Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

194 FRANCIS BACON
Bacon, because, forsooth, having worked with the whole mass
of his accumulated knowledge to begin upon, whereas he began
upon nothing, they now find short cuts to the invention of sciences
for which he laboured when science was an empty name, and
the art of invention unknown excepting by Bacon himself. That
his works are ostensibly and intentionally left unfinished, and
that the book-lore of his time was to his mind thoroughly unsatisfactory,
and the store of knowledge acquired inadequate for
the invention and advancement of arts and sciences, is made
very plain in the " Filum Labyrinth i sive Formula Inquisitionis, "
in which he relates to his sons 1 (the Rosicrucian Fraternity, of
which he was the father) the thoughts which passed through
his mind on this subject:
" Francis Bacon thought in this manner. The knowledge
whereof the world is now possessed, especially that of nature,
extendeth not to magnitude and certainty of works. . . . When
men did set before themselves the variety and perfection of works
produced by mechanical arts, they are apt rather to admire
the provisions of man than to apprehend his wants, not considering
that the original intentions and conclusions of nature,
which are the life of all that variety, are not many nor deeply
fetched, and that the rest is but the subtle and ruled motion
of the instrument and hand, and that the shop therein is not
unlike the library, which in such number of books containeth,
for the far greater part, nothing but iterations, varied sometimes
in form, but not new in substance. So he saw plainly that
opinion of store was a cause of want, and that both books and
doctrines appear many and are few. He thought, also, that
knowledge is uttered to men in a form as if everything were finished,
for it is reduced into arts and methods, which in their
divisions do seem to include all that may be. And how weakly
soever the parts are filled, yet they carry the shew and reason
total, and thereby the writings of some received authors go
for the very art; whereas antiquity used to deliver the knowledge
which the mind of man had gathered in observations,
aphorisms, or short and dispersed sentences, or small tractates
of some parts that they had diligently meditated and laboured,
which did invite men to ponder that which was invented, and to
add and supply further.
l In the left-hand corner of the MS., in the British Museum (Harl. MSS. 6797,
fo. 139), there is written in Bacon's hand- Ad Filios.