Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

174 FRANCIS BACON
powers, Spenser representing- England vviLh its religious sense of
duty combative; Shakespeare, enabled by that English earnestness
to speak through the highest poetry the highest truth?
That the depths were stirred, and the spirit of the time drew
from the souls of men the sweetest music, ennobling and elevating
rough soldiers, mechanics, and country louts into poets of
the highest degree? "
But in truth Bacon condemned the literary part of the
knowledge of his own time before he touched upon the scientific
part, although, for convenience, the order is here reversed. The
second book of the Advancement treats of " the Divisions of the
Sciences. " There " all human learning " is divided into History,
Poesy, and Philosophy, with reference
to the three intellectual
faculties, Memory, Imagination, Reason, and we are shown that
the same holds good in theology or divinity.
History he again divides into natural and civil (which last
includes ecclesiastical and literary history), and natural history
is subdivided into histories of generations and arts, and into
natural history, narrative and inductive. So we see that the
science comes last in Bacon's contemplations and method,
although, in the chair of sciences, it connects itself with the first
part of human learning— history. But here at once he discovers
a deficiency. "The history of learning— without which the
history of the world seems to me as the statue of Polyphemus
being left out which marks
without the eye, that very feature
the spirit and life of the person I set down as wanting." As
usual he gives
a summary of the requisites for this work, and
the best method of compiling such a history from the principal
works written in each century from the earliest ages, " that by
tasting them here and there, and observing their argument,
style, and method, the literary spirit of each age may be
charmed, as it were, from the dead."
Such a history would, he considers, greatly assist the skill of
learned men. " It would exhibit the movements and perturbations
which take place no less in intellectual than in civil
matters. In short, it would be a step toward the true study
of human nature," which was his aim.