 been too much occupied with civil business to allow much 

 leisure for the prosecution of a work of that kind. It was im- 

 portant to push it forward as fast as possible, even at the expense 

 of completeness : for the very object for which I suppose it to 

 have been undertaken, that of making an impression on the 

 king's mind while it was in the best state to receive impressions, 

 would have been lost by delay; and accordingly in the 

 autumn of 1605 appeared "the Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon, 

 of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and 

 humane ; " with many marks of haste in form and composition, 

 and even in substance not altogether adequate to the argument 

 in hand, but nevertheless well enough adapted for its imme- 

 diate purpose, if I have rightly conjectured what that purpose 

 was. 



If this be the true history of the Advancement of Learning, 

 the rest follows naturally. The stroke, though well aimed, 

 was not successful. The book may have raised James's opinion 

 of Bacon, but it did not inspire him with any zeal for the 

 Great Instauration. There it was, however ; and it contained 

 such a quantity of the best fruits of Bacon's mind and so many 

 new views bearing on the great reform which he meditated, 

 that it seemed a pity not to find a place for it in the great 

 work. This was easily done by enlarging the original design 

 so as to include a preliminary survey of the existing state of 

 knowledge ; in which case the substance of the second book of 

 the Advancement might do duty as the first part of the Instau- 

 ratio Magna. If we knew when the fragment entitled Partis 

 Instaurationis Secundce Delineatio was written, we might almost 

 fix the time at which this enlargement of the original design 

 was resolved upon. For in that fragment Bacon proposes to 

 distribute the whole subject of the Interpretation of Nature 

 through the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parts of the 

 work, exactly as in the Distributio Operis ; a place being re- 

 served for a first part, though the nature of its contents is not 

 specified. And from the Dcscriptio Globi Intellectualis, which 

 was written in 1612 and appears, as I have elsewhere remarked, 

 to be a commencement of the Partitiones Scientiarum itself, we 

 may partly infer the form in which he then intended to cast 

 that part. 



Why he afterwards altered his intention and resolved to con- 



