Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 169
most of them true fire or flames ;
that flame and air do not mingle
except for an instant, or in the vital spirits of vegetables
and living creatures. Everywhere the Paracelsian and very
poetical idea of the vital spirits of nature is perceptible, and the
whole of these notions are resolved into poetry in Shakespeare
and elsewhere. It is not too much to say that there is in
the plays hardly an allusion
to any subject connected with science
or natural history which is
not traceable to some note in
these commonplace books, the apparently dry records of disjointed
facts or experiments.
Not only arts and arguments, but demonstrations and proofs
according to analogies, he also " notes as deficient. " And here
is a point in which his observations are distinctly in touch with
the Rosicrucian doctrines, or, to put it more accurately, a point
in which the Rosicrucians are seen to have followed Baconian
doctrines. For they made it a rule to accept nothing as scientific
truth which did not admit of such proof and demonstration
by experiment or analogy.
As an example of the deficiency in this quarter, Bacon gives
the form and nature of light. 1 That no due investigation should
have been made of light, he considers " an astonishing piece of
negligence. " Let inquiry be made of it, and, meanwhile, let it
be set down as deficient. So of heat and cold, of flame, of dense
things and rare, of the nature of sulphur, mercury, salt, and
metals, the nature of air, of its conversion into water, and of
water into oil; almost everything, in fact, which we now call
natural science, he either marks among the deficients, or as
being handled in a manner of which he " prefers to make no
judgment."
Since doubts are better than false conclusions, Bacon sets
down a calendar of doubts or problems in nature as wanting,
and probably few students of works of the class here indicated
will find much difficulty in identifying the works written to
supply these needs.
l Here, we think, is the customary double allusion, light being, in his symbolic
language, synonymous with pure truth.