Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 167
doubtful, and his course is, to- make wonders plain, and not
plain things wonders."
So, in the thousand paragraphs of the Natural History, or
Sylva Sylvarum, we find each paragraph recording, not mere
speculations, or repetitions of theories or conclusions supposed
to have been established by former philosophers, but reports of
experiments (sometimes very strange and original) made always
with a definite object, and generally accompanied by some
remarks explaining the causes of the phenomena observed.
Bacon is never ashamed to admit his own ignorance of causes,
and nothing which tends to their recovery is, in his eyes, insignificant
or unimportant.
" It is," he says, " esteemed a kind of dishonour to learning,
to descend into inquiries about common and familiar things,
except they be such as are considered secrets, or very rare.
Plato, he says, ridiculed this " supercilious arrogancy; " and " the
truth is that the best information is not always derived from
the greatest examples, but it often comes to pass that mean and
small things discover great, better than great can discover the
small, as that secret of nature, the turning of iron touched with
the loadstone to the earth, was found out in needles, and not in
bars of iron.
The collector of facts he compares to the ant heaping up its
store for future use. He does not despise the ant, but commends
its intelligence, as superior to that of the grasshopper,
which, like the mere talker, keeps up a chirping noise, but does
no work. The notes which he collects in such a store as the
Sylva Sylvarum (although, as we firmly believe, ambiguous in
meaning, and in their more important bearings symbolical or
parabolic) give a good idea of the want of observation and general
ignorance in Bacon's times on matters with which children
in the poorest schools are now made familiar. Whatever double
purpose this work on Natural History may have had, these simple
notes were offered to the public as interesting and instructive
information, and as such were received by the learned in the
seventeenth century.
For instance, we read that alkali
or potash is used in making