Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 183
centuries, but also the very language in which those books
are written, the " noble model of language " which has never
been surpassed, and which constitutes the finest part of the
finest writing of the present day.
Now, to return to our hasty sketch of deficiencies in grammar
and philology, we find, as might be expected, that, inasmuch
as words and graceful forms of speech were lacking, and
the very machinery or organs of discourse imperfect, so " the
proper rational method of discourse, 1 or rhetoric, fpr the transmission
of knowledge, has been so handled as to defeat its
object. "
Logicians, by their artificial methods, have " so forced
the kernels and grains of the sciences to leap out, that they are
left with nothing in their grasp but the dry and barren husks.
Changing the metaphor, Bacon declares that he finds the road
to knowledge abandoned and stopped up, and, setting himself
to the task of clearing the way, he quotes Solomon as to the use
of eloquence, and again enforces the necessity of making collections.
This time they are to be collections of " illustrations "
which shall consider the opposite sides of every question, and
show that there is a good as well as a bad side to every proposition.
" It is the business of rhetoric to make pictures of virtue
and goodness that they may be seen. And a store of sophisms,
or the colours of good and evil, should be made, so that when
men's natural inclinations mutiny, reason may, upon such a
revolt of imagination, hold her own, and in the end prevail."
These " points and stings of things " are by no means to be
neglected ;
yet they, like the rest, are deficient.
Bacon wishes it to be plainly understood that the object of all
this " provision of discourse" is to enable men readily to make
use of their acquired knowledge. The system of noting, tabulation,
and indexing which he enjoined, practised, and developed
into a perfect system in his secret society is, he says, rather an
exercise of patience, a matter of diligence, than of erudition.
" Aristotle derided the sophists who practised it, saying that
they did as if a shoemaker should not teach how to make
a shoe, but should only exhibit a number of shoes of all fashions
1 "An honest method, as wholesome as sweet." {Sam. ii. 2.)